Greenpeace heroes thrown into Arctic Sea by Gazprom oil workers

Activists protesting at Arctic oil drilling were thrown into the freezing Pechora Sea this morning by Russian sailors working for oil giant Gazprom.

The action is occurring as Arctic sea ice cover reaches its lowest ever extent four weeks earlier than the previous record five years ago, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

The ice extent was 4.10 million square kilometers (1.58 million square miles) on August 26; 70,000 square kilometers (27,000 square miles) below the previous record low extent of 4.17 million square kilometers (1.61 million square miles), recorded on September 18 2007.

The graph above shows how unprecedented this drop in ice cover is in historical terms.

NSIDC scientist Walt Meier called it "an indication that the Arctic sea ice cover is fundamentally changing", and its Director Mark Serreze, commented that: "The previous record, set in 2007, occurred because of near perfect summer weather for melting ice. Apart from one big storm in early August, weather patterns this year were unremarkable. The ice is so thin and weak now, it doesn't matter how the winds blow."

There is little doubt now that this pattern of ice loss is due to the unexpectedly fast increase in the rate of global warming. And yet the reaction of countries bordering the Arctic Ocean has been to see it as an opportunity to access the resources that lie on its seabed.

On Sunday, Royal Dutch Shell asked the U.S. Interior Department to extend a September deadline to complete planned drilling in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northern coast, because it realised that its Arctic Challenger ship would become icebound later in the season than it had previously estimated. Shell also plans to drill in the Beaufort Sea.

Greenpeace is mounting a global challenge, which it claims is supported by almost two million people, to stop the drilling for oil and gas in the region. It argues that firstly any spillage or accident would have disastrous consequences and be almost impossible to clean up, and secondly that it is madness to continue to use fossil fuels when the climate of the planet is so obviously radically changing.

Its activists have been in the Arctic for five days. For the first three days they occupied the first permanent oil rig in the offshore Russian Arctic.

Then, Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo and six other Greenpeace activists in the Pechora Sea headed in two high-speed boats to intercept the Anna Akhmatova, a passenger vessel carrying workers to the rig, and were soon supported by two other boats carrying seven more.

14 activists from 10 countries attached themselves and their boats to the anchor chain of the Anna Akhmatova in order to prevent it from sailing out to the Prirazlomnaya oil platform.

When the first officer sought orders from management in Moscow he was told to “use any means at your disposal to continue operations," according to Greenpeace. At 5am this morning, he ordered two Gazprom ships to train high-pressure water cannons onto the Greenpeace inflatable boats.

Their occupants were washed out of the boats, and thrown into icy water some distance away. They were rescued and are safe, and not long afterwards the action was called off.

The Prirazlomnaya is the first permanent oil platform in the offshore Arctic and marks what Greenpeace calls “the creeping industrialization” of the Arctic. The construction phase on the platform is nearly complete, and Gazprom is eager to begin drilling and become the first oil company to commercially produce oil from the offshore Arctic.

However, Greenpeace has warned that Gazprom has no strategy to prevent oil spills or clean them up if they occur. “Despite extreme operating conditions, Gazprom has only released a summary of its oil spill response plan to the public. Yet even this document shows that the company would be completely unprepared to deal with an accident in the Far North, and would rely on substandard clean-up methods, such as shovels and buckets," it said in a statement.

All countries that border the Arctic Ocean are lining up to exploit its riches. This includes Britain, which, under David Cameron's leadership, signed an agreement with Norway in June that commits it to tapping gas and oil reserves in the Arctic.

While campaigners reissued their call at the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June for the Arctic to be made a scientific reserve along the lines of the Antarctic, the World Ocean Council has convened a meeting of the “Arctic Business Leadership Council” which is the start of a forum for representatives of shipping, oil and gas, fisheries, aquaculture, tourism, marine science/technology and other industries with interests in the Arctic to see how they can “responsibly" exploit the new opportunities presented by the melting ice.

They will meet on 17 September in Reykjavik. The draft agenda calls for the setting up of a roadmap to show how it can be exploited. It also asks for opinions from industry on how the guidelines for Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainable Business could be applied in the region.

Greenpeace said in a statement: “We're determined to save the Arctic. We know this is a different fight, at a different time; not least because the Arctic is home to millions of people who have a critical say in the future of their region; and because the threat is not just from industrial development, but from the global crisis of climate change."

