How to Gently Criticize a Pipeline
No matter the tactics they employ, climate protesters are already popularly maligned in the media and government for inconveniencing everyone with their implicitly petty demands for a livable future.
In my review of Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, I wrote in criticism of the book that “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.” Recent miscarriages of justice in the arena of climate action have confirmed the necessity of more forceful forms of protest, from the treatment of lawyer Steven Donziger to the more recent legal action against protester Deanna ‘Violet’ Coco, whose sentencing to a minimum of eight months jail time for the crime of ‘inconveniencing motorists’ was celebrated by a New South Wales premier. From The Guardian:
The New South Wales premier, Dominic Perrottet, has described the sentencing of environmental protester Deanna ‘Violet’ Coco to a minimum of eight months’ jail as “pleasing to see”, despite strong criticisms by human rights advocates and a UN official…
Asked about the jail term on Monday morning, Perrottet said the sentence was “not excessive” and warned others against taking part in protests that “inconvenience people”.
“If protesters want to put our way of life at risk, then they should have the book thrown at them and that’s pleasing to see,” Perrottet said.
“We want people to be able to protest but do it in a way that doesn’t inconvenience people right across NSW.”
He said the sentencing should serve as a “clear lesson” to people who wanted to protest.
“My view is that those protests literally started to grind our city to a halt,” he said.
“The clear message here, and it is a clear lesson – everyone has the right to protest, but do so in a way that doesn’t inconvenience people.”
These already-Draconian punishments are only get more severe as the planet heats up and the cause demands more action in turn. The elites will react commensurately to their level of fear regarding social unrest and upheaval, which is the only realistic threat to their hegemony. The explains the less severe punishments given to relatively non-disruptive actions resulting only in property damage, such as the Just Stop Oil protesters who recently defaced museum artworks and were mostly given weeks of jail time for the crime of property destruction. While troublesome to many, these acts of civil disobedience do not otherwise bother, for example, the average motorist. This kind of protest is therefore easier to ignore and minimize as a more symbolic gesture, one which is importantly only costly to the doubtlessly well-insured museums (and the paintings are protected by glass coverings). Blocking motorists on the other hand, is more diffuse, more directly visible, and more economically costly, especially if the idea is allowed to germinate and protests spread. The paintings have monetary value, but they are more appreciated for their rarity and cultural value, two readily-abandoned concerns in the minds of capitalist elites. Destroy a painting, and a few will get upset; disrupt the very economic apparatus in a visible way (stop the underclass from going to work to be exploited) and protests threaten the very noxious way of life which over the last few years has seen the elderly, immunocompromised, children, and vulnerable people essentially written off as lost causes in the drive to return to normalcy, despite Covid still killing thousands per week and ruining the lives of many more. This is the extent to which elites are willing to go to keep the machine running. Even the average “inconvenienced” motorist will often react with excessive violence:
Here we see the disproportionate reaction to even peaceful protest, this time by private citizen fascists. If the reaction to sit-ins such as this is so violent, why would the protesters themselves not meet these motorists’ escalations with force? The comments on this tweet thread rationalizing the unnecessary violence reveal the extent to which “law and order” propaganda is effective.
We might expect that the periodic forceful protests seen throughout history would have been met with even harsher punishments, but these are less important examples to be made because the intended message—that even minor disruptions will result in disproportionately harsh punishments—is not well-served by ruining the life or even executing a protester who has committed a more serious crime. We already expect murderers to be locked away for life at the very least, so the eventual act of capital punishment sends a message which will be lost on most protesters, who typically do not plan anything so extravagant or violent. If, however, the punishment for lesser crimes such as sabotage or assault are elevated to the equivalent level of murder or manslaughter, then by the cold, internally inconsistent logic of the criminal justice system, those crimes would be discouraged. There would also, importantly, be no reason to hesitate in making an assault into a murder from the lawbreaker’s perspective, especially if doing so would potentially allow them to escape justice (such as killing a witness rather than taking a risk by allowing them to live, for example). Regarding protest, if the punishment for even minor acts of civil disobedience is sufficiently harsh, why would a true believer in the catastrophic nature of climate change and environmental destruction ever stop at pouring soup on paintings? There is now no reason for them to hesitate in the name of proportionality, especially given the all-consuming problem the protests are meant to highlight. They might instead prefer to make their sacrifices count, and undertake an action such as those which which were outlined in this previous entry:
The conclusion is relatively simple: to get their attention, the self-interested nihilists which make up our ruling class must be made to feel pain (the form and severity of this pain is up to them to decide), and any honest appraisal of those who made them feel it would consider them as fully justified martyrs for the most important cause in human history. Those who fall short of forceful, even violent acts, will be seen as wasted opportunities by the millions soon to be impoverished, displaced, and bereaved by the changing climate and resultant upheaval and scarcity. For example, the Colorado man who set himself on fire on the steps of the Supreme Court last April in an environmentalist protest would have made much better use of the materials had he employed them in other ways we cannot discuss, from any conceivable perspective (from ethical concerns to the appraisal of its outcome) given that his sacrificial act was virtually ignored.
