Of Turmeric and Truth – ‘Fuel for Thought’ and the struggle in Ogoni

This blog is co-authored by Andy Rowell (Oil Change International) and James Marriott (Platform) Lazarus Tamana, Europe Coordinator of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), holds up a small round plastic container, an inch deep, two inches across. It is filled with a rich yellow-ochre coloured...

Singing Planet – Soundcamp 2019 and the Platform ‘Tree of Life’ Tent

Everywhere is the city. And everywhere is not the city. A small congregation, just a dozen of us, are guided in careful-footed silence along the central path through the cathedral of Russia Dock Woodland in London’s former Docklands. It is 04.30 am on 5th May. Our guides, John Cadera and...

North Sea oil: The unmentionable climate emergency scandal… until now

We’re in a climate emergency – so why is the UK aiming to extract 20 more billions of barrels of oil?! Our research, out today, shows just how far out of touch with reality this plan is – and what the UK needs to do instead, not only to protect...

Compelled to Be Wise in the Tent that Can Hear

This is a Guest Blog by Will Essilfie, educator and researcher, on Platform’s event ‘The Tent that Can Hear‘. In this event, Platform looked back at ecological issues in London in 1989 when we made the ‘Tree of Life, City of Life’ project, and forward to 2049. This was a...

Of Plastics and Brexit – the struggle against the new lords of oil & gas

On 16th January 2019 news was leaked through the German paper Handelsblatt of The Alliance to End Plastic Waste. A new industrial coalition that will invest $1billion over the next five years in a campaign to reduce the amount of plastic waste in the world. Here was a powerful body...

Volunteering on ‘London Divests’ – guest blog

This blog is by Freya Brindley Rowell who was on placement with Platform in March. She is about to go to university. Nervous, anxious and excited were all things I was feeling as I headed to London to volunteer at Platform. As a person that grew up in the countryside,...

Iraq, BP and the British Museum – look upon these works and hang our heads in shame

I had read in advance the briefing that Culture Unstained had put out to accompany the planned action. The protest at the British Museum was to be against BP’s sponsorship of the exhibition ‘I am Ashurbanipal: king of the world, king of Assyria’, a display of treasures from the land...

Hopes and fears in the climate of change….

I have been involved in various climate campaigns and research projects for the last 10 years and have often found myself in rooms full of well meaning, reasonably wealthy, middle aged white people. They are usually the Heads of Sustainability or Corporate Responsibility in their places of work –...

Silence in the Storm – Business and No Deal Brexit

The storm in Westminster rages so ferociously that at times it’s hard to hear ourselves think. There is second by second coverage of the House of Commons and Downing Street from every conceivable angle. Backbenchers so obscure that we’ve never heard of them before are dragged through the TV...

Of Climate and Memory – Extinction Rebellion and Doreen Massey

We drive slowly down the winding lane that leads across the flat landscape on the northern flank of the Solway Firth in the county of Dumfries & Galloway. As we move onto the farmland of Preston Merse, we are distracted by the red stone ruin of Wreaths Tower. All that...

‘The Knowledge Quarter’ – resistance to capture and divestment from capital

In the Autumn I attended an utterly inspiring Shake! & Stuart Hall Foundation event – the launch of the Black Cultural Activism Map. It was held at the Platform theatre space in the Central Saint Martin’s art school – CSM – part of University of the Arts London. This new premises...

$G20 summit in Argentina clashes over climate, fracking continues backstage$

G20 summit in Argentina clashes over climate, fracking continues backstage

By Observatorio Petrolero Sur, Buenos Aires, Argentina. – The G20 summit in Buenos Aires concludes Argentina’s G20 presidency. One of the year’s key themes and controversies has been climate change and the role of fossil fuels. In June the G20 energy ministers signed a communiqué highlighting the role of natural gas...

When we ask them they say ‘Don’t stop!’ – Knowledge as resistance to erasure at the launch of Black Cultural Activism Map

We watch in wonder as dancer Akeim Toussaint Buck moves his body as fluid as water across the black box of the stage. Our eyes are transfixed as the voice of activist Max Farrar intones the words of Sai Murray’s poem ‘Stop Signs’ over the sound system. And in Lane number...

A False Promise of Prosperity

An analysis of UK Prosperity Fund support to the oil and gas industry Based on official Foreign Office data, this briefing reveals that the UK’s Foreign Office spent funds from the Official Development Aid budget to promote shale gas drilling in China, as well as supporting expansion of oil and...

$UK government spends aid money on promoting fracking$

UK government spends aid money on promoting fracking

News just in: the UK is spending its official development aid funds to promote fracking abroad. The Foreign Office financed two projects in China to “export UK expertise in shale gas development”, aiming to create “an improved business environment” for UK companies. Our research, released today in collaboration with Friends...

New Report: “Risky Business: Local Government Pension Funds and the Climate Crisis”

Platform and Friends of the Earth reveal how UK Local Government Pension Funds are failing to protect themselves from the financial risks of climate change. Link to full Climate Risk report click here ...

Victory at Leith Hill! Divest Fracking! Resisting sites of speculation

This piece was written before the news of the draconian jail sentences passed on those opposing fracking in Preston, Lancashire … but that bitter ruling does not destroy the reality that shortly before that decision we celebrated a Victory! The News of an Amazing Victory! We wrote of it as...

#FromNopeToHope – Salon des Réfuseurs for our time

Heads up everybody interested in powerful political art and graphics. The exhibition From Nope To Hope – Art vs Arms, Oil and Injustice is running for an extra week, in Brixton Rec, London. Come and get inspired by the artwork of political artists, designers and activists who demanded their works...

