Seventeen years ago, the British novelist John Lanchester puzzled over a “strange and striking” fact: No one was blowing anything up to fight climate change.
This was strange, Lanchester wrote, because “terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action.” What’s more, there was no shortage of soft targets for an anti-carbon terror cell to attack. Gas stations were highly flammable. SUVs, ripe to be keyed, sat unguarded along every city’s streets. So why was no one engaging in such property destruction? Why did activists remain committed to pacifism, even as the world hurtled toward catastrophe? Perhaps, Lanchester mused, “even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it.”
The concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere is now nearly 10 percent higher than when Lanchester wrote those words. In 2007, limiting the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels remained plausible. Today, it is not. The absence of violent resistance to carbon power might therefore seem even more curious in 2024 than it was when Lanchester wrote his essay.
Still, there are ways of resolving the apparent tension between the severity of the climate crisis and the absence of ecoterrorism. One is to question whether terrorism is, in fact, “the modern world’s most effective form of political action.” Another is for climate activists to start detonating pipelines.
Andreas Malm recommends the latter.
In 2021, the Swedish academic published a case for climate activists to embrace property destruction titled How to Blow Up a Pipeline (aspiring bombers will be disappointed by the volume’s lack of step-by-step instructions). The book was a surprise bestseller. Mainstream media does not typically shower coverage on calls for violent resistance penned by Swedish Leninists. But given the perennial failure of…
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