An even more thorny question than the ethics of discussing acts of force in the service of thwarting an imminent disaster: given that by 2023 catastrophic warming is already largely irreversible and the time for effective revolutionary action has long since passed, should this extreme yet accurate pessimism factor into our appraisals of acts of forceful protest? It would stand to reason that if such actions are largely ineffective in the face of an accelerating breakdown, then they should be discouraged if they so much as slightly inconvenience others, and would be akin to protesting for an illusory or nonsensical reason, or to stop something which already took place in the past. On the contrary, even (especially) pessimistic climate campaigners view our current trajectory as terrifying yet also alterable, with each tenth of a degree averted a major victory which could save hundreds of thousands of lives—indeed, with life itself on the line, each amelioration counts for much more, given the accelerative nature of feedback loops. A degree saved now would mean less to compound in the future. On the other hand, those with a more rosy view of the future might consider active protests unnecessary—after all, the tech industry will save us with fanciful carbon sequestration or colonies on Mars. This is a level of delusion the earth can no longer afford.
What then does it take to morally justify disruptive or even violent protests? In the early days of climate awareness, it could have been plausibly if not convincingly argued that climate devastation was an illusory or far-off threat which would not then legitimate violence or even disruptive protests. This would have been a falsehood all along, as the extent of our biosphere abuse and its devastating impacts on the natural world were well known to scientists and energy industry insiders since well before the postwar acceleration of emissions took off. However, this knowledge was yet widespread and polluting industries took advantage of this, spending billions of dollars on “chicken little” (often anti-hippie) propaganda designed to discredit anyone raising an alarm:
This propaganda is known to be effective in sowing doubt about scientific conclusions regarding every aspect of reality, including the impact of pollution. In conjunction with the predisposition of a large proportion of Americans to believe in ghosts, gods, and unscientific conspiracy theories, these propagandists knowingly sewed the seed of doubt in the minds of potential climate protesters, ensuring that anyone arguing for the necessity of forceful protest would be met with sufficient naysaying and hesitance. Yet there are those who always knew and attempted to raise the alarm, often being belittled and lied about in the corporate media, yet who could prove the necessity of their actions in a court of law in the same way that a defendant might argue justified self-defense in the act of lethally thwarting an imminent attack, say from a knife-wielding lunatic for example. This industry propaganda effort is comparable to a lawyer arguing that the knife was actually plastic all along, and that the defender should have known this as well (or more illustratively, that the attacker never went anywhere near us to begin with). This is now an undeniable and demonstrable falsehood; the attacker is both real and approaching, and this legitimates necessarily forceful action in turn to save ourselves. To ask us to wait any further for more disasters and alarming revelations (which are increasing by the day: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12) is to effectively argue that we must wait until actively bleeding out to resist the attacker.
