Written by Calum Macintyre, Folk mot Fossilmakta. The article is part of the HELP-report by Klimakultur, published in November 2025.
This year I have been involved in two campaigns aiming to challenge the entrenched power and influence of the Norwegian oil industry – specifically the state owned oil company Equinor.
Both were focusing on the sponsorship of major Norwegian events – the World Ski Championships in Trondheim and the Bergen International Festival.
Working with these two campaigns has taught me a lot about how important these kinds of sponsorships are for upholding the oil industries political power in a country like Norway. In this article I am going to describe the three most important things that I have learnt about how we can effectively resist.
Sport and culture is a key power base for the fossil fuel industry.
Growing up in Scotland, I never saw oil companies like Equinor embedded in every aspect of our sport and cultural life. Sports stadiums, science centres or my local sports clubs were not sponsored by oil companies. Norway however, is very different. Since I moved here in 2016 I see Equinors branding across the whole of society – ski teams, festivals, science centres, school competitions, art exhibitions, football stadiums. Everywhere you can think of.
These sponsorships create positive associations with oil and gas.
1. What does this do to a society?
The first thing I noticed was how little people talked about the industry's connection to global climate change. Oil and gas is by far the biggest emitter in Norwegian society - yet you can watch journalists interview the Norwegian climate minister and not mention the impact of the oil industry once.
I studied for a masters in climate change management and was shocked at how little we talked about the oil industry.
People in Norway don’t talk about Equinor being big oil like we would elsewhere. Norwegians have a completely different association to Equinor than other oil companies around the word. It’s the peoples oil, its democratic and its low carbon and environmentally friendly.
The stories that Equinor tells through its advertising and sponsorships sell a story to the Norwegian public that separates Equinor from the damage that its product actually causes the world.
2. Disruption is effective.
Our theory of change with the two campaigns this year has been that in order to break through and actually create a story about how dangerous these sponsorships are – we need to get as much attention as possible. At the world ski championships we announced we would block the biggest race of the competition if they didn’t take away the Equinor logos. At the Bergen International Festival we said we would block the main road in Bergen and protest performances unless the festival made a plan to phase out their Equinor sponsorships.
By announcing unignorable civil disobedience like this - we actually put ourselves into a negotiating position that would have been completely impossible for us otherwise. We are a tiny campaign with hardly any money or resources. Within one week of announcing the protest at the world ski championships we were invited into a meeting with the leadership of the competition to speak about our demands.
Within one week of announcing our protests at Bergen International Festival the organisers asked us to take part in a public debate about fossil fuel sponsorships.
The media in Norway love to focus on the disruption we are potentially causing and how annoyed people are. They often suggest that we are damaging the conversation. What they fail to grasp is that without us being disruptive – there would have been no conversation about fossil fuel sponsorships at these events at all.
3. Respected voices need to use the platform that they have.
One of the biggest learnings from these two campaigns is how important influential voices are in challenging entrenched power structures.
At the Ski World Championships a small group of athletes took what we were trying to say seriously and actually entered into an agreement with us to speak up against fossil fuel sponsorships.
That was much more important than any protest that we could have organised – it was why we ended up cancelling our planned protest before the race. There is a reason why big companies sponsor these kinds of athletes in order to sell clothing. People listen to them! When these people publicly challenge the established narrative and story that society is sold by the fossil fuel industry – they lend authority and moral weight to what small groups like ours are saying. They often also have huge platforms and the media listen to them.
A major reason why the fossil fuel industry wants to sponsor these kinds of people is that it silences them. The industry knows that as soon as these kinds of important figures start speaking up against them – they will lose the social acceptance they have in society. It’s why both tobacco and alcohol sponsorships are banned in Norway.
We also got important help from international actors like Tzeporah Berman - the founder and chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. Her op-ed about Equinor sponsoring winter sports was an important factor in giving the campaign credibility and support.
There is a lot more work to be done. We need to not be scared to cause a little disruption, we need to try to get important voices on our side and above all we need to educate the public about how effective fossil fuel sponsorships are at blocking climate action.
The more people that resist, the quicker we will stop these dangerous companies from being able to influence our societies with their enormous marketing budgets.
