How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

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.

Sabotage, after all, is not incompatible with social distancing.

The commitment to the endless accumulation of capital wins out every time. After the past three decades, there can be no doubt that the ruling classes are constitutionally incapable of responding to the catastrophe in any other way than by expediting it; of their own accord, under their inner compulsion, they can do nothing but burn their way to the end.

At what point do we escalate? When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different? When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?

‘The war has come to us!’ Skerrit cried out, struggling to contain the pain. ‘We are shouldering the consequences of the actions of others. Actions that endanger our very existence … and all for the enrichment of a few elsewhere.’ He made a desperate plea to his audience. ‘We need action’ – action, that is, to cut emissions – ‘and we need it NOW!!’

The first was written by the British novelist and essayist John Lanchester. It begins: It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism.

Arguably constituting the most advanced stage of the climate struggle in Europe, Ende Gelände spanned the cycles and grew year on year; in the summer of 2019, 6,000 people closed the largest point source of emissions in Germany, backed up by several thousands more in the camp and some 40,000 in a Fridays for Future demonstration. By that time, Ende Gelände had forced the issue of brown coal to the top of the agenda and prompted a national commission to set a date for phasing it out – the date eventually announced as 2038. That’s another two decades of churning out coal. Hence Ende Gelände promised to march on and swell further and spawn more copycats around Europe; in 2019, dozens of climate camps were organised from Poland to Portugal. The learning curve went steadily upwards.

For this reason – economic, not technical – a unit of power generation from fossil fuels is expected to have a lifetime of around forty years.

Tong and his colleagues estimated that committed emissions from already-running power plants – not counting extraction, transportation, deforestation – would be enough to take the world beyond 1.5°C. Combined with proposed plants, they would nearly exhaust the budget for the amount of carbon that can be released while still giving the world some chance of staying below 2°C.

‘Current investments’, the study on coal observes, can be seen ‘as an indication that investors do not believe in future climate policy or that they are confident in their own lobbying power.’ They still feel that they own the world. Fixed capital of this size is normally subject to risks and sensitive to the anticipated ‘policy context’. Given the money involved, it would be imprudent to undertake these investments if swings and alterations in the economy threatened premature devaluation, let alone liquidation, but these capitalists do not see any wrecking balls coming their way. They think they have nothing to fear.

Moral pacifism claims to hold life in the highest regard and detest its violent termination, but a defensive act that saves lives and reduces violence is unacceptable to it insofar as it involves active physical force. This seems flawed.

Isn’t suffering unearned by the victims precisely what is so morally repugnant about the unfolding crisis? If so, why make it a virtue?

collective action against slavery perforce took on the character of violent resistance.

The suffragettes are instructive. Their tactic of choice was property destruction.

Fed up with their own fruitless deputations to Parliament, the suffragettes soon specialised in ‘the argument of the broken pane’, sending hundreds of well-dressed women down streets to smash every window they passed.

The suffragettes took great pains to avoid injuring people. But they considered the situation urgent enough to justify incendiarism – votes for women, Pankhurst explained, were of such pressing importance that ‘we had to discredit the Government and Parliament in the eyes of the world; we had to spoil English sports, hurt businesses, destroy valuable property, demoralise the world of society, shame the churches, upset the whole orderly conduct of life’.

the history of how the civil rights movement was girdled with armed protection. In the Deep South, rural African American communities had developed a long tradition of staving off murderous assaults with weapons; when the movement took root and began to deliver concrete benefits, it faced the same threat to physical survival.

From his cell, King could now signal a warning: if the demands of his movement were not met, other, more menacing forces would arise. If the channel of non-violence remained closed, ‘millions of Negroes, out of frustration and despair, will seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies’ and then ‘the streets of the South would be flowing with floods of blood’.

The civil rights movement won the Act of 1964 because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power.

In the words of Verity Burgmann, ‘the history of social movement activity suggests that reforms are more likely to be achieved when activists behave in extremist, even confrontational ways.

After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, the ANC leaders realised that they had to ratchet up the pressure and formed Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation, or MK. It was Nelson Mandela who pushed for the reorientation: ‘Our policy to achieve a non-racial state by non-violence has achieved nothing’, and so ‘we will have to reconsider our tactics. In my mind we are closing a chapter on this question of a non-violent policy.’

Reaching the days of Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax, one must ask if there is a little censoring angel sitting on the shoulder of the strategic pacifist and instructing him in the ways of redaction. As everyone who has ever heard of the tax knows, the revolt culminated in mass riots in London that killed it off.

If non-violence is not to be treated as a holy covenant or rite, then one must adopt the explicitly anti-Gandhian position of Mandela: ‘I called for non-violent protest for as long as it was effective’, as ‘a tactic that should be abandoned when it no longer worked.’ Strategic pacifism turns this method into a fetish, outside of history, unrelated to time.

