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enslaved people were also productive forces,
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fossil fuels, like slavery, cannot be the object of compromises; no one would consider reducing slavery by 40 per cent or 60 per cent. All of it must go.
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the ‘civil resistance model’ is based on movements for ousting dictators,
the revolution that knocked down the Shah was indeed one of the most popular in history, directly engaging an estimated 10 per cent of the population – compared with, for example, the 1 per cent that participated in the overthrow of the Soviet Union.
Of the eighteen days it took to expel Mubarak, the three first might possibly count as nonviolent. During the remainder, at least one-fourth of the country’s police stations – over 50 per cent in Cairo, over 60 in Alexandria – were sacked. The national tally of demolished police vehicles reached 4,000.
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.
This is the impasse in which the climate movement finds itself: the historical victory of capital and the ruination of the planet are one and the same thing. To break out of it, we have to learn how to fight all over again,
2 Breaking the Spell
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Scientists lag behind these positive feedback mechanisms and struggle to capture them in their models.
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if the thawing permafrost and proliferating wildfires and other mechanisms were accounted for, there would be even less of a margin available to stay below 1.5°C or 2°C.
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Using models with incomplete representation of positive feedback mechanisms, writing in 2019 – another year of rising emissions – Dan Tong and his colleagues concluded that 1.5°C still remained ‘technically possible’ on two conditions. First, to have ‘a reasonable chance’ of respecting the limit, human societies would have to institute ‘a global prohibition of all new CO2-emitting devices’.
the second condition for staying below 1.5°C – or indeed any other boundary between a tolerable and an intolerable future – would be ‘substantial reductions in the historical lifetimes’ of fossil fuel infrastructure. Not only new but existing, young and old CO2-emitting devices would have to be deactivated.
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
‘The current global energy system is the largest network of infrastructure ever built, reflecting tens of trillions of dollars of assets and two centuries of technological evolution’, 80 per cent of which energy still comes from fossil fuels. No one in his or her right mind would think that bands of activists could burn all or one fifth of that to the ground (or that such a tertiary fire would be unequivocally desirable). At the end of the day, it will be states that ram through the transition or no one will.
In June 1980, commando units from MK cut holes in the security fences around two hydrogenation facilities and planted mines in their tanks. Lasting for three days, the smoke plume could be seen by electrified audiences in Johannesburg: it ‘shattered the myth of white invulnerability.
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The façade of durability had been fractured.
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In a recent reconstruction of the campaign of 1969, Zachary Davis Cuyler has shown that the Front understood oil as a material base for the hostile trinity – US imperialism, Israeli colonialism, Arab reaction – and sabotage as a way to ‘strike at the ligaments of empire’.
In late 2005, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) announced itself by giving these corporations the ultimatum to leave or ‘face violent attacks’.
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Between 2006 and 2008, when the insurgency stood at its height, MEND shut down a third of production in Africa’s principal oil country.
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None of the above came close to the effect of the drones launched by the Houthi rebels in Yemen – another country with a tradition of pipeline sabotage – against Aramco’s refineries in Abqaiq, the world’s biggest oil processing facility, on 14 September 2019. 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.
Given this record from the past and present, the question is not whether it’s technically possible for people organised outside of the state to destroy the kind of property that destroys the planet; it evidently is, just as it’s technically possible to shift to renewable energy. The question is why these things don’t happen – or rather, why they happen for all sorts of reasons good and bad, but not for the climate.
The South reels under the blows from climate breakdown. It has the most to lose in the short and medium term, and popular concern is rife, far higher than in the North, according to some polls. This is where the know-how of grand property destruction is most alive, and still it is conspicuous by its absence.
insufficient politicisation of the climate crisis. People might agonise over it; they rarely see a means for fighting back.
Devices emitting CO2 have been physically disrupted for two centuries by subaltern groups indignant at the powers they have animated – automation, apartheid, occupation – but not yet as destructive forces in and of themselves.