Prior to the onset of observable cataclysm, the denialists and optimists alike could have made a case for inaction and therefore the needlessness of forceful protest, but no more. Perhaps at that point, they might argue that some kind of technology would emerge to save us, or perhaps global warming is a hoax anyway (these two statements, in terms of their insidiousness in planting the irrational seed of doubt, are identical). After the onset of observable cataclysm, however, the empirical reality of climate change becomes undeniable as it is now, and this legitimates forceful protest with the same immediacy and obviousness as that which justifies self-defense in the case of an attacker charging at us with a weapon. Now, each tenth of a degree increase thwarted avoids measurable suffering on a grand scale; there is no longer the potential for any reasonable doubt that the twin attackers of climate change and environmental destruction are going to wreak a level of havoc which justifies much more in opposition than the desecration of valued paintings. As climate change becomes more convincingly real, protest becomes more convincingly necessary, until it is either compelled morally or practiced by default by a desperate populace. This graph roughly illustrates the relationship between the imminence of the attack and the level of reaction justified in turn:
(Assume that the other major pieces of the ecological puzzle, general environmental destruction in the form of habitat loss, overconsumption, and other non-climate related issues rises concurrently with the temperature, which is naturally not the only variable worth considering here)
In sum: it is never too late, and as such forceful protest is never unnecessary, and violence toward the defenders of e.g. fossil fuel infrastructure is warranted by their resistance, which constitutes escalation. One helpful example occurred recently in France:
Had the overseers of this plant put up armed resistance, would the infiltrators have been justified in fighting back, or would they have been forced to flee in order deescalate the probable violence? Who are the real aggressors in this situation, the employees willing to use lethal force to continue destroying the environment, or the “forceful” practitioners of self-defense who set out to stop them? The answer should be clear.
What kind of protests are acceptable in light of this, given that the stakes are already more than sufficient and will only get higher? As the world burns down around us, how will we respond to those who raise the alarm, and how will we look back at our wasted capacity to act (or at least react appropriately to the actions of others) when the world is even more undeniably devastated than it is now? No less an authority than the UN recently stopped mincing words:
The United Nations' biodiversity chief says global talks under way in Montreal are the "last chance" to reverse the destruction of the natural world.
"Biodiversity is the foundation of life. Without it, there is no life," Elizabeth Maruma Mrema told BBC Radio 4's Inside Science programme.
But she is worried about the amount of work still needed for the 196 countries to reach an agreement.
The Global Biodiversity Framework, if agreed, represents fundamental change.
It is the nature equivalent of the Paris Agreement, an international treaty to limit global temperature rise and arrest the climate crisis.
"The targets in that [Global Biodiversity Framework] are a roadmap to, by 2030, reverse and halt the loss of biodiversity, which has reached rates unprecedented in the history of humankind" Ms Mrema said…
The current draft deal still had "a lot of brackets", Ms Mrema said. "And brackets mean disagreement - areas where the 196 still have to agree, compromise and reach a consensus."
In an article in Nature, ahead of the talks, ecologist Prof Sandra Diaz, from the National University of Córdoba, said the brackets had "proliferated at an alarming rate throughout the text, neutralising and paralysing goals and targets".
And some scientists in Montreal worry the policy fails to reflect the evidence.
Ms Mrema said the scientific evidence revealed the scale of the crisis and the urgent need for the talks to succeed.
"We've already degraded 75% of the Earth's surface and more than 60% of the marine environment," she said.
"Half the coral reefs have already disappeared and 85% of wetlands are degraded."
Action was needed now, Ms Mrema said, "or there would be no future for our children and grandchildren".
In 1980, perhaps this statement could have been written off as the blathering of the lunatic fringe. This is no longer the case in 2023. To preserve a future for our children and grandchildren, surely the inconveniencing of motorists is justified, and if this is justified in the service of protesting a demonstrably imminent deadly threat, then so are more forceful actions. If even inconveniencing others is unjustified no matter the reason, then no protest is ever just or even possible. We should therefore allow much moral leeway to the violent protester, appraising only how much care they took to ensure that these actions were targeted toward the truly dangerous and no one else:
There are a range of relevant estimates as to how much carbon the Amazon can absorb. The Washington Post reported that the Amazon’s annual carbon sink rate matches Germany’s emissions, which were “762 million tonnes of carbon dioxide” in 2021. Dr. Carlos Nobre, a leading expert at the University of São Paulo’s Institute for Advanced Studies, puts the figure at 1 to 1.2 billion tons per year. Meanwhile, global economic activity dumped a total of 41 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2021—dwarfing the Amazon’s quickly dwindling carbon sink capacity between 34 and 54 times over. The “lungs of the planet” can sequester, at best, just under three percent of current annual carbon emissions worldwide.