The Government fails to stand up for the Arctic environment

On Friday Greenpeace's director Kumi Naidoo was apprehended while trying to board a drilling rig off the coast of Greenland, in order to stop Cairn Energy drilling for oil and gas in this critically sensitive environment.

Speaking before he set out to scale the platform, Mr Naidoo, said: "The Arctic oil rush is such a serious threat to the climate and to this beautiful fragile environment that I felt Greenpeace had no choice to return, so I volunteered to do it myself."

Greenpeace feels compelled to act because the UK Government won't.

Last week, Energy Minister Charles Hendry said in public for the first time what had thus far only been said in private - that it is UK policy to support drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic.

Since when did this become UK policy? And why has the House of Commons never debated it?

Hendry told an energy conference that Arctic drilling is "entirely legitimate" and that, "given the ability to carry out this work safely, this should be part of the work of the industry".

Energy and mineral companies are taking a great deal of interest in the area now that climate change has caused the ice cap over the Arctic Ocean to melt during the summer months more than ever before in recent history, thereby easing access to the seabed.

A report issued by the US Geological Survey in 2009 estimated that the Arctic contains as much as 13% of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and 30% of its undiscovered gas.

Of course, this is just speculation, but the melting ice has exposed something else: an absence of regulation to protect this fragile and beautiful environment.

Britain, not being an Arctic state, nevertheless has clear interests in the region. It is an observer on the Arctic Council, along with France, Germany, Netherlands, Poland and Spain.

The Council's full members are Canada, Denmark (representing also Greenland and Faroe Islands), Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the USA. It has several working groups which investigate the environmental and social aspects of developing the area.

But the Council is not a legally empowered body. It does not have the muscle to veto the actions of members, who in turn are not obliged to act in accordance with its deliberations.

In fact, it is a talk shop, which gives the appearance of collaboration between interested parties, while behind the scenes they frantically scurry to gain competitive advantage over access to the trillions of dollars of riches on the continental shelves surrounding the ocean. "There is in fact no strong consensus between the states," comments Anna Galkina, a researcher on this issue at think-tank Platform.

British companies BP, Shell and Cairn Energy are amongst those behind this struggle, which has recently seen BP spectacularly falling out with Russian giant Rosneft despite heavy UK government lobbying on its behalf.

BP's troubles seem all the more ironic when you know that on 14 January 2011 BP CEO Bob Dudley and Eduard Khudainatov, CEO of the Russian state oil giant Rosneft, following a meeting with Vladimir Putin, signed their original agreement in the presence of our Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne.

In the absence of any regulatory body capable of controlling this oil and gas rush, it has fallen to NGOs to try and put a brake on exploration.

Cairn Energy is at the forefront of the rush and is about to commence drilling off the Greenland coast. Twice this year Greenpeace has attempted to stop them with direct action, and in response Cairn has just obtained an injunction preventing them from boarding their rigs.

Hendry's phrase, "the ability to carry out this work safely", cannot be tested in public because Cairn refuses to publish its Oil Spill Response Plan despite a petition signed by almost 50,000 people and a highly unusual admonition by a judge in Amsterdam, who said that doing so would make absolute sense, even to the company concerned, if it really wanted to maximise the chances of preventing an accident.

I am putting in an FOI request to find out if Hendry, or anyone at DECC, had been shown Cairn's Oil Spill Response Plan for its Greenland operation before coming out with such unequivocal support. Because if he has seen it, why can't we all? And if he hasn't, how can he so confidently support the company?

Or has he forgotten BP's rather costly adventure in the Gulf of Mexico last year?

The US National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling concluded in its final report in January 2011 that "detailed geological and environmental information does not exist for the Arctic exploration areas and industry and support infrastructures are least developed, or absent

Lord Howell, at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, is one minister heavily responsible for UK policy on the Arctic, and is involved in lobbying to support British oil companies' commercial interests abroad.

Yet the British Parliament has not had a chance to debate and decide this policy. The only time it has come remotely near to being discussed was in a poorly attended and very short debate in the House of Lords on the 6th December 2010, led at 8.02pm by Lord Jay.

