#CleanGasIsADirtyLie

Shale Must Fall is an international solidarity campaign connecting environmental struggles from the frontlines of extractivism in the Global South and beyond, mobilizing on the same day with their counterparts of consumption in the Global North. It seeks at the same time to bring visibility and accountability to corporations that are among the top polluters and biggest climate criminals from Europe by helping amplify in the Global North the local struggles against their ecocides in the Global South. The campaign focuses on connecting the multiple aspects of the fracking industry (extraction, LNG export/import terminals, pipelines, plastics, etc) as a common denominator behind shale companies, but also including other environmental struggles from the frontlines in the Global South directly related to ecocides and human rights violations as part of their operations. The campaign may also target governments (and their foreign representations) involved with these companies and promoting their activities/products.

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 which must be tackled globally. This also makes shale gas the fossil fuel with highest greenhouse gas emissions among all fossil fuels, and an unbeatable tool for dismantling the dominant narrative that has portrayed gas as a clean transition fuel- which we will use as a platform to launch a broader narrative explaining why we must reject all gas as “Clean Gas is a Dirty Lie”.

Shale Must Fall will involve multiple movements and countries coming together, seeking to break the relative isolation of many struggles by connecting the dots and joining forces to present a coordinated multinational resistance against a threat that is multinational in nature.

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.