Having sustained attacks from the army, government thugs, the civil police and the secret police known as SAVAK for months, the mobilised masses ‘aggressively struck back at the armed forces’ in the autumn of 1978. In Amol, they equipped themselves with bows and poisoned arrows, overwhelmed the garrisons and seized their weapons; in Dezful, they dropped bags of sand on patrolling soldiers, who were then jumped upon and disarmed; in Hamadan, they burnt down government buildings until the city ‘came to resemble an ancient ruin’;

But the millions of Egyptians did not reach that square by offering flowers to the police. On the decisive Friday of Anger, 28 January, they picked up gas canisters, pieces of pavements and other projectiles and fought their way through the dense cordons across the bridges to Tahrir – ‘a confrontation that turned peaceful protesters into violent protesters who defeated the riot police out of necessity and despair’,

From the years around 1789 to those around 1989, revolutionary politics maintained actuality and dynamic potentiality, but since the 1980s it has been defamed, antiquated, unlearned and turned unreal.

The irresponsiveness to the crisis has exceeded expectations. So has, no less fatefully, the response of the climate system: at the time of COP1, few scientists foresaw that the land and the oceans so soon would fail to soak up the gases emitted, become overfilled and disturbed and start leaking and puffing carbon dioxide and methane at such a rate.

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 instant suspension of every project in the pipeline would make 2°C achievable only if accompanied by the decommissioning of one-fifth of all power plants running on fossil fuels (this estimate is as of 2018 – more years or decades of business-as-usual would raise the requirement).

The question is not if sabotage from a militant wing of the climate movement will solve the crisis on its own – clearly a pipe dream – but if the disruptive commotion necessary for shaking business-as-usual out of the ruts can come about without it.

The unmanned vehicles swarmed into the precincts to puncture storage tanks, light fires, disable processing trains; in one fell stroke, half of the oil production in Saudi Arabia, accounting for 7 per cent of global supplies, had to be taken offline.

Property destruction still happens – it’s just done by the wrong people for very wrong causes.

We have deflated one or more of the tyres on your SUV. Don’t take it personally. It’s your SUV we dislike. You are certainly aware of how much gas it guzzles, so we don’t need to enlighten you about it. But what you seem to not know, or not care about, is that all the gasoline you burn to drive your SUV on the city’s streets has devastating consequences for others,

Always the grim men: never far below the surface, the terror of symbolic castration for owners who had invested not only class but manhood in their monster cars.

if there is anything to be learned from this little episode, it is that some exercise of the imagination might allow activists to neutralise CO2-emitting devices with easily accessed means.

To be rich in the world today is to come out on top in the distribution of the ‘unequal ability to pollute’,

One article published by Ilana M. Otto and her colleagues in Nature Climate Change in 2019 finds that the richest 0.54 per cent of the species emit one-third more than the poorest half.

this study calculates only the CO2 emissions from the gasoline burnt to move the superyachts around. The global fleet has 300 vehicles. In a year, it generates as much CO2 as the 10 million inhabitants of Burundi.

There are fifty-six countries in the world with annual per capita emissions lower than the emissions from one individual flying once between London and New York.

A quantum of methane from a ruminant or paddy might have the same radiative forcing as a quantum of CO2 from an SUV, Agarwal and Narain accepted, but the moral substances are like chalk and cheese.

A group of American and British criminologists have consequently argued that conspicuous consumption of fossil fuels ought to be classified as a crime.

To be super-rich and hypermobile above 400 ppm is to dump lethal hazards on others and get away from them in one master stroke.

Ilona Otto and her colleagues point out that in 2017 alone – according to official rolls – forty-four individuals inherited more than $1 billion each, a total sum of $189 billion. The four largest global funds for financing adaptation to climate impacts approved projects amounting to $2.78 billion.

If we are ever going to start cutting emissions, on any plausible principles, luxury will have to be the first thing to go. The more gigatons of carbon out there, the fiercer the clashes might be over whose emissions to initially terminate when the hammer finally falls.

If we cannot even get rid of the most preposterously unnecessary emissions, how are we going to begin moving towards zero?

It might take attacks on luxury-emitting devices to break the spell cast in the sphere of consumption.

the purpose here would be to hammer home another ethics: rich people cannot have the right to combust others to death.

if we have to cut emissions now, that means we have to start with the rich.

‘The oil being taken out of the ground and the machinery that does it and the infrastructure which supports it – this is violent’, Reznicek stated in an interview. ‘We never at all threatened human life. We’re acting in an effort to save human life, to save our planet, to save our resources.

righteous property destruction falls within the boundaries of non-violence.