Andreas Malm is many things. Born in Sweden in the mid-70s, he is a professor of human ecology at Lund University, an author, a climate activist, and a Marxist. In an effort to do some research for a fiction project I am working on I read his book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
I ordered the book from Amazon, and the delivery took place in the afternoon while I was still at my office. When I arrived home and walked through the door, my wife held it up with an alarmed look on her face. “Did you order this book?” she asked.
“I did.”
“Why?”
I broke into a smile. “Research,” I answered. “I want to get some insight into the more radical side of climate activism for a book project.”
“Okay,” she said. She didn’t look convinced. “Are we going to end up on a terrorist watch list because of this?”
I shook my head. “It’s not a technical manual. The book is just an argument for why the climate movement should consider embracing tactics or actions that are more impactful than the symbolic things they’re doing right now.”
“Symbolic? Or stupid?” she asked. “How is throwing soup on a priceless painting going to convince anyone of anything?”
“Exactly. This guy is arguing that the time for symbolism and strict non-confrontation has passed, and the gravity of the situation demands something new. Honestly, he should change the name of the book from How to Blow Up a Pipeline, to Why We Should Blow Up a Pipeline. But it probably wouldn’t sell as well with that title.”
If the book is more about why to blow up a pipeline, the movie inspired by the book, which is also titled How to Blow Up a Pipeline, deals much more with the how. The film, released in 2022, chronicles the efforts of a group of young people to sabotage an oil pipeline in west Texas. I have not seen it, so I won’t comment on it except to acknowledge that Malm’s work is the inspiration for it.
Andreas Malm is an excellent writer. The ideological distance between myself and Malm is hefty, but I found the narrative engaging and easy to read. The book is organized into three long chapters and is best described as a polemic. Malm’s thesis, crudely stated, is “things are bad; we need to start blowing shit up.” The opinion is controversial, even in activist circles, because climate activism under the leadership of individuals like Bill McKibben (350.org) and Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion (XR), has committed itself to a policy of strict pacifism, arguing that sabotage and violence, even against inanimate things, are self-defeating. Malm writes this about an element of the rationale used by the climate movement to justify their strict adherence to non-violence.
Slipping out of the antinomies of moral pacifism, however, is the second version: the strategic one. It says that violence committed by social movements always takes them further from their goal. Turning to violent methods is not so much wrong as impolitic, ineffective, counterproductive — poor strategy, in short; non-violence is hallowed less as a virtue than as a superior means.
And this from Roger Hallam:
Violence destroys democracy and the relationships with opponents which are vital to creating peaceful outcomes to social conflict. The social science is totally clear on this: violence does not optimize the chance of successful, progressive outcomes. In fact, it almost always leads to fascism and authoritarianism. The alternative, then, is non-violence.
In the first chapter, “Learning From Past Struggles,” Malm begins by describing a phenomenon that he names “Lanchester’s Paradox.” The source of the phenomenon is the British novelist and essayist, John Lanchester, who wrote:
It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as about, say, animal rights. This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising SUVs.
“Lanchester’s Paradox” is the cornerstone of the narrative. Malm goes on to illustrate how the organizers of historical struggles for recognition and justice — the Suffragettes, Black Americans in the civil rights era, apartheid South Africa — found it necessary to move beyond a doctrine of strict pacifism and include the harsher tactics of a “radical flank” to achieve victories long denied. Examples of actions taken include the suffragettes smashing windows and lighting letterboxes on fire in central London, urban riots that caused Martin Luther King to signal from his jail cell that if the civil rights demands of black Americans were not met that other, more violent resistance would arise, and the sabotage of utility poles and power stations in South Africa by Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress (ANC). Malm writes this about the policy success of the American civil rights movement.
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.
Having set the stage by demonstrating that historic struggles often characterized as strictly peaceful typically required a radical flank to achieve what peaceful protest and resistance alone could not, Malm titles the second chapter “Breaking The Spell.” Here, he sets out conditions that justify the turn from peaceful protest to sabotage or destruction of “machines of the fossil economy.” The first condition is from the writing of William Smith, who Malm quotes directly:
… direct action should be limited to disrupting practices that might result in, or imminently threaten to generate, serious and irreversible harm. The urgency of the situation might be sufficient to override a presumption in favor of lawful advocacy or civil disobedience, if too much damage would occur before the process of reflection and reconsideration triggered by the latter could run its course.
Second, there should be evidence that the tactics of non-confrontation and peaceful protest have achieved nothing. And third, there should be a convention, charter, or higher principle that is violated by the wrongdoers. Examples of this would be commitments to reduce CO2 emissions to a predetermined level, or to hold planetary warming beneath a threshold.
