Book Review: How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Andreas Malm's 2021 work How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire is a compelling read, but not the all-encompassing climate activism manual its title would suggest.
In the March 2020 preface to this provocatively titled book, activist, writer and professor Andreas Malm notes that his manuscript was finished prior to the emergence of Covid and finds some potential in the unprecedented act of communities coming together to quarantine and briefly pause free market environmental destruction (page 2):
But world capitalism has also had to close its shops like never before. Therein lies an opportunity. Emissions will plunge — again, just like after the financial crisis of 2008, for reasons entirely unrelated to climate policy — which in itself is a good thing. Taboos against interfering with private property have been broken. If a pandemic can induce governments to take emergency actions, why can’t a climate breakdown that threatens to kill off the very life-support systems of the planet do the same? After this, there can be no more excuses for passivity.
This is not to day that aggressive climate measures will happen automatically, that the curfews and closed industries and paused airports will necessarily extend into a transition away from fossil fuels. We should rather expect the opposite: business-as-usual bouncing back as soon as the pandemic dies down. The car companies will itch to restart production, the airlines to fly again, the oil and gas companies to profit from prices rising anew. If the corona crisis constitutes an opportunity for climate mitigation, it can be realised only if acted upon.
The author can be forgiven for clinging to some hope that Covid would teach our governments a lesson—only the most cynical pessimist would have anticipated that its economic costs would soon be cited as one of several reasons to postpone action on climate change and overall have only a deleterious effect on the environment and its defenders. As a test run for our collective ability to deal with climate change, the Covid pandemic was an unmitigated disaster, with the government essentially abandoning the most vulnerable the moment the cost of protecting anyone began to add up. Not only was the climate mitigation opportunity presented by the pandemic not acted upon, its inverse turned out to be the case, and Covid became just another in a long and accelerating line of disturbing developments, one most clearly manifested in the popular joyous removal of masks which took place several months ago (an act that has undoubtedly ended thousands of lives) and the proclamation that Covid is now “endemic” rather than a pandemic—a fact of life, something we will have to get used to. The same could be said of climate change and its many heretofore and looming disasters.
Far from a call to arms, the book was meant to spur discussion and deliberation about the future of the climate movement in a world that is already significantly degraded by climate change. Malm divides the book into two key arguments: that doctrinaire opposition to the use of force (either against property in the case of vandalism and sabotage, or against people in the case of terrorism and kidnapping, though on this point he is more silent for obvious reasons) in upward social movements is both ahistorical and strategically and morally unsound, and that environmental pessimism (or realism) does not lead inevitably to inaction: the time for action is most importantly the present, but it also extends well into any conceivable future, no matter how wrecked by climate change (because there will always be some room to improve whatever conditions eventually exist, giving up is not an option despite some moral systems arguing for it—“every gigaton matters,” he writes). He supports these arguments well, examining the history of successful movements and finding them to be mostly peaceful but benefiting greatly from a near-separate wing of the movement which is unafraid to escalate, given that strictly peaceful movements rely too greatly on the kindheartedness of the oppressors. With the threat of costly sabotage or embarrassing losses, power-holders are more likely to treat the peaceful wing of the movement with respect and consideration. From page 67:
Now the likelihood of the ruling classes implementing a global prohibition of all new CO2-emitting devices because scientists tell them to, or because billions of people would otherwise suffer grievous harm, or because the planet could spin into a hothouse, is about the same as them lining up at the summit of the steepest mountain meekly proceeding to throw themselves off the edge.
So here is what this movement of millions should do, for a start: announce and enforce the prohibition. Damage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.
The book was mostly well received, with most of the engagement coming from within the environmentalist sphere. Some criticism of his arguments can be found within the climate justice movement, mostly centered on his supporting arguments and historiography (less so his actual conclusions). Indeed, those outside of it would likely have little opinion on what is mainly a conversation within the group that might be defined as “Those who believe the climate crisis is a civilization-destroying concern and who feel this realization should influence their actions one way or another.” Those outside of the environmentalist milieu will not read the book, only point to its title as further proof that the left is suffused with dangerous extremists (they will proclaim this to be the case even if he had title the work How to Tenderly and Legally Criticize Some Aspects of a Pipeline).