There, Howell admitted that besides ostensibly protecting the Arctic environment, "our second aim is to protect crucial UK energy supplies from the region and promote UK business interests. Thirdly, we want to ensure access to fisheries and transport routes in the region, including the ones that may open up in the future-not just in summer but in winter."

Only then did he say that a fourth aim is "to promote wider UK Government objectives with regard to sustainable development, environmental protection and climate change".

It's not that he is unaware of the fact that all of this exploration is only possible because of climate change. He even commented on "the irony that the melting of the ice means that all sorts of possibilities open up for access to the huge hydrocarbon resources in the region." But he only talked of "how" - not whether - these "colossal reserves" might "be got out economically and in line with all the other restraints that the world wants."

I asked the Department for Energy and Climate Change if they would clarify their position. This is what I received in response: "regulation of Cairn's drilling proposals in the Arctic is a matter for the Greenland Government. As an observer in the Arctic Council, the UK has contributed to the development of the guidelines recently agreed by the Council on oil and gas, and supports robust provisions on environmental protection and sustainability in Arctic waters.

“More generally, the UK is participating in the G20 initiative to promote best practice and regulatory standards, to ensure that oil and gas activities carried out anywhere in the world align with industry best practice and are managed so as to ensure minimum impacts to the environment.”

Nothing about climate change.

The Arctic Council's guidelines on exploration were in fact agreed in 2009. They include acknowledgement of the principles of "polluter pays" and "the precautionary principle", and they recognise that the area "has high sensitivity to oil spill impacts and the least capacity for natural recovery".

Given the overwhelming threat of climate change, many NGOs, including Greenpeace and WWF, are demanding that no fossil fuels be extracted from the area. They are calling for the Arctic to become a scientific reserve, as the Antarctic is, and left alone.

There is, sadly, little chance of this. An important discussion document published in Washington in January this year - The Shared Future: A Report of the Aspen Institute Commission On Arctic Climate Change - supposedly takes "a hard and new look at climate change in the Arctic".

But does it call for a moratorium and a ban on drilling in the area? No. Its main recommendation is that "governance in the Arctic marine environment, which is determined by domestic and international laws and agreements, including the Law of the Sea, should be sustained and strengthen by a new conservation and sustainable development plan using an ecosystem-based management approach".

Amongst its 10 principles of Arctic governance is number 4: "Avoid exacerbating changes that may be difficult or impossible to reverse in temperature, sea-ice extent, pH and other key physical, chemical and biological ecosystem parameters."

It's hard to see how any exploration can go on in such harsh conditions which do not contain the risk of doing so. But the document falls short of admitting this.

Instead, it says that Arctic governments should take immediate steps to begin developing an Arctic Marine Conservation and Sustainable Development Plan by 2012, which "should also open the door to a new model of natural resource governance in the Arctic that promotes an ethic of stewardship and multinational use of best management practices".

Fine words. But while energy companies can't even publish their safety plans there is fat chance of this happening.

Diana Wallis, Vice President of the European Parliament and MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber, and the Green Party's Caroline Lucas are alone amongst legislators in pushing for stronger regulation. Wallis' website allows people to vote on whether there should be a moratorium on oil exploration in the Arctic. Two thirds of voters there think there should be.

What she and I want to know is: why isn't the British Government standing up for the Arctic? Why is it caving into commercial interests?

And why can't there be a proper debate in the House of Commons on this crucial issue?

After the cold December - is climate change real?

Many sectors of the media suggested last month that the exceptionally cold weather that gripped the UK and other parts of northern Europe challenged the science of climate change.

Sceptics, however, tend to look for easy, local, black-and-white answers to the problem of climate change and whether it is caused by human activity. Unfortunately, the climate is much more complex than this, and scientists are still struggling to adapt the models to the observed and collected data.

However, this does not mean that climate change is not happening: it is, and extreme weather events are part of the expected pattern.

Weather and climate

A basic mistake is to confuse weather with climate. The weather is not the same as the climate. A pattern of 'climate' in a region changes over a number of years. 'Weather' is local and changes by the hour.

There is no doubt than in general, the Earth is warming - global average annual temperatures are increasing. This is a view held by the vast majority of climate scientists.

