Next time you boil a kettle on the galley stove spare a thought for the bowhead whale: in some parts of the Arctic there are only 200 left.

Yet Shell wants to develop the Sakhalin gasfields in Russia’s Okhotsk Sea where the leviathans breed.

The European Union’s development bank, the EBRD which now helps emerging economies further afield, is being pressed by Shell for an £11.5 billion loan to go ahead.