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.