One such criticism can be found in the thought-provoking analysis and response by writer and activist Madeline ffitch, on the Verso Books site:
What actually happened was an era of industry-sponsored, state-enforced backlash against environmental activists in North America. September 11, 2001, turned nationalistic paranoia mainstream. The Department of Homeland Security was created. Surveillance and crackdowns on all manner of dissent increased exponentially. Eco-defenders experienced waves of arrests, accusations of terrorism, steep charges, COINTELPRO-style infiltration, lengthy prison terms, suicides and deaths. Many activist networks and communities were scattered and destroyed. We are still recovering. What Malm calls petering out, we call the Green Scare. …
Malm’s failure to even mention the Green Scare, let alone examine it, confounds me. Frankly, it makes it difficult to evaluate his seriousness. To highlight hard-won lessons that already exist would signal that Malm believes in his own proposal, rather than simply launching a neon-colored provocation. There is something just a bit convenient about introducing pearl-clutching liberals to the idea that nonviolence might not be the panacea they believe it to be (a revelation most frontliners had a long time ago) while at the same time skimming over the deeper discussion about grand juries, infiltration, prisoner support and security precautions. Yet the perspective of battle-weary land defenders is vital if Malm’s book is to be taken as something more than sensationalism. Recently, the counterinsurgency tactics and brutality documented against frontliners fighting Enbridge Line 3, Water Protectors at Standing Rock, and Appalachians fighting the Mountain Valley Pipeline in West Virginia have been characterized as “the new Green Scare.” When climate scholars propose sabotage, seeking generational movement perspective is not only respectful, it’s necessary.
Malm’s book illustrates convincingly how everyone from letter writers to saboteurs contribute to effective resistance. Time is of the essence, he reminds us, and none of us have the luxury of ideological or tactical purity. I don’t mean to polarize or attack (no, not even Bill McKibben) but to invite and to challenge. Here is my challenge: If the climate movement lacks a strategic compass, it can find that compass on the frontlines. What if the mass climate movement was focused on supporting frontline direct action? Not advising frontline struggles, not evaluating them, not launching snide critiques, not delivering lectures on civility and proper messaging, not handing down smug analysis about what works and what doesn’t. I mean real support. Throwing out their handbooks. Refusing to denounce militant tactics. Asking frontline campaigns what they need instead of telling them what they should do. Funneling resources, amplifying actions, asking blockaders to share our ideas instead of telling us to be nice.
Echoing this criticism, I wrote previously of the weighty, severely damaging prohibition against open discussion of such targeted “terroristic” (to use a designation discussed in the book) actions, concluding:
We must be careful not to endorse or directly discussion such actions, which will remain nameless, but as often as I am asked “If you think things are so irreparably damaged that there is no cause to hold onto hope, why don’t you just kill yourself?” I am asked “If you think big polluters are destroying the planet, why don’t you do something more compelling than protesting or adopting a vegan lifestyle”? This is a powerful rhetorical trick, because it forces the climate realist (what some might derisively refer to as a “doomer”) into the trap of admitting either some level of hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance, or the intent to engage in questionably legal sabotage or other direct action. It lazily forces us to put ourselves at risk of investigation in order to be consistent with our principles, but the onus is placed unfairly on us, because the illegality of direct action is itself unjust—we had a relatively small hand in the creation of the issue, so the burden is not appropriately ours to bear. Powerful CEOs, on the other hand, were much more directly involved in the climate crisis and are therefore more responsible for doing what they are able to correct their past indiscretions. They are also in a position to accomplish much more than the average individual. But is direct, potentially violent action necessary? Surely there are less damaging alternatives available to us while we still have time….
There are no indications beyond the increasing availability of cheap, less carbon-intensive technologies that any progress whatsoever has been made as a result of peaceful protest. Visibility has increased, but that is more down to the inability of the government to hide discussion centering on increasing carbon and temperature rise, deforestation, the increasing frequency of costly natural disaster, or even something as plainly visible to us all as the lack of insect biomass, to name one example. Much can be hidden from the public, but the lifeless background silence, the lack of bothersome buzzing and distant birdcalls, is deafening. Awareness will increase whether it is the result of scientists publicizing their findings or the plainly obvious, preternaturally distressing outcome of a century of wanton overconsumption.
So far, mostly-peaceful protest has yielded far too little in the way of climate concessions on the part of governments, with emissions, biosphere destruction, and construction of new carbon emitters only increasing. This does not prove that more forceful protest and sabotage would have resulted in a more favorable outcome, but it does show that there is little to lose by trying.
