Will North Sea Oil Rigs Go Vegan For Earth Day?

For Immediate Release:

18 April 2019

Contact:

Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327, ext 222; [email protected]

WILL NORTH SEA OIL RIGS GO VEGAN FOR EARTH DAY?

PETA Calls On Shell to Offset Environmental Damage by Serving Eco-Friendly Vegan Meals to Workers

Aberdeen – An eco-friendly move … from an oil company? Ahead of Earth Day (22 April), PETA sent a letter today asking Royal Dutch Shell to offset some of the environmental damage done by drilling for oil by serving vegan meals on all its offshore oil rigs in the North Sea, where workers live for months at a time.

“Animal agriculture is right on the heels of burning fossil fuels when it comes to contributing to climate change,” says PETA Director of International Programmes Mimi Bekhechi. “This Earth Day, PETA is calling on Shell to improve workers’ health, save animals’ lives, and slow down the destruction of the planet by switching to vegan meals on all of its offshore rigs.”

In its letter, PETA points out that, combined, the top five meat and dairy corporations are responsible for more greenhouse-gas emissions than either Shell, ExxonMobil, or BP. Research by scientists at the University of Oxford shows that all animal-derived foods – including cows’ milk and chickens’ flesh and eggs – have a higher carbon footprint than their plant-based equivalents. And eating vegan foods can reduce a person’s dietary carbon footprint by more than half.

In addition, PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview – notes that each person who goes vegan spares more than 200 animals a year daily suffering and a terrifying death and that vegans have a lower risk of suffering from heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer than meat-eaters do.

PETA’s letter to Royal Dutch Shell CEO Ben van Beurden is available here. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk.

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