Now let’s add the crucial context of how carbon generated by personal consumption varies by income (a near-taboo for much elite-feelings-focused media). The world’s top 1 percent by income generate an astonishing 17 percent of global carbon, while the global top 10 percent generates about half of the total. Running those numbers suggests that annually offsetting the emissions of the top 1 percent would require between 6 and 9 Amazons; for the top 10 percent, between 16 and 26 Amazons.1
Now consider the impacts of aggregate deforestation in recent decades. The 17 percent of the Amazon already destroyed is equivalent to emitting 18 billion tons of long-stored carbon. That’s less than a single year of the global top 10 percent’s emissions. Wrecking the rest of the entire rainforest would release between 90 and 1202 billion tons of carbon. That’s only around three years of our carbon.
It’s likely no accident that most of the audience of the outlets quoted above occupy the high-carbon-hog categories ($53,000 per year puts you in the global top 10 percent, U.S. college graduates have a median income higher than that, and the majority of New York Times readers are college graduates). Perhaps without audience-pampering, feel-good filters, these outlets might report passionately on how the resource-intensive lives of their readers are 6 to 26 times more of an obstacle to our “chances of surviving” than mustache-twirling climate villains like Bolsanaro. To ignore these sorts of concrete consumption trade-offs is perhaps the defining charismatic mega-folly of the rich-world’s “save the rainforest” set.
The ultra-rich are indeed extremely dangerous individuals to the rest of us:
However, the average person in the top one per cent of the global population contributes 110 tons of carbon a year, while the average person in the top .01 per cent contributes a monstrous 2,531 tons. Meanwhile, a billionaire typically contributes a jaw-dropping 8,190 tons.
So while the ranks of the superrich are small, their carbon emissions (from private jets, yachts and multiple homes) are so immense — and fast-growing — that they are a key driver of climate change.
Now we come to the second part of the problem: their role as corporate owners directing enormous pools of capital towards fossil fuel production and infrastructure.
In a new study, Oxfam notes that if the investments of billionaires are factored in, their average emissions move from thousands of times greater than an ordinary person to more than a million times greater.
Oxfam examined the investments of 125 billionaires and found that they were skewed toward fossil fuels. If these billionaires moved their investments to a fund that simply followed the S&P 500, the intensity of their emissions would be reduced by half.
Billionaires clearly have a choice where to put their money, but there are only rare exceptions to the pattern — such as Patagonia sportswear billionaire Yvon Chouinard, who put the company’s ownership into a trust, declaring “Earth is now our only shareholder.”
Most, however, use their capital — and the enormous political clout that comes with it — in ways that further our dependence on fossil fuels, both by investing in their production and infrastructure and by influencing governments to block climate action.
That influence can be observed at the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where more than 600 lobbyists and executives from fossil fuel-related industries are working hard — often ensconced right inside national delegations — to block climate progress.
The individuals who are demonstrably most dangerous to earth’s survival (the ultra rich) are by and large leading what is inaccurately considered by the mainstream media to be the charge toward adopting the green technologies and carbon capitalism which has the best chance to save us:
As government struggles to move quickly to contain greenhouse gases, ultrawealthy investors and philanthropists are increasingly grabbing the reins, using their fortunes to guide the transition to cleaner energy toward their favored projects and market strategies.
They are men with household names like Jeff Bezos (net worth: $113 billion, according to Forbes), Mike Bloomberg ($77 billion) and Bill Gates ($106 billion), along with other billionaires who have lower profiles but equally large climate ambition. Their role as shadow policymakers has grown amid the evolution of the Biden administration climate agenda and the recent U.N. Climate Change Conference in Egypt, known as COP27, where their projects were on prominent display.
See a previous entry, my review of Adrienne Buller’s The Value of a Whale, for a good summation of the many compelling arguments against this strategy and any necessary further proof that these ultrawealthy are not to be relied upon to save us. These men are dangerous and not to be trusted, as they are only concerned with doing the bare minimum (or, crucially, appearing to do the bare minimum) to preserve the arrangements which both enriched them beyond compare and led us to the current predicament.
The word “dangerous” is crucial here, and should be used in place of “deserving” or “polluting” as everyone pollutes, and the case could be made from such a limited perspective that the emitters in the developing world are culpable for industrializing or clearcutting out of a survival need and would therefore be justifiably denied the right to live in an already-damaged world. A stock response to anyone daring to criticize the polluting tendency of the 1% consists of pointing to industrializing nations and asking the environmentalist why they excuse their environmentally damaging practices but not ours (forgetting of course that our own predatory colonial policies both kept them in a state of poverty and compel their industrialization to meet our needs). This amounts to a strawman argument used to discredit the left criticisms of environmentally damaging production and lifestyles in the richer countries by essentially stating “they are doing it too, albeit to much lesser degree, so why don’t you go after them instead of us”?
