How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

McKinnon, has argued in the article ‘Climate Change: Against Despair’, a delightful logical evisceration of the fatalist position, it often comes down to a probability assessment. While some climate fatalists deny that it would be logically and technically possible to cut emissions to zero and then begin the work of repair and regeneration, more common is the argument that this just won’t happen, because of the way the world is. Scranton at one point acknowledges that it could be accomplished, if we managed to ‘radically reorient all human economic and social production, a task that is scarcely imaginable, much less feasible. It would demand centralized control of key economic sectors, massive state investment in carbon capture and sequestration, and global coordination on a scale never seen before’ – a scenario that can be conjured up in some theoretical hemisphere of the mind but not promoted or implemented in the real world, because the forces stacked against it are so stupefyingly strong. Despair about the climate is here based on a judgement of extreme improbability, hypostatised into impossibility. The procedure is anti-political through and through.