In Malm’s view the world is so saturated with CO2 and the climate emergency so acute that the purchase of a luxury SUV has the capacity to “supercharge a hurricane or set the match to a dry forest.” Condition one is no hindrance to action. As for condition two, well, his entire book is about the ineffectiveness of “lawful advocacy or civil disobedience.” That box is checked. And Malm writes that “whole libraries’ worth of covenants and consensuses have been assembled for climate activists to pursue the felons with,” so condition three is satisfied as well.
Malm is clear that violence against humans is not to be countenanced, and he highlights a distinction between “luxury emissions,” like owning a private jet, and “subsistence emissions,” which might be a poor family that uses energy from a coal-fired power plant to cook their food and light their home. Obviously, luxury emissions should be targeted first since they are clearly in the category of “wants,” not “needs.” In my essay POW Misfires, I discussed the mental gyrations that professional skiers and snowboarders engage in when they try to justify their helicopter and snowmobile lifestyles against the backdrop of a perceived climate crisis. Andreas Malm lumps their preferred solution, systemic change, in there with the “lawful advocacy and civil disobedience” that he indicts for its ineffectiveness. I suspect he has a few choice names for them and views their justifications as a cop-out.
And while Malm may view luxury toys as the fattest targets, the subsistence emitters are always the ones who suffer. When a pipeline is sabotaged and gas prices rise, who pays the price? When dependable power plants fueled by coal or uranium, long paid for, are taken off-line and the price of electricity rises while the reliability goes down, who pays the price? When you’re forced to buy a vehicle that is more expensive and less useful than the ICE car you currently own and enjoy, who pays the price? In every case it’s the people on the margins, where all the pennies are spoken for, and additional expense can have dire effects. You can plan an action to blow up Paul Allen’s yacht, but it doesn’t really hurt Paul, and everyone else with a big boat ponies up for some additional yacht security in the aftermath.
The closing chapter, “Fighting Despair,” is a plea for people to take up the fight. He counsels against the “we’re f#cked” fatalism of authors like Roy Scranton and Jonathan Franzen, and the deep green, dystopian fantasies of others who envision “widespread industrial collapse,” and the reduction of “organized human life to a tabula rasa” in order to “hand the planet back to the animal kingdom.” Malm has no intention of giving up the fight.
The alpha and omega of the science of the cumulative character of climate change run contrary to the axioms of fatalism. Every gigaton matters, every single plant and terminal and pipeline and SUV and superyacht makes a difference to the aggregate damage done, and this is just as true abov 400 ppm and 1 degree C as it is below. It won’t lose its truth at 500 ppm or 2 degrees C or higher still.
Given the urgency of the sentences above, it is surprising to discover that Malm’s own efforts, to date, run well to the timid side of the radical flank. He describes an action to deflate the tires of SUVs in an expensive suburb of Stockholm, and breaking through the perimeter fence of a coal-fired power plant in Germany. A tissue please. I’m verklempt.
For his PhD thesis, Malm studied the rise of steam power in the British cotton industry. The thesis contends that British industrialists adopted steam power not because it was less expensive or more abundant than the water mills they had previously used, but because it freed owners to locate factories in places where there was abundant labor to hire. Actions like this are anathema to a Marxist, so the explosion of productivity and wealth unleashed by the steam engine, which to a large degree redounds to everyone in society, is hardly mentioned except to say that steam power, fossil power in Malm’s vernacular, was adopted for profit not utility. Malm’s Marxist blind spot continues today, as there is never an acknowledgement of the incalculable benefits of affordable, reliable energy, available on demand. Instead, in the type of intersectionality most prized by academics and activists, capital, and fossil capital specifically, not only leads to class conflict but climate catastrophe. The back cover of Malm’s book is dominated by a single sentence written in large, block letters. “Property will cost us the earth.”
The actions Malm would sanction to Just Stop Oil go considerably farther than the mandates of the organizations devoted to that purpose. Perhaps the reticence of the climate warriors to escalate, as Malm put it in a question to Bill McKibben, is an unconscious reflex. A deeper knowing that the thing they like least—energy from hydrocarbon fuels—makes life possible for billions of people. That if they take it away, the death and destruction is on them.
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As an example of someone with a yacht, you should've picked someone still living instead of Paul Allen.
Malm should read Teddy Roosevelt’s writing “Man in the Arena”. It’s one thing for Malm to criticize the energy world from the stands … and another for him to jump into the arena and make the hard choices as how to power the world. In other words … what is his vision?