How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire

The Preliminaries

• The US is the world’s top producer of oil and gas and has the largest network of pipelines, stretching for thousands of miles.
• ⅔ of worldwide capital placed in energy projects in 2018 went into creating additional facilities for oil, gas, and coal.
• The three largest asset managers in the world (handling assets worth more than China’s GDP) continue to invest in oil, gas, and coal—an indication that the investors either don’t believe in climate policy or are confident in their own lobbying power.
• In 2017, 44 people inherited more than $1 billion, a total of $189 billion. Global funds for financing adaptation-to-climate-impact projects are around $2.78 billion.
• There are 56 countries with annual per capita emissions lower than the emissions of one individual flying once between London and New York.
• SUVs are the second-largest driver of increasing global CO₂ emissions.

Learning from Past Struggles

There have been several cycles of the climate movement:

• First, between 2006-2009 in Northern Europe, numerous climate camps and hundreds of thousands of protesters.
• Second, in 2011 in the US, focused on Keystone XL, a proposed pipeline for transporting oil from Canada to Gulf refineries.
  • Thousands protested and were arrested; activists pressured universities, churches, and others to sell their stocks in oil, gas, and coal companies.
  • Sioux nations protested at Standing Rock against the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline, which attracted tens of thousands of protesters. 
  • President Obama rejected Keystone XL but President Trump approved it.
• Third, in 2018 in Sweden (and across the world), Greta Thunberg led a youth movement in walking out of school to protest ineffective climate policies.
  • In 2019, a half million struck and marched in what might have been the largest coordinated youth protest in history.
  • Extinction Rebellion, a global environmental organization, has had multiple protests, one of which shutdown much of London in one of the UK’s largest civil disobedience actions, without a single incident of violence.

Despite advances gained by these movements, substantial change still needs to come from the top, but “the ruling classes really will not be talked into action…[t]he movement must learn to disrupt business-as-usual.”

• Malm observes that it’s strange that the climate activist movement is so calm, given:
  • First, the magnitude of what is at stake;
  • Second, the ubiquity of potential targets in advanced capitalist countries (e.g., there are SUVs everywhere in America);
  • Third, how easy it would be to implement deterrences (e.g., scratching SUVs to deter people from owning them);
  • Fourth, the widespread awareness of the problem;
  • Fifth, the efficacy of a campaign to take out emissions-intensive devices;
  • Sixth, the enormity of the injustice being perpetrated.

The movement thus far has been largely pacifist, which certainly confers good press. But, an evaluation of history shows that very few social movements were actually completely pacifist.

• There are two forms of pacifism:
  • Moral pacifism: It is always wrong to commit acts of violence.
  • Strategic pacifism: Violence committed by social movements takes them further from their goal.

• There are several popular historical analogies that the climate movement has referenced, and although some seem non-violent, Malm concludes that all involved some form of violence.
  • Slavery: “Abolition is conceived as a reprogramming of ethical codes—slavery went from foundation to abomination and fossil fuels will go the same way.”
    • Slaves did not truly have the option of non-violent civil disobedience as a means to effectively end slavery.
    • “Even the most pacifist Quakers pointed to the revolts as proof of the horrors of the peculiar institution.”
  • Suffragettes: They obtained the vote for women through civil disobedience.
    • Property destruction and militancy were at the core.
    • Not a single life was lost, “[b]ut they considered the situation urgent enough to justify incendiarism: they had to ‘discredit the Government and Parliament in the eyes of the world…spoil English sports, hurt businesses, destroy valuable property, demoralise the world of society, shame the churches, upset the whole orderly conduct of life.’”
  • Mohandas Ghandi: Not a moral paragon for the climate movement.
    • In early 1918, he promised millions of Indian men to the British viceroy.
      • (“As long as Indians were effeminate and weak, the British would never consider them equals…Gandhi’s strategy for national liberation never—and this is true—condoned violence against the British, but it did include violence with them.”)
    • He frowned upon anti-facist resistance; in 1938: “In the case of war, Hitler might implement a ‘general massacre of the Jews’, but ‘if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving.’”
  • US civil rights movement: Malm believes this offers the most compelling analogy.
    • The Montgomery bus boycott, lunch counter sit-ins, the Birmingham offensive, the Selma to Montgomery marches and other non-violent actions upended segregation in the South.
    • “Why did the federal government meet the long-standing demands of Martin Luther King and his peers at this moment? The turning point came at the Birmingham offensive in 1963….If the channel of non-violence remained closed, ‘millions of Negroes, out of frustration and despair, will seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies’ and there would be blood,” which stunned President Kennedy’s administration.
    • “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.”
• Although climate change has no true comparison, it is still similar to the aforementioned cases and other events such as the felling of dictatorships, because both involve overbearing power and incredible profit.
  • Scientist James Handsen said that “fossil fuels, like slavery, cannot be the object of compromises; no one would consider reducing slavery by 40 percent or 60 percent. All of it must go.”
• “The remaining question is whether it is possible to locate even one minimally relevant analogue to the climate struggle that has not contained some violence. Strategic pacifism is sanitized history, bereft of realistic appraisals of what has happened and what hasn’t.”

Breaking the Spell

The world is caught between business-as-usual and planetary devastation. Preventing the Earth’s temperature from rising above 1.5C is crucial to stemming this devastation.

• To have a reasonable chance of respecting the limit, there needs to be a global prohibition of all new CO₂-emitting devices and all operating CO₂-emitting devices need to be deactivated.
• It is crucial to establish a disincentive to invest in CO₂-emitting property and to demonstrate that it can be put out of business. 
  • For instance, there has been substantial pipeline sabotage in multiple areas (Iraq, Palestine, Nigeria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) which created an inhospitable investment environment.
  • Another group deflated SUV tires (with no one harmed) in 2007 in Sweden, and sales plunged.
• There is a tight correlation between wealth and CO₂ emissions, and examining this correlation is essential for determining which emissions to eliminate.
  • The richest 0.54% emits ⅓ more than the poorest half.
    • Only 0.0027% of humans have superyachts, which together emit enough CO₂ as Burundi’s 10 million inhabitants.
  • Not all emissions are equal: there are luxury versus subsistence emissions—the first CO₂-emitting devices to go must be the purely wasteful, frivolous, and unnecessary ones, like superyachts, because:
    • First, the harm that luxury emissions inflict is immediate.
    • Second, the hypermobility of the rich insulates them from the consequences of their indulgences.
    • Third, it actively champions the most unsustainable kinds of consumption.
    • Fourth, all this money could be spent on better purposes.
    • Fifth, if humans were ever to genuinely start cutting emissions, luxury items would plausibly be the first to be eliminated.
    • Sixth, luxury emissions are supremely demoralizing for mitigation efforts: “If we cannot even get rid of the most preposterously unnecessary emissions, how are we going to begin moving towards zero?”

Fighting Despair

• To those who urge people to surrender humanity to a fiery fate:
  • “Climate fatalism is a performative contradiction. It does not passively reflect a certain distribution of probabilities but actively affirms it…‘it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy: that which is repeatedly asserted to be impossible can thereby become impossible.’”

• Spotlights on admired climate activists and their sacrifices and inventive methods of forcing policy change
• Scores of examples of civil disobedience that led to positive political change, not just for the climate but for social gains
• Analyses of multiple climate movements and their triumphs and failures
• More details about the stark state of the climate
• Philosophical differentiation between bodily violence and property destruction