"It is quite likely that you feel it yourself"

January 14, 2024 8:16 PM

"With this desperation comes an openness to the idea that what we've done so far isn't enough." An brutally honest interview of Andreas Malm* on how it feels when "the enemy has never ceased to be victorious – and it's more victorious than ever" in this stage of the climate crisis. Gift link to the NYTimes article. *author of “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” and now co-author of “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.”
posted by coffeecat (25 comments total)

I was really surprised to read this interview in the Times today. I don’t know enough about the man or his books to comment on that, but it definitely seemed like an indication of the zeitgeist that his ideas were engaged with seriously.

I first encountered this idea—that targeted violence against the worst polluters was likely to be the only thing to move the needle towards progress on the climate crisis—theorized in Kim Stanley Robinson’s book “Ministry for the Future.” That book contained a lot of magical thinking but I had a feeling that this component of it was likely to escalate in the real world, and soon.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 9:55 PM on January 14 [8 favorites]

Interesting piece, especially at the end. The organized violence has started and is here, directed for instance against migrants coming into the US and Europe from countries hit by the effects of climate change: drought, political instability, food insecurity, civil war. Ukraine may be targeted for its grain supplies and ability to feed people in the years to come, as much as to further the Russian Mafia's other geopolitical ends.

Ultimately, the polluters are backed by people with bigger guns. For example, the government of Texas has stated by way of its governor that it wants to shoot and kill migrants, and they are acting as if they have or will soon be given legal authority to do so. For those looking for a violent solution, how do you beat the ones with those bigger guns? It's one thing to bomb a pipeline, and yet another to attack the government of a state that has effectively called for the murder of asylum seekers. Is it fair to sell books or other media effectively promoting that response, while not suffering any personal consequence from the resulting deaths?
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:34 PM on January 14 [8 favorites]

There’s a sense sometimes that violence is a direct and simple way of addressing the problem, one we’re only avoiding because of hesitancy and niceness.
But nothing is simple. You blow up a major pipeline, maybe you reduce world supply temporarily. That might cause a recession, with its own consequences for the least wealthy and possible alienation of ordinary voter opinion, which could quickly swing in favour of subsidies for fuel. Also, when the price of fossil fuels go up, mines and wells and fracking sites that were mothballed or never developed become viable again, and you may actually end up with expanded capacity and new reserves.
Defeating world capitalism is tough.
posted by Phanx at 12:15 AM on January 15 [12 favorites]

The idea that blocking commuters annoys people but they’ll be fine with you restricting supply and whacking up prices is, well, optimistic.
posted by Phanx at 12:24 AM on January 15 [6 favorites]

"the enemy has never ceased to be victorious – and it's more victorious than ever"

*author of “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” and now co-author of “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.”

What is this guy talking about?

Per capita carbon emissions have fallen tremendously in recent decades.

Solar and wind power are 80%-90% cheaper than they were 15 years ago.

The coal industry is dying.

The U.S. is beginning to build massive offshore wind farms, has just drastically tightened regulations around methane emissions, and is getting ready to impose a substantial cost on carbon emissions.

This dude is a doomkopf.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 12:38 AM on January 15 [15 favorites]

But by that logic, unless we live a carbon-neutral lifestyle, we should all be looking in the mirror and saying, I am a killer.
I don’t live a zero-carbon lifestyle. No one who lives in a capitalist society can do so. But the people on top, they are the ones who have power when it comes to investment. ... They belong to a class that shapes the structure, and in their own private consumption habits, they engage in completely extravagant acts of combustion of fossil fuels. On the level of private morals: Do I practice what I preach? I try to avoid flying. I don’t have a car. I should be vegan, but I’m just a vegetarian. I’m not claiming to be any climate angel in my private consumption, and that’s problematic. But I don’t think that is the issue — that each of us in the middle strata or working class in advanced capitalist countries, through our private consumption choices, decide what’s going to happen with this society. This is not how it works.

Pretty honest, and a good point that is often elided: money, at this point in time, makes the world go 'round.