One facet of the retrogression in Europe in recent years is the far right’s virtual monopolisation of political violence,
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Property destruction still happens – it’s just done by the wrong people for very wrong causes.
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Unscrew the cap on the valve of the tyre. Inside, there is a pin that will release the air if pushed down. Insert a piece of gravel the size of a boiled couscous grain or corn of black pepper – or, we suggested, use a mung bean – and screw the cap back on. With the little object pressing down the pin inside the valve, the tyre will be fully deflated after about an hour.
why go after private consumption? Hasn’t the movement worked hard to shift attention away from consumers – the favoured subjects of liberal discourse – to the production of fossil fuels? Wouldn’t pointing to the former represent a slide backwards? But consumption is part of the problem, and most particularly the consumption of the rich.
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a diminutive share of the population accounts for a wildly outsized portion of the gas released.
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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.
two Indian climate scholars and activists, Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, who took issue with calculations that treated all emissions as equal. ‘Can we really equate’, they asked, ‘the carbon dioxide contributions of gas guzzling automobiles in Europe and North America or, for that matter, anywhere in the Third World with the methane emissions of draught cattle and rice fields of subsistence farmers in West Bengal or Thailand? Do these people not have a right to live?’ A quantum of methane from a ruminant or paddy might have the same radiative forcing as a quantum of CO2 from an SUV, Agarwal
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rich people like to wallow in the pleasure of their rank, the latter because poor people try to survive. If a peasant family in India uses coal to cook their food, or light up their house with electricity from a coal-fired power plant, the only available alternative might be no stove and no lamp. Because they are locked in a fossil economy, they have little choice but to use the CO2-emitting energy on offer.
all reasonable carbon budgets are close to depletion. There is not much room left for anyone. ‘No one, rich or poor’, can have something like a right to emit because all emissions must be brought to zero in no time.
the main source of luxury emissions – the hypermobility of the rich, their inordinate flying and yachting and driving – is what frees them from having to bother with the consequences, as they can always shift to safer locations.
the burning of money has an additional ethical connotation when that money could be diverted to helping the victims of that same burning.
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.
features of luxury in a CO2-saturated world: wanton criminality, insulation from the fallout, waste promotion, withholding of resources for adaptation, persisting in the most odious variants and ostentatiously negating the very notion of cuts.
states should attack luxury emissions with axes – not because they necessarily make up the bulk of the total, but because of the position they hold.
Under the current balance of class forces, the average capitalist state with some pretension to care about the climate will rather be inclined to begin at the opposite end: with an attack on subsistence emissions. This is what Emmanuel Macron, king of climate diplomacy and private luxury, did in France in 2018. The fuel tax that triggered the Gilets Jaunes targeted the cars of the popular classes.
second-largest driver of the increasing global CO2 emissions since 2010. The power sector came first, the swelling SUV fleet second, beating heavy industry – cement, iron, aluminium – and aviation and shipping by wide margins.
The incessantly growing share of SUV sales offset all gains from fuel efficiency and electric vehicles; so large and so heavy, these cars continued to devour prodigious amounts of gasoline, as well as energy in the stage of manufacturing.
safety inside these tanks is an illusion, as SUV drivers are far more likely than other motorists to crash, roll in a crash and die.
strategic pacifists are right in asserting that in the eyes of the public, in the early twenty-first century and particularly in the global North, property destruction does tend to come off as violent.
We must accept that property destruction is violence, insofar as it intentionally exerts physical force to inflict injury on a thing owned by someone who does not want it to happen
we must insist on it being different in kind from the violence that hits a human (or an animal)
indirectness is also what sets property destruction apart, for one cannot equate the treatment of people with the treatment of the things they own.
one type of property destruction that approaches killing and maiming, namely that which hits material conditions for subsistence:
direct action should be limited to disrupting practices that might result in, or imminently threaten to generate, serious and irreversible harm.
