What do you think?
Rate this book
How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire
Property will cost us the earth.
The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest?
In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop—with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.
Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women's suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. In a braided narrative that moves from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.
This audio edition of How to Blow Up a Pipeline is skillfully narrated by Brian Arens, an Audible listener favorite. It was produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.
The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest?
In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop—with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.
Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women's suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. In a braided narrative that moves from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.
This audio edition of How to Blow Up a Pipeline is skillfully narrated by Brian Arens, an Audible listener favorite. It was produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Audible Audio
Published December 5, 2024
3 people are currently reading
19 people want to read
About the author
Andreas Malm
32 books487 followersAndreas Malm teaches Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author, with Shora Esmailian, of Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War and of Fossil Capital, which won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 27, 2025
Interesting overview of the climate movement up to 2020, appreciated learning more and the tie backs to historical social movements.
I think ecoterrorism can be justifiable.
I think ecoterrorism can be justifiable.
February 13, 2026
Asks the very viable question of why the climate crisis and consistent government inaction has not driven violent protest.
Very much appreciated the first section’s critique of XR’s historical reference points of non-violent direct action, it had always grated with me despite me being aligned to their wider mission.
Terrifying stat that if SUVs were collectively a country their emissions would be make them the 7th most polluting country in the world. And this is what I appreciated from the book - a clear narrative of the class dynamic of the climate crisis. It is fundamentally an unequal crisis: caused by the richest nations with the highest impact on the poorest, and exacerbated and accelerated by the richest people impacting the poorest even within wealthy states.
So why aren’t we running a campaign of direct action against wealth? No reason to kill - he doesn’t but maybe should’ve quoted E Pankhurst - ‘There is something that governments care far more for than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy’. Key SUVs. Smash windows of fossil fuel companies. Blow up pipelines. Why aren’t we?
Sadly this question remains unanswered. And what the answer may have been when he was writing may also have had different emphasis to now. Just a few years later it feels more obvious why not, at least in the UK and USA - you’d be risking your life. How the UK has squeezed out protest and redefined terrorism in recent years, and how the federal government in the USA feels confident enough to shoot peaceful citizens in the street for disagreeing politely, points to what’s at stake personally for the middle classes who are more sheltered from the impacts of the climate crisis but have thus far been the leaders of the protest movement.
He comes back to those non-violent direct action movements; they needed the more radical flanks in order to push government to change, to show that they’re reasonable and can be worked with, in comparison. The suffragists needed the suffragettes, the anti-apartheid movement needed MK. Is the climate movement failing and losing its way because of the lack of a more radical flanks? That really resonates with me. I just wish I knew how to ignite it because we’re rapidly running out of time.
Very much appreciated the first section’s critique of XR’s historical reference points of non-violent direct action, it had always grated with me despite me being aligned to their wider mission.
Terrifying stat that if SUVs were collectively a country their emissions would be make them the 7th most polluting country in the world. And this is what I appreciated from the book - a clear narrative of the class dynamic of the climate crisis. It is fundamentally an unequal crisis: caused by the richest nations with the highest impact on the poorest, and exacerbated and accelerated by the richest people impacting the poorest even within wealthy states.
So why aren’t we running a campaign of direct action against wealth? No reason to kill - he doesn’t but maybe should’ve quoted E Pankhurst - ‘There is something that governments care far more for than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy’. Key SUVs. Smash windows of fossil fuel companies. Blow up pipelines. Why aren’t we?
Sadly this question remains unanswered. And what the answer may have been when he was writing may also have had different emphasis to now. Just a few years later it feels more obvious why not, at least in the UK and USA - you’d be risking your life. How the UK has squeezed out protest and redefined terrorism in recent years, and how the federal government in the USA feels confident enough to shoot peaceful citizens in the street for disagreeing politely, points to what’s at stake personally for the middle classes who are more sheltered from the impacts of the climate crisis but have thus far been the leaders of the protest movement.
He comes back to those non-violent direct action movements; they needed the more radical flanks in order to push government to change, to show that they’re reasonable and can be worked with, in comparison. The suffragists needed the suffragettes, the anti-apartheid movement needed MK. Is the climate movement failing and losing its way because of the lack of a more radical flanks? That really resonates with me. I just wish I knew how to ignite it because we’re rapidly running out of time.
June 9, 2025
Adreas Malm has been involved in the sharp end of climate activism for many years, and in this book - really an extended essay - he details laments the lack of public engagement with climate activism, and details a broad view of what could be a successful strategy to save the planet.
First, he makes the distinction that because climate change isn't immediately obvious like the worst excesses of racism and state violence, it's harder for people to emotionally engage with the issue and therefore get involved. He then talks about tactics, the importance of mass movements led by a cadre of inspired activists. He gives numerous examples of how sabotage is only effective when it's used as the tip of a much larger movement, it costs capitalists money, and it doesn't endanger anybody or directly inconvenience the public. Finally, he talks about why it's important to keep fighting for a better world even in the face of extraordinary odds, and calls out some nihilists by name as examples of bourgeois, consumerist thinking taken to the extreme.
I found this book to be both inspiring and illuminating, and an important read in these times where it seems like the ruling class is winning everything.
I listened to the audiobook via Overdrive from my local library while running and/or cycling, and I don't process auditory info very well at the best of times so my recollection of details is suspect.
Reading Level: adult, some familiarity with marxism helpful but not necessary
Romance: NO
Smut: NO
Violence: NO
TW: NO
First, he makes the distinction that because climate change isn't immediately obvious like the worst excesses of racism and state violence, it's harder for people to emotionally engage with the issue and therefore get involved. He then talks about tactics, the importance of mass movements led by a cadre of inspired activists. He gives numerous examples of how sabotage is only effective when it's used as the tip of a much larger movement, it costs capitalists money, and it doesn't endanger anybody or directly inconvenience the public. Finally, he talks about why it's important to keep fighting for a better world even in the face of extraordinary odds, and calls out some nihilists by name as examples of bourgeois, consumerist thinking taken to the extreme.
I found this book to be both inspiring and illuminating, and an important read in these times where it seems like the ruling class is winning everything.
I listened to the audiobook via Overdrive from my local library while running and/or cycling, and I don't process auditory info very well at the best of times so my recollection of details is suspect.
Reading Level: adult, some familiarity with marxism helpful but not necessary
Romance: NO
Smut: NO
Violence: NO
TW: NO
October 14, 2025
Audiobook
November 30, 2025
a bit dry at times but also very convincing!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews