How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

climate movement without social anger will not acquire the required striking capacity, and it should have no difficulties developing the point – and indeed, some Gilets Jaunes have touted the slogan ‘More ice sheets, fewer bankers’. Or, ‘End of the month, end of the world: same perpetrators, same fight.’ Not only do the rich make our lives miserable, they are working to terminate the lives of multitudes. Here is another dimension in which XR leaves room for radical flanks of the movement: those who dare to speak the name of the enemy.

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

‘the real reason that non-violence is considered to be a virtue in the powerless is that the powerful do not want to see their lives or property threatened’ – only to come down firmly against any action.

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.

If someone seeks to affect the ways of the world by acting in one way rather than another, it must be because she holds an outcome to be desirable and wants to contribute to its realisation. If she merely wished to confirm the most probable outcome on account of its high probability, she would have no reason to act at all. Her behaviour would have no normative substance. It would have no strategic charge. She would simply be floating, and she would be floating just for the sake of it. To act politically is to reject probability assessment as a ground for action

that which is repeatedly asserted to be impossible can thereby become impossible’.

Imagination is a pivotal faculty here. The climate crisis unfolds through a series of interlocked absurdities ingrained in it: not only is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, or the deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system – what we refer to as geoengineering – than in the economic system; it is also easier, at least for some, to imagine learning to die than learning to fight, to reconcile oneself to the end of everything one holds dear than to consider some militant resistance.

What despair here amounts to is that ‘I can make no difference because I am unwilling to make a difference’.