HOT TAKE: How To Blow Up A Pipeline by Andreas Malm

A really quick review of a book I've been thinking on a bit

Honestly I had very little thoughts of what to expect from this book. I walked into Point Reyes Bookstore (my favorite bookstore since high school) and found the loud millennial orange cover fun and started reading the thing.  

In How To Blow Up A Pipeline, Andreas Malm writes a strong case against climate activism as usual. He posits a simple critique, and one we’ve heard before: the way we’re fighting climate change clearly is not working. 

However, the culprit is not simply capital interests or CEOS and politicians across the world, but the great fear of escalating actions into damaging acts in order to gain the ears and therefore the actions of those who wielded the power. Through upending the misrepresentation many peaceful protesters made of Gandhi’s pacifism that reinforces much of the global climate movements, Malm is able to point out both the absurd naivety of this kind of passive activism, and bring forth a better moral compass for how to escalate activism in the ever-growing threat of climate change. He calls this nearly religious fervor for peaceful protest (including property damage) strategic pacifism:

“[Strategic pacifism] is a mixture of can’t and forgery. It reneges on its promise to treat civil disobedience as a tactic — something you do because it works well, which implies openness to reassessment. If non-violence is not to be treated as a holy covenant or its, 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 active that should be abandoned where it no longer worked.’ Strategic pacifism turns the method into a fetish, outside of hasty, unrelated to time.”

I have often heard this inditement of the climate movement — that it is too soft, too passive, too happy. Essentially, that it gets nothing done. And this Malm effectively point out is a critical failure of the contemporary climate movement — there is no true threat to the systems that uphold the fossil fuel economy.

An action such as a march is only able to grab the media, and to have them say “wow, people e are so great for caring” while doing very little to consider what might be done to truly care, and what might force these people to disrupt, not only their lives, but others as well.

However, it is important to note that Malm is not one for literal violence in How To Blow Up a Pipeline — as in the murder or attack of people. The violence, the escalation, he speaks of, is of property damage.

The only way that Malm sees any demonstrations effectively working to stir up true concern and controversy within the public is by creating a bit of destruction, specifically to properties that are directly antithetical to a climate solution. These are the key actions. Using anti-colonial movements in Nigeria, to the destruction of gas stations and office of white supremacy in both apartheid South Africa and the civil rights movement of the sixties, he displays that this has already been an effective tool in the past, however, just not in regards specifically to the climate crisis. 

What gives me pause in this book is how these sorts of tactics were able to specifically alter policy makers minds. In essence, when he was giving examples, it was unclear just how such actions catalyzed change within the minds of those who controlled the tethers of power. He mentions how the threat of greater chaos lead to action by policy makers in the sixties, (as he posits a few times). But there was no study, as in proof, that his claim was actually valid.  In essence, I’m unsure if he is cherry picking examples, working with the intimacy of individual scenarios or historical moments, or if he is completely legitimate in his argument. 

Regardless, what he is proposing, which is greater climate actions against the petroleum industry and its infrastructures, is truly brilliant. I think it is something many will grow and use and consider as the reality of the climate crisis becomes harder to deny. And we already see this, in minor ways, with the latest actions from Just Stop Oil.

Near the end of the book Malm goes deep into climate fatalism and its inherent elitism and illogic— white northern hemisphere folks believing in the end because they rather love their lives (my opinion) and would rather the world suffer more in the future. Because this logic forgets that it’s never about now, it’s only and inherently about the future. Just as with any social change, revolution, or steady progression of change, the future is what we seek.

I used to think of monkey wrenching as stupid and immature. However, the powers that be are clearly not listening to reason, the thing that was to be the foundation of this nation’s (the United States’) founding. So we might as well start breaking shit like toddlers. And Malm gives us at least the rhetorical, if not material, tools in order to do so.