$BP Chairman: "fracking is a great opportunity" but don't ask us about the risks$

BP Chairman: “fracking is a great opportunity” but don’t ask us about the risks

Today I attended BP’s annual shareholder meeting alongside Fernando Cabrera from OPSur (Argentina). Fernando came to challenge BP’s board on the dangers from their fracking operations. BP’s Argentinian arm Pan American Energy is using fracking frighteningly close to Patagonia’s freshwater supplies and fruit orchards (see our report “BP’s Fracking Secrets”...

Update: The Bus, its seizure and our story

Here is the latest on the campaign to pressurise Nigeria Customs release the Living Memorial to Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni 9 known as the Bus. Customs seized the Bus in 2015 and has refused to release it despite the huge efforts and directives described below. The guest blog is written by...

Win! Mayor of London and More Councils Back Divestment

Yesterday, the Mayor of London joined the divestment movement. Sadiq Khan announced plans to divest the London Pension Fund from fossil fuels, calling on other London boroughs to do the same. We are seeing a wave of divestment pledges across the capital. Lambeth and Islington Labour have announced divestment commitments in...

BP’s Fracking Secrets: Pan-American Energy and Argentina’s shale mega-project

BP plays a leading role in advancing one of the world’s biggest carbon bombs, the Vaca Muerta shale mega-project in Patagonia. BP does not carry out fracking in the UK because the practice would “attract the wrong kind of attention”. This report by Platform with Observatorio Petrolero Sur reveals BP’s role...

Revealed: UK council pensions are banking £16.1 billion on climate disaster

Today we’re releasing new data analysis showing that UK councils invest £16.1 billion in fossil fuel corporations through their workers’ pensions. These investments are bankrolling the companies most responsible for climate change, like Shell and BP. The councils with the biggest investments in fossil fuels – Manchester, Galloway & Dumfries,...

Bribes, bulldozers and BP: what makes a gas mega pipeline?

Earlier this week, the Guardian’s Azerbaijani Laundromat investigation uncovered thousands of covert payments totaling £2.2bn from Azerbaijan’s ruling elite to prominent Europeans through a network of opaque British companies. Today, Platform and other organisations had a letter published in the Guardian, filling in the blanks in the story. Azerbaijan is...

Demand a Public Energy Company for London!

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has just published his four year vision for London, A City For All Londoners. During his election campaign Sadiq pledged to set up London’s very own public energy company to give us clean, affordable energy. Now we need to keep the pressure up to...

We took the stage for jailed Egyptian activists at British Museum’s BP-branded big lecture

Today, at the BP sponsored British Museum, we remembered political prisoners and friends jailed in Egypt. In particular, we remembered Alaa Abd El Fattah, Aya Hejazi, Ahmed Maher, Ahmed Douma, Yousef Shabaan, Mahmoud Shawkan, and Abdullah Al Fakhrani, who are amongst the tens of thousands of dissidents imprisoned by Abdel...

First UK Pension Fund divests 100% from fossil fuels

We won! Last week the pension fund committee of London Borough of Waltham Forest became the first UK public authority to announce its commitment to go 100% fossil free. The decision to divest was unanimously agreed by both Labour and Tory councillors. Why is this important? Exactly a year ago,...

Open letter: BP can’t buy our silence

Today’s Times has published an open letter from Mark Rylance, Naomi Klein, Nnimmo Bassey, Matthew Herbert, and 215 artists, actors, arts managers, musicians, frontline activists, campaigners, and scientists, arguing: We cannot afford another five years of BP-branded culture. Last Thursday BP announced the renewal of its flagship sponsorship programme. Its partners, this time: British...

BP’s sponsorship of Tate is over!

Today is one of those days when we know we’re winning. It emerged that BP’s sponsorship of art gallery Tate will end within a year. Until this morning we didn’t know whether Tate would be signing a new deal with the oil company, locking it into fossil fuel promotion for a further 5 years. But in...

Walking the Line. New Interactive Documentary

In Italy, Azerbaijan and the UK people are fighting against the devastating impacts of import pipelines and wresting back control over their energy system. In this beautiful documentary we made with Global Motion, Re:common and Counter Balance we meet the people who live alongside the Euro-Caspian Mega Pipeline and are...

Free Mahienour: Egyptian revolutionary & climate justice activist

Our ally Mahienour El-Massry is facing 2 years in jail in Egypt for speaking out against human rights abuses. This Sunday 31 May, a court will rule on her case. She faces a two year sentence on trumped up charges, for a small lawyers protest at Raml police station after...

A manifesto for Energy beyond Neoliberalism

We’ve written a manifesto titled Energy beyond Neoliberalism: “This is a call for energy democracy. Not energy security or energy separation. A survivable and just energy future means breaking the grip of elite interests on our energy systems, ending dependency, increasing autonomy, building diverse power structures through which we can...

The story of Platform

Want to tell someone about Platform, in a nutshell? Try this video made for precisely that purpose!

The Oil Road – Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London

The new Paperback edition has a brand new Afterword… “★★★★★…The Oil Road opens the lid on the often-shady energy economy, weaving absorbing travel reportage into powerful investigative journalism…. If you want to know why oil matters, read this book.” – Time Out (book of the week) “An elegantly written travel book…will...

Fighting to keep fossil gas in the ground

This project is part of Platform’s long-term commitment to support environmental justice struggles at the front lines of oil and gas drilling internationally. BP does not carry out fracking in the UK where it is headquartered, because “it would attract the wrong kind of attention”. But BP, Shell and a...

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...

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You can help us change the world Platform’s work involves taking risks that many others won’t. Sending staff to Egypt as the revolution was unfolding, challenging structural issues like colonialism and race oppression, and proposing visions of energy democracy. By joining our base of Platform Sustainers, you can help us...

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