This dude is a doomkopf. I see what you did there, and I agree, but I also don't think he's _wrong_ or wrong-headed. Actually, I hope he is wrong, and that money - he talks about 'stranded assets' associated with the fossil fuel industry - recognizes (continues to recognize) the changing fortunes and shift. But, there is still/always plastics and fertilizer and and and which use extracted resources and as long as the market for these continues to grow so will the carbon output.

I'm all for it. Blow up a pipeline. They apparently won't blow themselves up... (I say that but maybe they will, look at the death of public transport in the US - was once ubiquitous is now very much not. Musk, for all his many many shortcomings, lit a fire under the asses of the car companies to change to EVs. It could well be that something similar will happen (like in Alberta, the tar sands rely on oil being above X$/barrel and if not, the work stops because it just isn't worth it. For the corp. The workers get screwed, of course.)
posted by From Bklyn at 3:09 AM on January 15 [3 favorites]

i feel the same desperation as the author, oscillating between that and some kind of star trek "techno-hope".

i often think i shouldn't have had kids, because it seems i've doomed them to a miserable future. but then i imagine i would be equally depressed by contemplating the future all of the world's children face, and i suppose i haven't committed a terrible deed in bring mine into the world.

in the end i take solace in the idea that simple life will probably be able to cling to existence around hydrothermal vents, and one day a million years or so from now repopulate the earth. would an intelligent species, one able to contemplate it's own existence, travel to other worlds, stare back across vast gulfs of time with telescopes, emerge twice? dunno. but at least the planet might shake off it's virus, humanity. if intelligent life is rare, then we probably owe it to the universe to try and survive though.
posted by winston smith at 6:05 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]

I read this when it came out yesterday and wondered if it would end up here.

I had two reactions: First, everything he is articulating sounds like it could have come directly from the Weathermen and their supporters in the US or groups like the RAF in Europe, including the feeling of total frustration at changing destructive policies that seem at the time to be immune from democratic pressure. However, he doesn't seem (on the basis of just this interview) to have looked at the lessons learned from those past experiments with left-wing violence in democracies.

Second, I thought his whole section where he danced around the issue of what if the sabotage causes deaths to seem very cheesy and dishonest. He was clearly enjoying that this could happen, is openly encouraging people to do it, and yet won't take ownership of the moral issues around the killings that would ensue. It was the same with his hints about whatever kinds of sabotage he had engaged in -- teases of "I did something but I won't say what." If it was low-key stuff, just own up to it since there won't be any consequences. And if it was heavy-duty stuff, don't even hint about it.

So overall I read him as wanting the credibility and respect of being associated with violence, without taking ownership of what that means. I feel sorry for the people who will get inspired by his kind of writing and will inevitably get caught and face incredibly serious consequences, without causing the change they are hoping for.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:40 AM on January 15 [10 favorites]

You can't solve systemic problems through individual consumption. You also can't stop through individual acts of sabotage. Changing society requires organization and coordination, whether it is done with or without the toleration of the powerful. Neither individual asceticism nor individual heroism can save us.

I don't think the current economic system we have devices can be made sustainable. The question is whether we dismantle it deliberately, with care for the lives entangled with it, or whether it falls apart beneath us. We need to build new ways of life, and show people there is hope for productive, meaningful, joyful living detached from the current death machine.

If we can't do that, then no amount of broken infrastructure is going to stop people from clinging to the current system. That isn't to say there is no place for destruction moving forward, but I think a lot of the struggle is going to be defending people and communities from the reactionary response to building lives outside of capital.

I guess my point is that blowing up a pipeline is much easier but also much less useful than creating a way of life where people don't need the pipeline.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 6:59 AM on January 15 [5 favorites]

I posted this because while I agree he comes off as extreme, his answers really resonated me, particularly on an emotional level. I also found it valuable that his new book is breaking down the wishful thinking happening in the corporate world around the idea of being able to "overshoot" our targets – it's important to make people aware that any solution that hinges on technological innovation is basically a giant gamble with billions of lives (human and otherwise) at stake. While I agree he comes off a bit overly bleak at some points, whatever positive changes that have recently started are not happening quickly enough.

