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For years politicians in Britain have been looking with increasing envy at the burgeoning shale boom in the US, believing that it could be replicated in the UK.

Its hotting up down in Ohio between the oil industry and locals who oppose the dumping of millions of gallons of potentially toxic waste water.

The UK had never seen a day like it. Yesterday, there were over a dozen protests against fracking across the country, from Wales to the North West, from London to Manchester.

If there is one country where Shell’s broken promises ring hollower than anywhere else it is in Nigeria.

Earlier this week in London, in a novel action which some are calling a “playtest”, over 50 young children gathered outside Shell's London headquarters to protest against the oil giant’s Arctic drilling programme and its controversial collaboration with the iconic children’s toy-maker, Lego.

As so often in the past, where America leads, the UK obligingly and belligerently follows. It has been widely known for months that Britain was going to open up vast swathes of its densely-populated land for fracking, but now we have confirmation.

Big Oil has always been a bad, bad loser. And it is therefore no surprise that it has threatened to sue a small coastal city in Maine which on Monday night struck an historical blow against the industry by banning the export of tar sands from its harbour.

Yet another pivotal battle is brewing in Canada, over a little-known pipeline labelled the “mother of all pipelines” by the country’s First Nations.

And so the battle lines have been drawn. On the one hand you have Canada’s federal government, ever eager to please Big Oil, which has just agreed to let Enbridge build its highly controversial $8 billion Northern Gateway pipeline from the toxic tar sands of Alberta to the rugged coast of British Colombia.

Many visitors to the iconic British Museum in London got more than they bargained for on Sunday, when hundreds of protestors descended on the Museum to protest against BP's sponsorship of a major exhibition on Vikings.