Shale Must Fall: Global day of climate actions uniting sites of extraction in the Global South and beyond with their counterparts of consumption in the Global North.

Friday Dec. 11th, on the eve of the 5th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, a diverse group of environmental movements from 20 different countries are mobilizing together to bring visibility to the environmental destruction of fracking.

The movement is mobilizing to highlight the damage caused by European multinationals that do abroad what they are banned from doing at home (in this case, fracking) with the complicity of their governments that subsidize the industry.

The day of action highlight how those government policies completely undermine the Paris Agreement, as Europe is simply “outsourcing” its emissions to the rest of the world.

The actions around the world are focusing on some of Europe’s largest climate criminals which are also shale oil companies—Repsol, Total, Wintershall, Shell, BP—by connecting the dots of their operations around the world.

It is outrageous that Europe is on one hand committing to emissions reductions and the Paris Agreement, yet on the other it is allowing and even subsidizing companies based in their country to frack the rest of the world, causing enormous harm to human health and to the natural world, and dooming future generations—including their own people—to climate chaos.

Local and grassroots movements from the frontlines of extractivism in the Global South are mobilizing against the operations of these multinationals from the Global North demanding climate justice and an end to this international ecocide.

Solidarity is Strength

Each of the environmental resistance struggles at the frontlines in the Global South is usually not strong enough, if isolated, to defeat a threat so disproportionately larger. But as our struggles begin to come together as we are doing today, we can present a united multinational resistance against a threat that is multinational in nature.

The Harms of Fracking

Science has shown fracking to be responsible for more than 50% of all of the increased methane emissions from fossil fuels globally and approximately 1/3 of the total increased emissions from all sources globally over the past decade. Methane is 87 times more harmful than CO2 in its global warming impact on the atmosphere during the first 20 years, and thus the fracking industry is a major cause for accelerating global warming.

This also makes shale gas the fossil fuel with highest greenhouse gas emissions among all fossil fuels.

After having banned or imposed moratoria on fracking in their home countries, European governments are not only allowing their companies to frack the rest of the world, but they are also subsidizing the import of fracked gas with billions of euros of taxpayers’ funds, by building LNG import terminals across the region that will lock the EU into decades of dependency into this fossil fuel.

They are selling the fossil fuel with the worst carbon footprint of all as a clean form of energy that will serve as a bridge to move away from coal. A transition away from coal with something worse than coal? This is insane and we have to stop it. Clean gas is a dirty lie!

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