No oil drilling in the South of France.

From the Riviera Times:

Thousands of people have been demonstrating against controversial American-English plans to search for potential oil reserves off the coast of Mediterranean city Marseille. President Nicolas Sarkozy has also denounced the scheme, calling for the oil-hungry foreign drillers to “look elsewhere”.

 

Could Marseille's Calanques hold millions of years worth of oil? Sarkozy says it is "doubtful"

Texan oil firm Noble Energy – once a leader in the oil industry – has teamed up with Melrose Resources, a British oil and gas exploration company. The two fuel giants, who already maintain core assets in Eastern Europe as well as West Africa and North Africa respectively, have applied for their license to drill in the Mediterranean to be extended until 2015.
Residents along the Côte d’Azur have expressed their disgust by protesting on the beaches of the Riviera last weekend. During his tour in the south of France earlier this month, Sarkozy also criticised Noble Energy and Melrose Resources’s offshore drilling application, calling it “crazy and completely unnecessary”.
President of the EUROMED network Christian Estrosi – also Mayor of Nice and President of the Nice Côte d’Azur Metropolis – has called on the alliance’s 99 towns and cities to support the region in its fight against the pressure of the two huge oil firms. “It is imperative that we protect our landscape, whether it is in the water or on land,” said Estrosi, adding, “we must change our energy consumption and usage, using more environmentally friendly materials and methods."
The Calanques are a series of fragile limestone cliffs, scarred by deep valleys, that run for some 20 kilometres along the coastline of Marseille. Exploration teams from Melrose Resources believe there could be oil fields at the foot of these natural formations. If plans do go ahead and the oil companies are granted their much sought-after drilling permit, the eco-systems surrounding Marseille could be severely disrupted and damaged.
With no concrete proof that there is actually any oil in the seabed, demonstrators argue the operation poses too much of a danger to marine life. They fear a catastrophe like the BP Gulf of Mexico spillage in 2010, which caused detrimental damage to the entire gulf – a process that will take generations to repair.

Elsa Carpenter