The Carbon Web


Oil runs through every sector of society. London, our city, is one of the global centres of the oil industry. Oil companies use the city to extract a combination of financial, political, legal and technological services that enable them to produce, pump, transport, refine and sell oil and gas. 

For more than a decade, Platform has been mapping out the network of relationships between oil and gas companies and the government departments, regulators, cultural institutions, banks and other institutions that surround them. We call this the Carbon Web.

The Carbon Web is key to our understanding of how the corporations function. It is a tool that helps campaigners find points of intervention against the oil industry.

The aim in these campaigns is to sever the links between oil companies and the institutions that facilitate extraction. Our campaign against the Royal Bank of Scotland targeted private bank financing of harmful fossil fuel projects. Platform’s Fossil Free Culture project successfully challenged Tate’s promotion of BP’s brand. Our work to push local councils to divest their pension funds and reinvest in renewables is gaining significant victories. Internationally, the Carbon Web helps us work in allyship with communities fighting gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea to Italy, to campaigners against BP’s fracking in Argentina, to those against tar sands extraction in Alberta, Canada, and those resisting the injustices of Shell’s oil exploitation in Nigeria.

 

PLATFORM BRINGS workers AND communities TOGETHER TO CREATE NEW, LIBERATORY SYSTEMS THAT TACKLE INJUSTICE AND CLIMATE BREAKDOWN.