Forrest Goodluck in How To Blow Up A Pipeline, which ‘gives the same answer in fiction that Andreas Malm’s 2021 book of the same name gave in nonfiction: sabotage’. Photograph: PR

When climate despair spills over into righteous violence, can that ever be right?

Natasha Walter in The Guardian

The film How to Blow Up a Pipeline makes a case for using sabotage, but hope remains that we can build rather than destroy

The new film How to Blow Up a Pipeline raises loudly the question that many protesters are asking quietly: what happens when peaceful climate protest fails? In its sympathetic depiction of a group of climate activists who set out to blow up a huge oil pipeline with homemade explosives, it gives the same answer in fiction that Andreas Malm’s 2021 book of the same name gave in nonfiction: sabotage.

Its UK release could hardly be more timely. As thousands prepare to gather for Extinction Rebellion’s new wave of peaceful protests this weekend, there is a sense of desperation in the air. So much has already been tried – so many marches and choirs, sit-downs and stunts, assemblies and pickets. Yes, we will gather again. Yes, we will paint more placards. Yes, we will sing more songs.

But what happens when the crowds disperse? If the government continues to talk about expanding oil, gas and coal use rather than investing in home insulation; if it continues to pursue the mantra of growth at all costs, even the cost of a stable climate and resilient ecosystems; if all those people who are going out on the streets to call for change see no shift in the direction of travel, what will they do?

What is surprising about Daniel Goldhaber’s film is just how unsurprising it makes the journey of disappointed activists from peaceful campaigning into militancy. Each of the activists in this story starts out on a different path, yet while they may be impelled by rage, love, personal grievance or political conviction, the structure of the film makes their bomb-making retreat in the desert feel like an inevitable destination.

Sasha Lane, right, and Jayme Lawson in How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Photograph: AP

Malm’s book, too, made a persuasive argument for the use of sabotage in the climate movement. His view is that while nonviolent protest is often assumed to be the key to success, history teaches that it needs to be embedded in a movement that is prepared to use violence, at least against property, to be effective. He cites various examples, including the women’s suffrage movement, to argue that the peacemakers will not inherit the Earth.

The film feels close at hand, too, because sporadic sabotage against fossil fuel interests is already with us. The recent documentary film, Finite, mainly explored the stories of protesters putting their bodies on the line to protect forests and ponds, but also touched on activists who secretly destroyed equipment at a German coalmine.

Goldhaber’s film was prepared through careful research into those who have taken similar actions, including Jessica Reznicek, who faces an eight-year prison sentence for vandalising the Dakota Access pipeline. Even Extinction Rebellion and related groups in the UK have used very limited, always accountable, destruction of property, such as cracked bank windows or petrol pump screens, while the Tyre Extinguishers secretly sabotage SUVs in cities.

It’s hardly unreasonable, then, to suggest that much wider use of much greater violence by much less accountable individuals against much bigger targets could be on its way. But however carefully planned and executed, such a path would be unlikely to turn out to be as straightforward as it is sometimes imagined. If we are to take lessons from the past, we should be honest – history teaches us little that is clear and nothing that is certain about the right direction for the current movement.

Ariela Barer in How To Blow Up A Pipeline. Photograph: Neon

However much we admire the suffragettes, we shouldn’t forget that their militancy did cause genuine suffering, including injury and deaths of bystanders. For that cause, the end – the simple advance of women’s suffrage – is often seen to justify the means.

A demonstrator wears a globe costume as people protest during the Extinction Rebellion's The Big One event in Westminster, London

The ends of this movement are so much more complex. The most inspiring activists today are not only saying that we should no longer put carbon into the atmosphere; they are also saying that we should build a better world, in which compassionate and regenerative solutions are centred, rather than selfish and destructive ones. That surely makes it even more essential that the behaviour modelled by activists is in line with their desired outcomes.

If there were to be a turn to large-scale sabotage now, the gap between activists and the rest of society would widen. In a world dominated by divisive online debate, we might see any chance of reasoned discussion disappear into those gaps. At a time when activists who throw soup on a glass screen or block a motorway are already called terrorists and murderers on social media, how would the makers of bombs be seen, and how could their arguments be heard?

Even though some of those taking to the streets this weekend may be dogged by a creeping sense of despair, in fact hope has not yet run out for the creative and complicated movement that exists today. Rather than embracing more divisive actions, the activists’ greatest potential still lies in strengthening connections. There is so much energy in the tactics being embraced by the climate movement right now, as activists expand circles of solidarity, working with ever wider networks of organisations and individuals and challenging fossil fuel interests through every peaceful means, from trespass to law to divestment.

While there is still so much to do on so many fronts, more violence against property is far from inevitable. The work in hand is still more about building good things than destroying bad things. If we all come together to do that work – and there is work for everyone – there may never be a need for it.

Natasha Walter is a writer and campaigner
Natasha Walter is facilitating a panel discussion after the screening of How to Blow Up a Pipeline on Saturday 22 April at 6pm at the Picturehouse Central, London

Climate diplomacy is hopeless, says author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Andreas Malm says he has no hope in ‘dominant classes’, and urges more radical approach to climate activism

International climate diplomacy is hopeless, the author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline has said, as the film adaptation of the radical environmentalist book is released.

As activists around the world take increasingly desperate actions against destructive projects, Andreas Malm told the Guardian he had not “a shred of hope” elites were prepared to take the urgent action needed to avert catastrophic climate change.

“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.

Target engaged … an image from How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

“And the Cops [Conference of the parties 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 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 shock waves through the climate movement, less than a year after the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns brought an abrupt end to its biggest ever mass mobilisation.

From 2018 onwards, 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 – the most stringent rule of XR, in particular – 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 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.”

An Extinction Rebellion activist reading How To Blow Up a Pipeline while police use tools to cut other protesters loose in The Hague. — An Extinction Rebellion activist reading How to Blow Up a Pipeline while police use tools to cut other protesters loose in The Hague, the Netherlands. Photograph: Michel Porro/Getty Images

Since its publication, experiments have begun, starting gently and becoming ever more radical. Over the past year, across Europe and North America, in a campaign directly inspired by Malm, climate activists have gone on night-time raids in their cities’ wealthier districts, pushing lentils into the tyre valves of SUVs to deflate them by morning.

Since then, things have accelerated. In Cambridge, England, 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 new pipeline to siphon jet fuel from Portsmouth to London’s airports.

In Lutzerath, Germany, protesters in overalls recently fought riot police trying to clear a condemned village for the expansion of an opencast mine, which was needed to supply the dirty coal to keep power stations burning to feed industries starved of energy from embargoed Russian coal.

But the most exciting development in environmental protest, says Malm, has been in France, where activists under the banner of Les Soulèvements de la Terre have begun sabotage campaigns against environmentally destructive targets. Last month, 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 when it comes to radical tactics in the UK or Germany or anything like that,” Malm said. “It’s so many people doing so radical things.”

But Malm 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 … a political error”, said Malm. “Since then, there’s been an attempt to kind of regain the momentum. But that attempt hasn’t worked. We haven’t come anywhere near to the momentum that we had in late 2019.

“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, you know, different groups of committed activists trying out different kinds of tactics.”

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