How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

A pandemic may course through the world for a couple of years. It could peter out. It might be combatted with a vaccine. But global heating will only become progressively worse until the moment greenhouse gas emissions cease and drawdown of CO2 from the atmosphere commences.

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?

He made a desperate plea to his audience. ‘We need action’ – action, that is, to cut emissions – ‘and we need it NOW!!’ He probably knew on what kind of ears his words would fall.

These include ‘small wins’ – a gas pipeline cancelled here, a coal plant scrapped there – as well as some big losses, which, however, seem to ensure the movement its growth, as the fire drives more people to take the plunge into activism. But so far, the movement has stopped short of one mode of action: offensive (or for that matter defensive) physical force.

Not a single stone was picked up and thrown. The supply was abundant – we were standing on top of thousands; we could have pelted them – and after such an assault, other types of crowds would have responded in kind. The climate movement would not.

A moral pacifist can respond to this sort of objection by saying, ‘Granted, some violence must be accepted in some cases’ – at which point the pacifist, of course, ceases to be a pacifist and becomes like everyone else.

Among ethical standpoints, there is no such thing as ‘contingent’ or ‘relative pacifism’. A pacifist who makes exceptions is a just war theorist.

‘Gandhi famously resisted any use of violence’, runs the standard characterisation, here in the words of yet another writer who thinks the climate movement should model itself on the mahatma. Did he? Perhaps the Boer and Zulu episodes were youthful blunders?

in the 1950s and early ’60s, the African National Congress (ANC) experimented with bus boycotts, strikes, pass-burning, campaigns to refuse segregation in trains and post offices and found that they invited little else than overwhelming repression.

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.’

Now the likelihood of the ruling classes implementing a global prohibition of all new CO2-emitting devices because scientists tell them to, or because billions of people would otherwise suffer grievous harm, or because the planet could spin into a hothouse, is about the same as them lining up at the summit of the steepest mountain and meekly proceeding to throw themselves off the edge.

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.

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

We likened SUV drivers to the upper-class youth of Östermalm, who early in the new millennium had developed an infamous habit of purchasing bottles of ultraexpensive Champagne, uncorking them and spraying out the liquid in the neighbourhood’s bars, just to show off how much money they could waste – with the difference that this exhaust did more than wet a floor. It killed people.

Sabotage can proceed in the dark. Indeed, if one wants to accomplish something, one shouldn’t follow the example of Roger Hallam, who announced beforehand that he would fly drones into Heathrow airport to protest its expansion, with the predictable result that he was preemptively apprehended.

Pacifism has perhaps never existed as a real thing. What exists is the ability, or not, to distinguish between forms of violence.