A large portion of the book is spent answering that question: if climate change is indeed the largest and most apocalyptic problem human civilization will ever face, whither the violence and sabotage in response to our governments’ complete lack of satisfactory actions? After all, lesser problems have led to revolution numerous times throughout history. The Los Angeles Review of Books shares this criticism:
Many observers would probably agree that, in a world of accelerating carbon extraction, strategic property destruction or sabotage is justified, but they might also point out the many reasons most activists choose not to escalate their tactics: namely, structural poverty, widespread exhaustion from laboring in neoliberal economies, and increasingly violent and carceral responses by the state. Malm mentions this critique only to dismiss it; he argues against the pacifist position but does not seriously consider the pacifist context, the barriers hindering many from engaging in such direct actions. He discusses two climate activists indicted on charges that could have carried 110 years in prison and writes that their “sacrifice” could be seen as a “signal to others that this is worth fighting for, even spending the rest of one’s life in prison for,” without truly contemplating what life in prison means. Malm may well be correct that the alternative is even less thinkable, but surely it is not entirely fair to blame “the comfort levels” in the Global North for the relative rarity of such sacrifice. This is especially so because, at another point in the book, he notes the increasing criminalization of protest, especially protest against pipelines.
Disappointingly, considering Malm’s expertise on Iran and the occupied Palestinian territories, he focuses inordinately on protest in the Global North. Only in passing does he mention indigenous activists who battled the police and temporarily shut down the largest pipeline in Ecuador. The European activist group Ende Gelände (translated from German as, roughly, “here and no further”) gets far more space in his book. For years, Ende Gelände has sent thousands of its members to disrupt operations in coal mines and fracking sites but it has not escalated its tactics nearly as aggressively as the Ecuadorean protestors did. An alternative focus would have revealed far more individuals engaging in the strategy Malm favors, even if these activists will never get the headlines XR or Greta Thunberg do. Certainly, his scattered references to such actions in the Global South end up troubling his three neat phases of climate activism.
Malm does propose an apt explanation for the lack of forceful actions on the part of climate activists: the general death of revolutionary activity in the global north, of which environmentalism is one aspect. This is the most interesting question Malm raises: given the civilization-ending scope of the climate crisis, why has forceful action (let alone violence) been as rare as it has been in the ecological protest movement compared to previous similar movements?
There is another issue, which is that the previous uses of violence were undertaken in response to a more immediate and focused form of oppression, as Malm points out. His dissections of the US and South African civil rights movements are instructive here, as they are typically considered a triumph of wholly peaceful protest, but in both situations the threat and occasional manifestation of less-than-peaceful protesting was key to their ultimate victory—such as these victories were. This leads to another point that is less well explored: these victories were both fleeting and incomplete, though significant and transformative for many. But racism, inequality, and de facto segregation still exist in intolerable amounts worldwide. How much more complete would these victories have been had they more readily resorted to violence of any kind? Likewise, is Malm too dismissive of this violence by conceding its use as just another tool in the climate protesters’ arsenal? If we apply the analogy of the US civil rights movement, would any such equivalent climate victory accomplish much other than causing the government to obfuscate and slant the science, as it is already doing (and as it perfecting with its program to bury Covid statistics and jeopardize everyone’s health by portraying it as having run its course)? If segregation was privatized rather than meaningfully ended in response to civil rights movement, would any victory short of a green communist revolution be tolerable in this situation?
If there is a weakness to his argument, it can be found in this contradiction: the sheer number of climate protesters and the willingness to use forceful methods is meant to be complimentary, but both of these metrics are as likely to decrease in response to worsening climate conditions and government reliance on fascist propagandizing and crackdowns (as in the Green Scare) as they are to increase. That this number will increase in response to further climate degradation is not a given. Desperation will increase and along with it the possible mass desire to join rebellious, forceful protest groups, but that desperation will also weaken, enfeeble, and outright kill many who would otherwise be star participants. Highly visible mass climate protests just occurred, but these might have been a blip, just as the spike in eco-violence Malm discusses peaked decades ago. Mass movements aided by a more aggressive wing require both masses and aggression, neither of which are a given, especially with the complicating presence of a perpetual disease we are being told is now a fact of life.