The multiplicative and exponential nature of ecological degradation and climate change alter the analogy of an imminent attack in an important way, elevating the knife-wielding lunatic to one armed with a nuclear device. This alters the calculus concerning imminent harm appropriately and justifies far more in the way of preventive measures. More important still is the question, “how did the attacker get ahold of a nuclear device in the first place, and how can others be prevented from doing so in the future?” This is where directionality and proportionality are important in any ethical discussion, because “punching down,” while it might carry some technical benefit for the environment, does not prevent future acts of massive destruction; if anything, it will embolden them because they will have seen they’ve gotten away with it. How indeed were the polluting industries able to grow so large that they now threaten life on this planet? In the analogy of an imminent attacker, the 1% are the lunatics holding a nuclear device, and the average indigent might amount to a potential stone thrower. We can stop the nuclear-armed lunatic and dissuade the stone thrower in the same action. This is why it is important to target protests toward the architects of our current path of destruction: industrializing economies in 2023 have had little to do with this predicament and only their disappearances (or forced decarbonizations) in great number would benefit the rest of us climate sufferers. The point of protest is to send a message; force against the 1% sends an appropriate one, diffuse oppression of the 99% sends the opposite. To abandon this crucial aspect of protest out of expedience or laziness and “punch down” toward the defenseless is to borrow a strategy from the robber barons whose actions set us on our original collision course with nature.
The right in general and climate denialists in particular have worked for generations to corrupt the very simple principle of self-defense as it applies to our current ecological predicament, muddying the waters and invalidating the idea of justified prevention by reducing it to preemption. In this respect, we can see that “stand your ground” laws or castle doctrine or gay panic defenses, for example, do not only represent a fetishization of unreactive and therefore unnecessary violence, but also an attempt to discredit the idea of self-defense by taking it to such disagreeable conclusions, invalidating the idea that one can use force to resist actual real imminent threats, at least in the minds of many would-be protesters and those who would exhort them to hesitate before so much as inconveniencing any attackers. It is no accident that the fascist version of otherwise lofty ideals resemble the opposite, negative version of them—see for example the current rightist complaints about the restriction(such as it is) of “freedom of speech” on social media, which more closely resembles the fascist notion of “freedom to propagandize, oppress, slur and slander my ideological opponents.” Their play-acting is nonetheless effective, convincing some nontrivial number of non-rightists that it is important to tolerate the dissemination of disinformation (including dangerous disinformation in the case of anti-vaccine Covid conspiracy theorists) and abusive language under the guise of freedom of speech. Elon Musk’s recent takeover of Twitter is instructive here: he describes himself as a free speech absolutist yet denies the fact that hate speech has risen on the platform as a result of his ownership and mistreatment and subsequent firing of thousands of employees, and his charge of a previous leftwing bias amounted to nothing more than standard content moderation (some hate accounts, such as Libs of TikTok, were even receiving preferential treatment). At the same time, many prominent leftist accounts have been banned or otherwise punished despite not having broken any rules. In the same way that Musk’s “free speech” is anything but, the right-wing concept of justified self-defense is a funhouse mirror version of the actual principle, which would unequivocally apply to any protesters employing force in the defense of our shared natural heritage.
It is time to stop polite, civil protests—punitive reactions to them will increasingly be indistinguishable from those levied against violent protesters, so the material difference between standing in a designated free speech zone with a politely worded “please stop killing all life” sign and committing acts of industrial sabotage will soon be purely strategic, and discussion about strategy the strict domain of the comfortable. On behalf of those who are unable to defend themselves, we comfortable of the first world have the luxury to employ targeted, justified force with the goal of saving their lives and the lives of their progeny (and, if successful, the lives of our own as well). For everyone else, unless revolutionary acts of a sufficient scale are soon undertaken, violent acts of protest will be both commonplace and necessary for survival but no longer capable of containing runaway warming, breakdown, and social upheaval—they will win protesters only the resources necessary to continue surviving for another brief period in the wasted, parched ruins of the apocalyptic future.