• The Guardian Saturday 22 April 2023
36
‘Not a shred of hope’ Climate
talks will not work, says author
of How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Damien Gayle
I
nternational climate
diplomacy is hopeless, the
author of How to Blow Up
a Pipeline has said, on the
eve of the UK premiere of the
film adaptation of the radical
environmentalist book.
As activists around the world
take increasingly desperate actions
against destructive projects,
Andreas Malm told the Guardian he
had not “a shred of hope” that elites
were prepared to take the urgent
action needed to avert catastrophic
global heating.
“If we let the dominant classes
take care of this problem, they’re
going to drive at top speed into
absolute inferno,” Malm said.
“Nothing suggests that they have
any capacity of doing anything
else of their own accord because of
how enmeshed they are with the
process of capital accumulation.
“And the Cops [climate summits]
are the ultimate proof of this. Yes,
there’s more intention to them,
but the Cops themselves have
degenerated into kind of an annual
Environment
theatre for pretending that we’re
doing something about global
warming while, in fact, we’re just
letting fuel be poured on the fire.”
Published at the beginning of
2021, How to Blow Up a Pipeline
sent shockwaves through the
climate movement less than a year
after the Covid lockdowns had
brought an abrupt end to its biggest
ever mass mobilisation.
From 2018, Extinction Rebellion
and the climate strike movement
brought tens of thousands on to the
streets. But even as public opinion
swung behind their calls for radical
change, emissions and investments
in fossil fuels continued to grow.
The problem, said Malm, was
their absolute commitment to non-
violent civil disobedience, which
left fossil capital nothing to fear
from public opinion in bourgeois
states where “capitalist property
has the status of the ultimate
sacred realm”. Instead of disruptive
protests and mass rallies, Malm
called for a campaign of sabotage
 A demonstration against police
violence following clashes in France
PHOTOGRAPH: MICHEL CHRISTOPHE/
ABACA/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
▼ Climate protesters in Lützerath,
Germany, have fought riot police
over the expansion of a coalmine
PHOTOGRAPH: BERND LAUTER/GETTY IMAGES
of fossil fuel infrastructure, to
break the taboo against targeting
property. Or, he contended in one
of the book’s epigrams, “property
will cost us the earth”.
“I think the reason for the sort
of success of the book is not that
the book itself has such amazing
qualities,” Malm told the Guardian.
“It’s because it happened to come
out precisely at the moment when
the climate movement was starting
to think along these lines.”
Since its publication,
experiments have begun,
‘The dominant beginning gently and becoming
classes are going to ever more radical. Over the past
year, across Europe and North
drive at top speed America, in a campaign directly
into absolute inferno’ inspired by Malm, climate activists
have gone on night-time raids,
pushing lentils into the tyre valves
of SUVs to deflate them by morning.
Andreas Malm After that, things accelerated. In
Writer and academic Cambridge, clandestine activists
have graffitied and smashed the
windows of buildings linked to
fossil fuel extraction companies. In
Hampshire, others sabotaged the
site of construction of a pipeline
to carry jet fuel from Portsmouth
to London’s airports. In Lützerath,
Germany, protesters fought riot
police trying to clear a condemned
village for the expansion of an
opencast coalmine.
But the most exciting
development in environmental
protest,according to Malm,
has been in France, where
activists under the banner of Les
Soulèvements de la Terre have
begun sabotage campaigns. Last
month, a crowd of thousands
fought with police in Sainte-Soline
in western France, in an attempt
to sabotage a new mega-project to
harvest groundwater for industrial
agriculture.
“The scale of that clash and
protest puts everything else in the
shade,” Malm said.
But he does not believe a new
cycle of climate activism has begun.
“My – maybe too optimistic – take
on that would be that we are in
between waves, in between cycles,
because at no point since 2019 have
we yet come back to the numbers
and the scale of activity that we saw
in that year,” he said.
The movement’s suspension
of activities during Covid was
“in retrospect a mistake”, said
Malm. “Since then, there’s been an
attempt to regain the momentum.
But that attempt hasn’t worked.
“What has happened since then
is that you’ve had a diversification
of the movement, and in a sense
kind of fragmentation, with the UK
being one case with XR continuing
to produce these offshoots, Insulate
Britain, Just Stop Oil, these various
groups more or less masterminded
by Roger Hallam.
“And it’s similar in Germany,
where you have the Last Generation
playing a sort of analogous role,
and different groups of committed
activists trying out different kinds
of tactics.”
The popularity of his book has
catapulted Malm, an associate
professor of human ecology at the
University of Lund in Sweden, to
movement stardom.
He is as surprised as anyone that
such radical ideas have become
mainstream. The very fact of the
making of the How to Blow Up a
Pipeline movie, a tense and tightly
made thriller, suggests a radical
change in public attitudes towards
potentially violent activism.
“Things have shifted in the sense
that, if you know something about
the climate crisis, you know that
the situation is extremely dire,” he
said. “And that gives you a kind of
sympathy for the idea that some
people might want to take things
into their own hands, or at least a
measure of understanding of the
frustration. And that feeling is
going mainstream.
“Clearly, not everyone is blowing
up pipelines – I don’t know if
anyone is doing it. But the idea that
the big crime is to build a pipeline,
and not potentially blow it up – that
idea has a very broad appeal.”
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is now on
general release in the UK