Andreas Malm’s Warning

Pipelines and Politics

In the introduction to his book How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Verso), author Andreas Malm writes: “Sabotage, after all, is not incompatible with social distancing.”

Malm’s quip is probably the only light moment in the book.

I have written about Malm before but he deserves much more focus today especially after COP26. Malm, a writer, and lecturer in human ecology at Lund University in Sweden wrote this book during the coronavirus outbreak, which he sees as an opportunity to embrace new approaches in the struggle against climate change.

He is very serious and important considering the joke that COP26 became. Here’s Malm:

“To say that the signals have fallen on the deaf ears of the ruling classes of this world would be an understatement.”

Malm is not engaged in pointless anger either or even anger at all. Malm sounds scientific in his approach. Destroying CO2-emitting property, he says, creates a “disincentive to invest in more of it” and demonstrates its vulnerability. He pegs it as a necessary response to “the extraordinary inertia of the capitalist mode of production meeting the reactivity of the Earth.”

Malm rejects the approach of nonviolent civil disobedience advocates like Bill McKibben of 350.org but he is particularly critical of those who have given up and await the destruction of the Earth and the human race without fighting back with any and all available tactics.

According to Malm, it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” the cause of our current climate death march, as well as “easier, at least for some, to imagine learning to die than learning to fight.”

Those with the ability to change the world’s climate outcomes would be wise to pay attention to Malm.

Climate disruption is at the point of no return. He rejects the idea that things are hopeless and we should accept our fate as a species heading for extinction. He also rejects the idea that only non-violent protests and actions are acceptable.

Here is Malm comparing the current struggle over climate disruption to the fight to abolish slavery. Malm does not accept a pacifist approach as the only approach to change either:

“Would slavery have ended without the slaves and their allies fighting back? The scholar who has most ambitiously sought to downplay the causal impact of slave revolts, Portuguese historian João Pedro Marques, has met with a barrage of criticisms from other specialists in the field. One of the most prominent, Robin Blackburn, has retorted that the very notion of slavery as unethical — harmful to the slaves, whom the masters wished to portray as happy and docile — originated in the acts of explosive refusal. Even the most pacifist Quakers pointed to the revolts as proof of the horrors of the peculiar institution. ‘There was a cumulative character to anti-slavery in the “age of abolition” ’, Blackburn writes: a steadily rising tide of discontent and discomfort, sent off by the quakes on the plantations.”

Malm also discusses the suffragettes, the women who fought with every tactic they could muster to obtain voting rights for women in England. It was again a movement with many tactics and was not a movement of all non-violence. It was a movement with a goal, rational goals:

“The suffragettes are instructive. Their tactic of choice was property destruction. Decades of patient pressure on Parliament to give women the vote had yielded nothing, and so in 1903, under the slogan ‘Deeds not words’, the Women’s Social and Political Union was founded. Five years later, two WSPU members undertook the first militant action: breaking windowpanes in the prime minister’s residence. One of them told the police she would bring a bomb the next time. Fed up with their own fruitless deputations to Parliament, the suffragettes soon specialized in ‘the argument of the broken pane’, sending hundreds of well-dressed women down streets to smash every window they passed.”

COP26

Mostly, the meeting in Glasgow was another shit show. Like Paris. Like most of these show conferences. I did a survey of students in a class I teach and none of them thought that COP26 was a serious moment. I think they are waiting for the current set of leaders to go away and get new ones they can actually move on something.

Greek Economist, Yanis Varoufakis says the problem, as we all know, is capitalism:

“Free-marketeers would like us to believe that business has now yielded to science, and is ready and willing to step into the void of government inaction. We must not believe this for a moment.”

He’s right. COP26 was just more janky talk from janky leaders who can’t seem to be the adults in the room. New York Times opinion writer, Christopher Caldwell reported that “bankers took over the climate change summit” in Glasgow. No surprise.

Everyone even agrees as well that the way out of this will be to force divestment and to hold banks accountable for bankrolling our slow death as a species. In other words, just like in South Africa and apartheid, withdraw all holdings or everyone stops doing business with you.

COP26 is especially distressing because these same parties (nations) met in Paris many years ago and entered into a deal to reach certain benchmarks in order to reduce the warming of the planet.

Did any nation meet its benchmark? Don’t answer.

Growth

Way back in 1990, the naturalist writer, Wendell Berry was already sounding the alarm about consumption and growth. He called for reduced consumption and for society to discard the economic growth model. No one has listened to Berry. They have never listened. Berry wasn’t the only one making this charge. Voices along this line were mostly ignored.

Voices attacking the growth model are surging. One of the most prominent is called Degrowth. It is changing the debate and discourse.

Voices fighting against the anti-growth model are surging as well. Profits would shrink. Consumption would have to shrink. Americans and much of the West find this scary. Imagine, being forced to live with less?

Malm

Does Malm intend to try to blow up pipelines or to help organize pipeline vandalism? No. He makes that clear.

But, listen to the podcast below; it is worth it to understand the serious nature of Malm’s writings.

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Previously Published on medium

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