How to Blow Up a Pipeline

"No, I think the book could more accurately be titled, ‘why blowing up a pipeline should potentially be part of the climate activist’s toolkit’. Or perhaps it should be called, ‘how to puncture a tire’. Malm is now a very productive academic in Sweden, who’s written several books on the history of what he calls ‘fossil capitalism’, linking climate change and capitalism. He calls himself an eco-Marxist, so he’s quite open about his political perspective. But he started out his young adult life in climate activism and one of the things that he did as a climate activist was to go around letting the air out of SUV tires. He uses that as an example of the strategic use of violence that he’s advocating. It’s a short book, and it’s a polemical book. It has a lot of rhetorical gambits that don’t necessarily play out. But I chose it because I appreciated Malm’s provocation. The title may be too provocative and not doing his argument any favors, but I feel comfortable recommending it—even though I wouldn’t advocate for a book that was literally telling people how to blow up pipeline—because I think Malm raises some important points. The key point he’s making is that climate protests have only been increasing over the last 25 years, but they haven’t come close to achieving the kinds of actions that are needed to address climate change. He divides these cycles of protest and activism into three phases. It starts in 2006 in Northern Europe—it’s a very Eurocentric book—in the runup to COP15. Then he talks about 2011 and the protests focusing on the Keystone XL pipeline in America. Then, in the summer of 2018, Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion emerge. Malm identifies this climate movement as becoming the single most dynamic social movement. But, across the same period of time, he notes that emissions have only continued to increase. So at the first COP, which was in April 1995, carbon dioxide concentration was 363 parts per million. Right now it’s about 412 parts per million. So what have these protests achieved, if emissions seem to only be increasing? Does there need to be another phase beyond peaceful protest? “One person really can make a difference” Then he spends a lot of time shooting down a lot of the arguments that are made by groups like Extinction Rebellion, advocating for nonviolence and pointing to the success of nonviolent protests in the past. These are examples like the abolitionists, the suffragettes, Gandhi, those fighting apartheid. Malm goes through systematically to show that, actually, the threat of violence was central to the success of all of those movements. Now, I don’t have expertise in all these movements, and I don’t know that Malm makes a watertight case. But I think the point that he’s raising is important, which is that given the urgency of the situation and given what’s at stake, we should at least be talking about why we might want to consider the form of violence known as property destruction as part of a range of climate activism. In a funny way, this is similar to when Katharine Hayhoe says, ‘it’s not all or nothing, it’s not you’re against us or you’re with us, it’s about a spectrum of opinion.’ I think Malm is saying that our climate activism has to encompass a range of approaches. And one end of that range should be at least the possibility of targeted violence, he suggests. He says that sabotage can be done ‘softly, even gingerly’. Or even slashing them. Taking an action where it’s extremely unlikely that someone might get hurt and where the violence is focused specifically on property that is part of the fossil fuel infrastructure. So SUVs, but also things like oil refineries and pipelines. Now, it’s not straightforward because a) it’s impossible to ensure that people don’t get hurt, b) that kind of action risks backfiring and could cause public attitudes to turn against activism, and c) the people involved are being asked to risk serious jail sentences, and is it morally justifiable to expect individuals to do that? So there are a lot of good arguments against it. But I think Malm is doing a service by suggesting it’s something we should at least be talking about. I think he wants to suggest that it should be imaginable that we might start to damage property as part of climate activism. He says that right now it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism and he wants to change that. Yes, and I don’t know that I came out of it agreeing with Malm. But I did come out of it thinking about things differently than I had been. He forces us to consider why certain things feel more unthinkable than others. In doing that, he is moving the conversation along. The book doesn’t really engage very substantively with either the history or the contemporary set of issues at play in the Global South. It’s very much focused on Northern Europe, which is fine, but I’m not sure that he is as open about that as he might be. In a way what was most affecting about the book is when he talks about how he felt having taken these actions. So, in addition to letting the air out of the tires, he helped knock down a fence surrounding a power plant. He writes, “for one throbbing mind-expanding moment, we had a slice of the infrastructure wrecking the planet in our hands”. Now, that’s a sense of agency that can feel so lacking in other settings, and in the kind of image of the world that someone like Elizabeth Kolbert presents to us. If we’re thinking about how we motivate each other, and ourselves, to act, it’s worth thinking about where we can get a feeling of agency. Now I’m not advocating that agency should come at the expense of safety or even potentially property, but it would be naive not to take it into account as an important factor. I guess the question is, can we transmute that into the kind of political engagement that might result in changing regulations, and which ultimately needs to happen for large-scale system change to take place?"