At Climate Camp last week our main target was the Royal Bank of Scotland for it’s part in bankrolling climate change, but a secondary one was Edinburgh based Cairn Energy.

Cairn aren’t a famous name like BP or Shell, but right now they’re at the heart of one of the biggest battles that the environmental movement faces in the next few years: the fight to stop extreme oil extraction.

More and more geologists now suspect that the world is approaching peak oil, the point at which we will have reached the maximum rate of global oil production, after which the rate will decline and oil will become harder and harder to extract. Most of the world’s most easily tapped reserves of oil are in production or in fact have already peaked. With declining availability, the price of oil gets pushed up. This problem is made even worse by the fact that financial speculators on the commodity markets take advantage of the situation, and push the price up even further. In this situation it becomes profitable to get oil from places so extreme that before companies wouldn’t have bothered.

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