As Woodside Energy investors convened for their annual meeting in Perth, Australia, on May 8, they were met by protests and heckling. Activists, angered over the fossil fuel company’s climate impacts and accidents, repeatedly disrupted speeches by company management.
While management and demonstrators debated, Woodside workers about 800 miles to the north were scrambling to stop a major “unplanned discharge” from a company pipeline that was being decommissioned. Amid a devastating marine heatwave, Woodside’s May 8 spill dumped about 64,000 liters (almost 17,000 gallons) of wastewater laced with oil, chemicals, and other contaminants into the Indian Ocean northwest of the Ningaloo Reef, a World Heritage site.
