This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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We stopped Cambo. Here’s how to beat Big Oil
By: []
Date: 2021-12
On Thursday 2 December at 6:30pm, my group chats exploded. Messages, memes, and tweets flooded my phone – and the phones of many others across the country and the world. ‘Stop Cambo’ activists were seeing the news – Shell had pulled out of the controversial Cambo oil field. I went for a pint with a friend and we mostly sat wide-eyed trying to work out what the hell was going on. Someone even phoned the Shell media line to make sure it wasn’t a Yes Men stunt.
It wasn’t. On Friday, the company behind Cambo, Siccar Point, quietly announced the project was on hold.
A test for a changed movement
In summer 2021, this moment felt a very, very long way away. There had been a major shift in the climate movement in the UK over the past two years, with the pandemic causing huge amounts of personal and political turmoil, and the danger of in-person gatherings shutting down our usual ways of building for change. On top of that came the necessary but demoralising delay to the UN Climate Summit, COP26, in November 2020. After the ramping up of action in 2019, by groups such as Extinction Rebellion and the global school climate strikes, this loss of momentum felt especially jarring.
But at the same time, there was another, more encouraging shift in how the Scottish and wider UK climate movement was engaging with a big topic that had been surprisingly low down the list of targets and priorities for a long time: North Sea oil and gas.
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There are many reasons why this hadn’t previously been at the forefront of the climate movement’s demands. It felt too big to tackle and too hard to shift public opinion on. But over the past few years, many have been making the point that action on climate is impossible without taking on the oil industry. In January 2020, for example, three people from Extinction Rebellion Scotland scaled a Shell rig in Dundee that was destined for the North Sea, as part of a week of action against oil and gas called the ‘Rig Rebellion’.
The climate movement has, in recent years, also begun to seriously engage with the concept of a ‘Just Transition’. This idea, developed by American workers in the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union from the 1970s, is a demand for new jobs that are not harmful to the environment. The choice must never be between having a job in oil and gas, which would take us beyond safe climate limits, or having no job at all. In tackling the climate crisis, there is an opportunity to ensure a green economy is better for workers and communities than what we leave behind.
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