The historical record is mixed on the lessons of violence - there are absolutely instances of violence working to bring about change (some he mentions in the interview), but there are other instances (as mentioned above) where violence has failed. In this case, the main challenge is the most so-called "stranded assets" are in authoritarian countries, where I'd imagine it's much harder to sustain militant climate activism.

Violence has a better way of working when done in service of a cause that the majority of the population support, even if they themselves don't support violence. Also if the majority of the population would materially benefit if the cause succeeded. Here, the comments section are intriguing – the majority of the top-comments are people saying, in some way or another "I support this guy's message and agree we've crossed the threshold of this crisis where some types of violence are justified." That's pretty striking given that the NYTimes comment-sections (as someone who regularly reads them) tend to skew slightly left-of-center.

I also thought of Kim Stanley Robinson’s book “Ministry for the Future.” One of the plot points is a terrorist organization based in India begins to take down planes through suicide bombing all over the world until air travel stops. When reading it, I thought, "Yeah, it probably will come to that - seems reasonable." Not only from this article and the response to it, I'd say what seems "reasonable" to a lot of people is shifting, and will continue to shift as things get worse.
posted by coffeecat at 7:58 AM on January 15 [5 favorites]

it definitely seemed like an indication of the zeitgeist that his ideas were engaged with seriously.

I think that as The Manwich Horror notes above, saying that people who care about the climate can blow up a pipeline is the safe approach for the establishment to take. First of all, not many people are going to do it. It gives something for NYT readers to fantasize about. Secondly, the people who do blow up pipelines are guaranteeing that they stay outside of polite society. They are not clamoring for change within polite society. It's not pushing any structural change. NYT can pat themselves on the back for publishing a guy who suggests we all go put lentils in SUV tires, but aren't going to publish, say, an op-ed by AOC explaining why we need to tax the rich.

I do believe that direct action can be impactful, but the editors at NYT don't, so they don't think any harm can come of this.
posted by tofu_crouton at 8:41 AM on January 15 [4 favorites]

First, what artifice says. Developed and developing economies are reducing carbon emissions per capital and per dollar of GDP at a breathtaking pace, fueled by regulation, consumer preference, and capitalism in several vectors (to avoid regulatory cost, to exploit regulatory rents, and outright naked profit ... with enough efficiency in capture and storage, wind and solar are going to be cheaper than hydrocarbons.)

Second, left-wing armed rebellion is a solution to nothing because it always fails. Mostly immediately, as it unifies all other forces of society to destroy it. For those few that initially prevail, eventually, in squalor, corruption or paranoia, and (if lucky) eventual transformation to authoritarian capitalism de jure (Russia) or de facto (China, Vietnam, etc.)
posted by MattD at 8:58 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]

The idea that blocking commuters annoys people but they’ll be fine with you restricting supply and whacking up prices is, well, optimistic.

The idea that an appropriate response to global warming ought not to hurt the feelings of car commuters is, well, unserious.
posted by cthlsgnd at 9:07 AM on January 15 [7 favorites]

Second, left-wing armed rebellion is a solution to nothing because it always fails. Mostly immediately, as it unifies all other forces of society to destroy it. For those few that initially prevail, eventually, in squalor, corruption or paranoia, and (if lucky) eventual transformation to authoritarian capitalism de jure (Russia) or de facto (China, Vietnam, etc.)

The history of left wing violence is a lot more complex than that paragraph, but where I think we're in agreement is that revolutionary violence (like blowing up pipelines in the hopes of changing the course of history) never works when it isn't coupled with a mass movement or popular support. I can't recall where I read it, but one theorist explained it as that you need both a kicking leg (i.e., the clandestine/violent wing) and a standing leg (i.e., the mainstream wing, with popular support, political candidates, etc.) that feed off each other. The climate change activists don't really have either component right now, and blowing up pipelines (or that guy who got caught shooting substations in the rural west) isn't going to organically lead to the "standing leg" that is needed to actually create institutional change.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:12 AM on January 15 [9 favorites]

Some war protesters recently blocked a section of an interstate highway in Seattle. A frequent reaction on some social media sites was to run them down. Granted, this was not a fossil fuel protest, but the expectation to be able to move freely by an ICE car is strong enough that people were calling for protesters to be killed. The struggle between popular support and inconvenience may favor ending those inconveniences over needed changes. It also calls to mind the UK recently ending EV mandates and shifting funds from rail construction to road maintenance.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:26 AM on January 15 [4 favorites]

Honestly I’d much rather hang out with Ed Abbey.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:31 AM on January 15

This dude is a doomkopf.