The term 'climate change' is used because in the chaotic transition from one stable climate pattern (recent centuries) to whatever the future holds, there is and will be turbulence and unpredictability locally - an increased number of extreme weather events.

For example, last year saw also a Russian heat wave resulting fires that killed 56,000 people and the loss of 39% of the grain harvest. Furthermore, 15 nations around the world reported large scale coral bleaching events , as a result of record sea surface temperatures, including 94oF in the waters of the 'Coral Triangle'.

In fact, 2010 was one of the hottest on record around the world. The weather in north-west Europe is just one part of the global picture. Many variable factors affect it, meaning cold winters are perfectly possible in a warming world.

So what did cause the cold weather?

A big high centred on Greenland - one of the most intense ever, say meteorologists - spread south and blocked warm westerly winds from crossing the Atlantic. To fill the vacuum, bitterly cold air from the Arctic flowed down over Europe.

The culprit is widely blamed as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).

The NAO has two phases: the positive phase when air pressure is low over Iceland, but high down south over the Azores islands off West Africa, driving strong westerly winds and weather fronts, whipping up storms and sometimes causing floods; and the negative phase as occurred in December.

According to science writer Fred Pearce, "the NAO has been in a generally positive phase for the past 25 years. As a result, winters have usually been mild since the late Eighties, encouraging one climatologist to predict an end to winter snow in Britain.

"But in the middle of summer 2009, it slipped back into a negative phase that has persisted month after month since, bringing us last winter's snow and now our current record-breaking December freeze."

What has caused the change? Well, fingers are being pointed at the thawing of the Arctic ice due to global warming. This has had two effects: the sea absorbs more heat from the sun than the white ice, which reflects the radiation back into space; and it also warms the air above the sea, which ice does not. It's a positive feedback loop for warming, and it has given rise to the high pressure.

The Arctic Dipole

But the climate is more complex even than this. According to climate-watcher John Mason, "a new atmospheric circulation pattern has been identified: the Arctic Dipole, which has become an increasingly-important feature of the Arctic climate during the first decade of the 21st Century."

He says that Arctic weather has until recently been driven by the NAO and its close relative, the Arctic Oscillation (AO), both of which broadly produce a circumpolar airflow from west to east. But the newly identified Arctic Dipole pattern features anomalously high and low pressure systems - they are occurring and persisting where previously they did not.

"Now, with the Dipole, they have competition and it is having some strange affects on the climate of the Arctic and further afield," says Mason.

The open water in the Barents-Kara seas reaches its maximum extent in mid-September: during the Autumn, the research has found, it returns some of that heat back to the lower atmosphere, driving up air temperatures and thereby affecting pressure and atmospheric circulation patterns, which in return go on to cause further excessive summer ice-loss in subsequent years.

This potential influence - the 'B-K Effect' - has been analysed using a global atmospheric circulation model by Vladimir Petoukhov of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Vladimir Semenov of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in a study submitted in November 2009 and recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

They found that the model responded in a non-linear fashion: rather than resulting in a warming over adjacent continents as might have been expected, a strong regional cooling was generated  within a certain range of sea-ice cover.

In the abstract, they state: "Here we show that anomalous decrease of wintertime sea-ice concentration in the Barents-Kara (B-K) seas could bring about extreme cold events like winter 2005-2006."

Changing climate models

Climate models may need to be updated to account for the readings observed. Rasmus Benestad of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, writing on the Realclimate blog on December 14th 2010, said that, while Petoukhov and Seminov's findings sound plausible, "There is a limit to what they are able to describe in terms of local regional details, and it is reasonable to ask whether the response to changes in regional sea-ice cover is beyond the limitation of the global model."

The extremity of the NAO is measured by an index from negative to positive. Whilst 2009-10 caused major problems in parts of the UK and had an index just under -4.0, it was not as cold as the 1962-63 winter, which had a lower NAO index of -4.0.

That winter had a Central England Temperature (CET) of -0.3C. The CET for the equivalent period in 2009-10 was 2.4C.

If the NAO was the only control-mechanism with respect to the severity of our winters, then by rights 2009-10 should have been colder than 1962-3. But it wasn't, and the difference might be due to overall average global temperatures increasing. The jury is still out.