It may seem to be conspiratorial to suggest that the forces of capital and their servants in the governments of rich nations woke up to the reality of the climate crisis at some point in the early 20th century (when scientists first posited a link between temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations) and have been silently preparing us for the inevitable transformation of civilization ever since by putting resources into the following programs to manipulate, placate, and propagandize its future victims:
Gutting and privatizing public education and politicizing knowledge itself so there will always exist a manufactured “doubt” in anthropogenic climate change even as it ruins millions of lives;
Starting a culture war distraction to convince people to vote against their own interests: it is no coincidence that anti-science forces are also anti-LGBTQ+, anti-choice, and pro-religious indoctrination;
Ensuring that a sufficient number of us have new toys and bad food to make us well behaved and pacified consumers, a carbon-intensive consumerism which also ensures that no one is entirely blameless and no one can throw the first stone, because our houses are all to some degree made of glass (it is often seen as problematic to criticize the consumption habits of the working class, many of whom greatly enjoy their burgers, gas guzzlers, and vacation flights—it is seen as insufficiently worker-friendly in some circles to call these activities out, but this has the effect of undermining all criticism of fossil fuel recreations full stop, and that includes the far more significantly polluting pastimes of the rich);
Extending the surveillance state and scaring would-be activists away from talking about destroying capitalist forces in the service of saving the planet;
Infiltrating leftist groups and escalating protests to discredit them and justify the use of disproportionate force, while appearing superficially to allow freedom of expression by permitting and even assisting right-wing and pro-capitalist protests;
Militarizing and excessively empowering the police in order to prepare for waves of climate migrants and normalize the use of disproportionate force on environmental saboteurs;
Unapologetically waging wars for resources under the flimsiest of pretexts which the government very openly does not care to try to explain (nor does it concern itself that relatively few bought the rationale it did offer);
Extending the fascist military industrial complex in scope and timeframe to ensure the government will always be able to mobilize the wartime economy, all while funneling sweetheart no-bid contracts to their industry cohorts (a bizarre sort of New Deal meant to save the free market through beneficial government intervention);
Offloading the externalities of the free market to former colonies to obfuscate and justify them as only harmful to some unimportant Other (who, they will argue, benefit from the pittance anyway);
Letting pandemics spread unchecked to further weaken and destabilize the working class, who suffer the most from them (and will suffer the most from climate change, another non-coincidence);
Transforming the lengthy, lucrative Cold War into the endless War on Terror, which was always just as nebulous and unwinnable, in order to maintain a ready-made excuse to postpone climate action and curtail rights in the name of fighting some greater opponent;
Marginalizing the criticism of religious beliefs to hamper Americans’ ability to meaningfully “believe in” the science of evolution, let alone the similarly-settled science of climate change.
The problem with climate change is that it is too diffuse, too slow, and too all-consuming to motivate similar spikes of violence to those which occurred during other (comparably mundane and personal) movements. Oddly, the global nature of the problem might be its undoing: we are not all suffering equally, but there is no provincial immediacy to the issue, no shared experience between those who are the first to be victimized aside from the fact that they are being victimized, and therefore only a solidarity of the global south (which has been effectively neutralized over the last 60 years by the US) could potentially coalesce into a meaningfully forceful movement. Local victories are important, as ffitch writes above, and local victories will continue to be important even as the climate heats up, but the atmosphere and its corruption is a global problem, one whose ethereal nature casts it as a prime candidate for placing on the back burner. It is difficult not to see the Covid response as a clear and emphatic rejection of the idea that the elites will ever budge in a satisfactory manner, and because of this they must be replaced down to an individual. A primarily peaceful, only occasionally violent climate movement is not up to this task, and for this reason, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a good starting point for a more comprehensive and openly revolutionary theory of climate justice.
On that note, it is prudent to end this review with the same disclaimer as the above linked article:
I will not do anything illegal to meaningfully alter the course of Western history, if such a thing was ever possible (this essay is a thought experiment and commentary on the forbidden discourse, not a statement of any kind of intent). I will instead work to minimize my own carbon footprint while recognizing the futility of doing so. Your project to foster short-sighted avarice and inequality will be allowed to finalize its dark and ultimately self-defeating mission with no violent or overly disruptive action on my part. I will sit obediently by and watch as we poison our home, content in the knowledge that I have at least not reproduced and thereby doomed any offspring to a fate worse than nonexistence, that my privilege dictates I will likely die before unlivable situations find me, and that the time for meaningful action of that kind was at any rate likely over many decades ago. I recognize that this is a selfish, comfortable inaction, but I did not ask to be born into a dying world and would have preferred it never happened.