On TikTok, a campaign to deny ConocoPhillips permission to launch an oil project in Alaska recently went viral. Look up the hashtag #StopWillow and the search results are full of protests warning of the potential damage the project could wreak. One video, which has been liked 3.4mn times, declares that approval would be “game over” for the planet.
As impassioned as the campaign was, it did not work: Joe Biden approved the drilling on March 13. The president had given ConocoPhillips almost everything it wanted, said Elise Joshi in one TikTok clip. “Biden just slapped young people in the face.”
Willow isn’t huge: Conoco says the $8bn project will produce 180,000 barrels a day of oil, or about 1.5 per cent of current US supply. Since Biden entered office, New Mexico’s shale wells alone have added more than 700,000 b/d. Still, approval came just days before the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned, again, of the catastrophe facing the world from existing fossil fuel infrastructure, let alone new projects that will pump for decades.