Climate trends are multidecadal affairs and the research discussed above is relatively recent. The influence of open sea water in the Arctic, where at one time there was extensive sea-ice, is clearly crucial to watch in the coming years. As with most matters of science, the truth will come out in due course.

Other references:
> Budikova, D. (2009): Role of Arctic sea ice in global atmospheric circulation: A review. Global Planet. Change, 68(3), 149–163.
> Honda, M., J. Inoue, and S. Yamane (2009): Influence of low Arctic sea-ice minima on anomalously cold Eurasian winters. Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L08707, doi:10.1029/2008GL037079.
> Overland, J.E., and M. Wang (2010): Large-scale atmospheric circulation changes associated with the recent loss of Arctic sea ice. Tellus, 62A, 1–9.

The feedback loop accelerating climate change

The current awful drought and record high temperatures in Russia are attributed to global warming.

But besides causing 700 extra deaths a day in Moscow alone - due to the smoke from forest fires, according to its top health official - the smoke is hastening the melting of Arctic ice.

Forest and peat bog fires around Moscow are burning over 1,740 sq kms (672 sq mile), the Russian Emergencies Ministry says.

Similar fires in Asia are having a similar effect on glaciers in the Himalayas.

On the other side of the planet, official Brazilian data shows the Amazon rainforest lost 1,810 sq kms in almost a year to June 2010. The real figure is likely to be higher.

Brown clouds also form over parts of North America, Europe, the Amazon basin and southern Africa. Burning of savannah in sub-Saharan Africa, to clear land for crops, is a new source.

"Health effects of such clouds are huge," said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, chair of a new U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) study called Atmospheric Brown Clouds.

This report says there are five hot spots for such clouds:

1. East Asia


2. Indo-Gangetic Plain in South Asia


3. Southeast Asia


4. Southern Africa; and


5. the Amazon Basin.

But the effects can be felt far away...

Melting Greenland

A team from Aberystwyth University currently doing research in Greenland has found unprecedented levels of melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

A key factor, they have discovered, is cryoconite, a form of ice dusted with minute specks - a mixture of desert sand blown thousands of kilometres from Africa, soot particles from power stations, vehicle exhausts and microscopic algae and bacteria.

These particles settle on the ice and, being dark, absorb the sun's rays, causing it to melt.

Besides that, the UNEP report says this atmospheric smog is near-permanent and blames it for causing chronic respiratory and heart diseases.

Since 1970, southern Greenland has warmed by 3oC (in Britain it is half of a degree). A week ago, a massive iceberg 100sq miles in area broke off the Petermann Glacier in the north-west of the island and floated into the ocean - the largest chunk of ice to break off Greenland for nearly half a century.

Greenland is losing, net, about 267 billion tons of ice a year, according to Aberystwyth University's Dr Alun Hubbard, Britain's leading glaciologist studying Greenland.

He says that two weeks ago an ice lake 2.5 miles across drained into the sea in just two hours when a crack opened up at the lake's deepest point.

He said it sounded like "an extraordinary rumbling, like an atomic bomb going off ". Ominous cracks opened up in the ice beneath his camp's tents as the lake was swallowed by the ice.

Such melt-water flows underneath the ice sheet to the sea, at the same time lubricating the passage of the ice above it and accelerating it towards oblivion. Exactly the same process is happening in the Himalayas and Antarctica.

If all of Greenland's ice were to melt, sea levels would rise by seven metres worldwide. London and Liverpool would be flooded. Hwever, current estimates are that this is unlikely to happen until a few hundred years have passed.

A reporter with the Daily Mail, embedded with the Aberystwyth University team, wrote this week that "Sceptics will argue that Greenland has always had moulins and meltwater rivers; this is true. But what is new is these used to be confined to the very edge of the icesheet, marginal, ephemeral features that lasted just a few weeks in the height of the summer melting season. Now there are lakes and moulins right on the centre of the cap, and persisting well into August."

When the normally sceptic Daily Mail and its climate change-denying columnist Michael Hanlon runs pieces like this, you know something is going on.

Brown clouds

"The Russian fires are in principle similar to what you see from other brown clouds," said Henning Rodhe of Stockholm University, a vice-chair of the UNEP Atmospheric Brown Cloud (ABC) study. "The difference is that this only lasts a few weeks."

