2/25/2005

Greenpeace Fools or Friends

Recently in London oil trading was disrupted by a group of greenpeace activists. The group burst into the International Petroleum Exchange with around 35 demostrators. They were successful in suspending trade of the worlds second largest oil energy futures market for nearly an hour. Can greenpeace really expect to disrupt the energy futures market enough to have a positive influence on the environment? In my opinion their efforts were futile at best. All they did was create a distraction for a few minutes that suspended the trading process for about an hour before everything returned to normal. I think greenpeace needs to rethink their strategy about how they plan to persuade the world to become less oil dependent. Did the suspension of trade for about an hour have an economic impact on the world economy? That is the question. I think it could have. There are many people all over the world trading with those people at the International Petroleum Exchange. If they could not get what IPE was offering because trading was suspended those folks business went elsewhere. The marginal costs of such a trade blip frankly in my opinion seem immeasurable. The next time greenpeace decides to have a demonstration maybe they should think twice about what it will do to them economically. After all even greenpeace demonstrators have to get around with some form of carbon dioxide emitting transportation.

1 comment:

Dr. Tufte said...

-1 on Drake's post for a (repeated) spelling error.

I'm not sure that Greenpeace's actions this time around had much effect on the world economy. For a group taking actions like this, the marginal benefit is from the publicity, and the marginal cost is from any damage they do that effects their reputation down the line. I don't think it is in the interest of Greenpeace to take actions that are destructive, and in this case they didn't.

BTW: the Greenpeace members were very upset that they got beat up by the people who work at the IPE.