The campaign name is inspired by and comes from a play on words on the Shell Must Fall campaign from the Netherlands, in which the concepts of climate justice and international solidarity are at its very heart, as it traces its own origins and inspiration to an anticolonial struggle from the Global South: “The campaign title Shell Must Fall is inspired by the South-African Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall campaigns, in which students demanded the decolonization of the education system and large-scale social and economic transformations, with the aim of tackling deep rooted racism, inequality and injustice. The fossil giant Shell is built on similar colonial structures and aggregates existing inequalities and (climate) racism. This must end. The Shell Must Fall campaign fights for a systemic transformation in solidarity with the student-activists from the campaigns in South Africa.” Shell Must Fall has also inspired other campaigns, such as INEOS Will Fall and BP Must Fall. 

 The campaign will be decentralized and organized by “connecting dots” between different sides of the same industry/company from around the world. Each country will organize its own campaign independently according to their own priorities and what is most relevant to them. 

Major Goals

– Build the critical mass necessary in Europe to ban companies from doing in the rest of the world what they are not allowed to do in their own countries, as well as to close the consuming end in Europe to the products of these environmental crimes perpetrated in the rest of the world, such as in this case shale gas. 

– Apply international pressure on governments and companies involved in this ecocide. 

– Increase the global visibility of the frontline struggles from the Global South and other extraction zones. 

– Capitalize on the negative and indefensible image of fracking among most of the public to launch a broader narrative against all gas, in order to start bringing down the dominant narrative of gas as a clean and transition fuel. 

– With fracking as a great example of a major form of global ecocide, help give more global visibility to the term ecocide in order to help push the campaign for a law to make ecocide an international crime.