How to Blow up a Pipeline

Andreas Malm has a simple thesis - that property violence is both necessary and justified in the struggle to end fossil fuels. Much of the book is spent critiquing Gandhi as well as Chenoweth and Stephan, heroes of my youth and my early peacebuilding career, respectively.

Malm argues that a violent wing to a broader movement is critical for that movement to achieve its objectives - that every Martin needs his Malcolm, etc. And he actively disputes the research and thesis of Chenoweth and Stephan's signature text, "Why Civil Resistance Works". He characterizes insistence on non-violence as the stance of the privileged who will bear the least of the burden as we descend into climate chaos.

As I write this, the U.S. Congress has passed an historic climate bill, investing $369 billion to overhaul our energy and transportation sectors. Through a combination of carrots and regulatory sticks, analysts predict that U.S. emissions may fall as low as 50% our 2005 level by 2050, a critical milestone if we are to keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius. This legislation was made possible through the non-violent mobilization of the climate movement.. Yet the flaws of the bill, and its insistence on the continued operation of fossil fuel infrastructure, means that many will continue to suffer from the harms produced by these deadly fuel sources.

It would seem, then, that if non-violence can claim to have made significant progress, it can not yet claim to have achieved total victory. And the reader still must ask - how best to protect frontline and fenceline communities? Is it justifiable to destroy fossil fuel property in the pursuit of justice?

I think it is critical that we, as citizens, increase the cost for fossil fuel companies to build infrastructure. Mechanisms ranging from legal tools for challenging construction to civil disobedience would increase the cost for construction. Ultimately, while I still believe that non-violent approaches can grow the movement and achieve results, the arguments by Malm are thought provoking, and deeply unsettling.

for a book i should ostensibly agree with on all points i found this deeply dull and fairly insipid. it goes to great lengths to categorize property damage as violence, dedicating only a few paragraphs around page 100 to the "ridiculous" idea that inanimate property maybe can't be subject to violence in the same way that living things can. it then uses this framework of property damage as violence to argue for the necessity of violence in protest, but jumps through incredible hoops to advocate for some sort of violence scale, from damaging luxury vehicles on one side to murder on the other, and is vehement that although the climate movement needs violence to achieve results (it argues against pacifism for almost half the book, albeit it itself is more pacifist than it knows), this can only mean - to malm- damage to fossil fuel infrastructure and luxury goods. it says; storm the coal plants, destroy fences, let air out of tires. fine. good, even. but a european fantasy of a police state that will not shoot you for doing just that, where the question of what do i do when they try to kill me never rises. this book was written before the blm protests in 2020-21 and fairy creek but after ferguson and standing rock. the author should know what it is to be faced with armed police who will hurt you for destroying infrastructure, for stopping traffic, for daring to protest. painfully naive.

if this were my book, and i were to take this deeply weird view - that property damage is violence at all, but somehow useful violence, unlike all other violence - i would at least include a chapter on how to use an acetylene torch. the best it offers is how to let air out of suv tires.

i've read the book two months ago - initially i've been pretty convinced by it (with the exception of apporving eco-leninism) esp because i think he's generally right with the case of property destruction. however, as somebody already pointed out, he does not give any information on how to do that. additionally, while he aims to critizise overly moralistc arguments for liberal peacefulness, he's pretty moralistic himself. prperty destruction alone won't make a revolution. he also never acknowledges that the climate movement in europe already faces state repression, and in other parts of the world even more so. he doesn't ever speak of the nessecity of support systems and care structres. his focus on property destruction alone, while ignoring everything else, stinks of having patriachal hero figures in movements which undervalue care work even more (bc you know, that's liberal pacifism /sarcasm). there should be an realistic approach to property destruction, based on the actual capacities of a given movement in a certain time and space. and if one's arguing for more militant action, they should aknowledge the violent backlash and understand the reasons why people choose and more important don't choose these tactics bc it's not easy to be militant. also his idea of "militants who pressure the state" doesn't really work - why trying to get the state to do A Ecology when it didn't work the years before, bother with militancy that aims for service and not try to connect with grassroots groups to build a better world? maybe that's just a different perspective, as i just don't really agree with him. two things that bugged me additionally are his dismissal of anarchism and his antisemitism. anarchism is esp. big in the climate movement, and anti-athoritarian and grassroots movements are the backbone of climate struggles worldwide. it's just frusttrating that critiques of the nation state are not taken seriously and the diverse range of anarchist and anti-authoritarian ideas, histories and tactics are thrown under the bus. and honestly,i'm pretty done with ML dudes like him glorifiyng palestine and slipping into anti-semitism.

This is a nice book. The author gives the rundown of climate movements of the past few years, focusing on Ende Gelände, Extinction Rebellion, and Fridays for Future. He's clearly actually been part of a lot of those actions and, as far as I can tell, he gets them pretty right. The tone is hopeful all in all and the central idea – that there should be a more militant flank focused on destruction of fossil fuel emitting devices like SUVs and pipelines – is made well, in particular the clear but charitable case against ideologues of pacifism in activism.

However, and this bugs me deeply, the author does not actually answer the question posed in the title. Nowhere in the book is there any kind of guideline of tactical advice or even finger-point to resources on how to go about this. There is no map of pipelines in Europe, no overview of IEDs used in attacks, no hint at ecotage manuals the author would find valuable. And even if the author wanted to address merely the best ways of building this radical flank, some advice on how to organize people for the kind of action the author wants to see, like coordinated SUV destruction or regular-enough pipeline attacks to make fossil fuel an investment risks, is sorely missing. The author does talk about the more militant first wave of eco activists around 2000, noting that the hundreds of thousands of acts of property destruction and violence committed by the likes of the ELF did not yield lasting success because they failed to be flanking a larger mass movement, but gives no hands-on advice for how to do better.

I believe this is a missed chance because I'm assuming the book is targeting activists who could become more militant. But it's exactly those activists who are open to militancy that will likely already support this point. When XR was in its infancy, people were actively trying to position it as the radical flank to Fridays for Future, recognizing that XR itself would need such a flank at some point. There is no dearth of people willing to commit property damage and sabotage in the climate movement, but what's holding them back is not the lack of justification but the lack of a plan for how to do so effectively.