Elsewhere, however, the polluting haze blocks out sunlight and so slows climate change. Despite this, overall, the report says, the brown clouds have the net effect of "heating of the surface-atmosphere system and therefore constitute a positive radiative forcing of the climate system and contribute to global warming. Thus, black carbon aerosols are major agents of regional and global warming."

The report says that in the Himalayas, "If the current rate of retreat continues unabated, these glaciers and snow packs are expected to shrink by as much as 75 per cent before the year 2050, posing grave danger to the region’s water security. Projections show that most parts of South and East Asia will suffer from water stress by 2050."

Mega-city hotspots

13 mega-city ABC hotspots in Asia have been identified: Bangkok, Beijing, Cairo, Dhaka, Karachi, Kolkata, Lagos, Mumbai, New Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tehran.

Kim Holmen, director of research at the Norwegian Polar Institute, runs a pollution monitoring station in Svalbard in the high Arctic. He says the air over Russia has been fairly stable in recent days, but a shift in winds could blow the smoke towards the Arctic.

He supports Russian authorities' concerns that the fires may also release radioactive elements locked in vegetation since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. He says radioactive isotopes include strontium 90 and caesium 137. Other industrial pollutants such as PCBs could also be freed.

"Such conditions are likely to become more common in the future," Rodhe said of the Russian heatwave and related fires.

If they are, sea level rise is likely to accelerate at a faster rate than would be anticipated if only linked to a global average temperature rise.

Arctic sea ice, which shrinks in mid-September to an annual minimum before the winter freeze, now covers a slightly bigger area than in 2007 and 2008, the smallest extents since satellite measurements began in the 1970s.

Stop Arctic Oil and Gas

Arctic Oil & Gas Corp. is an oil exploration venture company that has filed for the exclusive exploitation, development, marketing and extraction rights to the oil and gas resources of the seafloor and subsurface contained within the ”Arctic Claims“.

A preliminary assessment by the US Geological Survey (USGS) suggests the Arctic seabed may hold up to a quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil and natural gas reserves.

But the planet’s ecosystem could not absorb without radical change the release of the greenhouse gases their burning would release, nor the seabed’s ecosystem survive the mining.

It is madness and craziness beyond belief to exploit this resource.

It is absolutely vital that the world agree, as it did fifty years ago with Antarctica, to set aside a large percentage of the world’s surface as inviolable conservation areas, and it must be made financially worthwhile by their host nations to do so, along the lines of the agreement to pay countries with rainforests not to chop them down in return for carbon credits, in the post-2012 climate negotiations.

But this company does not care about this. Its email to me asked me to invest in the chance to make trillions of dollars from exploiting "the last frontier". It boasted greedily of how the area has more promise than Iraq.

An Exclusive Rights Claim to the Hydrocarbon Resources of the Arctic Oceans Commons was formally lodged by the Company and its partners with the United Nations and the five Arctic countries on May 9th 2006.

The Company intends to operate as the ”lead manager“ tasked to create a multinational joint venture consortium of major oil companies, whose technology and managerial expertise will be vital to recovering the oil and gas from the harsh, deep waters of the Arctic in an environmentally safe manner.

Its contact details are here:

Corporate Address:
Arctic Oil and Gas Corp.
8350 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 200
Beverly Hills, CA 90211

Investors and Press phone: 702.953.9688
Corporate phone: 323.556.0643
Email: ir@arcticoag.com

The company is obviously aware of the "sensitive" nature of its activities. Reading its policy on "corporate governance" is illuminating:

Arctic Oil & Gas Corp. is also committed to the highest possible standards of openness, honesty and accountability. In line with that commitment, we expect employees and others that we deal with who have serious concerns about any aspect of the company‘s work to come forward and voice those concerns.

Employees are often the first to realize that there may be something seriously wrong within the company. However, they may decide not to express their concerns because they feel that speaking up would be disloyal to their colleagues or to the company.

They may also fear harassment or victimization. In these circumstances, they may feel it would be easier to ignore the concern rather than report what may just be a suspicion of malpractice.

For this reason, the company has instituted a Whistle Blowing Policy is that is intended to encourage and enable employees to raise serious concerns within the company rather than overlooking a problem or seeking a resolution of the problem outside the company.

Then, presumably, they can be silenced.