That is an awesome neologism.

Some folks will always be looking for a reason to justify calls to violence. Those folks are generally unimaginative extremists who are best to be dismissed out of hand.
posted by leotrotsky at 11:45 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]

Some folks will always be looking for a reason to justify calls to violence. Those folks are generally unimaginative extremists who are best to be dismissed out of hand.

That, and everyone likes violence and its associated inconveniences when it is somewhere else. So blowing up pipelines sounds great as long as it is out there somewhere, but it's a lot less fun if your local fuel supply is affected. It's the same with substations, reading about someone shooting one somewhere is exciting, but I don't see many people volunteering to have their own neighborhood go dark.
posted by Dip Flash at 1:32 PM on January 15 [1 favorite]

It's strange how the article seems to uncritically accept the idea of property violence. I am skeptical that "violence" towards inanimate objects is really the same thing as violence towards people, though both things will get you a terrorism charge, and I guess that's really the interpretation that matters. I sometimes wonder if the ELF terrorism charges for burning unoccupied SUVs in a parking lot would have been possible if they had carefully disassembled the SUVs with wrench and prybar instead (and then I get distracted imagining a rogue nascar pit crew rolling up on an SUV and disassembling it in 5 minutes.)
posted by surlyben at 2:36 PM on January 15 [5 favorites]

Here's a previous thread we had about the Tyre Extinguishers, who let the air out of SUV tires to draw attention to the climate and road safety crises. Malm talks about deflating SUV tires a bit in the interview and we had some discussion there about the viability of this kind of tactic.
posted by threementholsandafuneral at 5:14 PM on January 15 [3 favorites]

Q. Which of your arguments are you most unsure of? A. I cannot claim to have a good explanation for what is essentially a mystery, namely that humanity is allowing the climate catastrophe to spiral on. One of my personal intellectual journeys in recent years has been psychoanalysis. Once you start looking into the psychic dimensions of a problem like the climate crisis, you have to open yourself to the fundamental difficulty in understanding what’s happening.

So there's actually a really simple answer: COOPERATION IS SURPRISINGLY DIFFICULT.

Individual incentives matter. When the costs of some action are spread over a large group, while the benefits all go to an individual, it's likely to happen even if everyone ends up worse off. This is exactly the case with burning fossil fuels, e.g. to commute to work.

George Washington (writing to the Continental Congress to argue for a military pension):

A small knowledge of human nature will convince us, that, with far the greatest part of mankind, interest is the governing principle; and that, almost, every man is more or less, under its influence. Motives of public virtue may for a time, or in particular instances, actuate men to the observance of a conduct purely disinterested; but they are not of themselves sufficient to produce persevering conformity to the refined dictates and obligations of social duty. Few men are capable of making a continual sacrifice of all views of private interest, or advantage, to the common good. It is vain to exclaim against the depravity of human nature on this account; the fact is so, the experience of every age and nation has proved it and we must in a great measure, change the constitution of man, before we can make it otherwise. No institution, not built on the presumptive truth of these maxims can succeed.

Joseph Heath, Hobbes's difficult idea:

One of the things I’m constantly amazed by in discussions over climate change is how elusive the basic concept of a collective action problem remains, and how unintuitive it is for many people (whether to grasp, or just to apply, as James suggests). I know that I certainly didn’t “get it” right away. I had been told the story of the Prisoner’s Dilemma several times before I realized that it was not just a little puzzle, but in fact a very big deal. (Probably reading Russell Hardin’s book, Collective Action, is what caused the heavens to open for me. Or perhaps David Gauthier’s Morals by Agreement.)

Anyhow, since that time, seeing the world in terms of collective action problems has become such second nature to me that I have increasing difficulty imagining what it would look like in any other terms, and thus, I have difficulty believing that anyone still fails to see it in those terms. I teach the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Tragedy of the Commons, and all the basic stuff about collective action problems, every year in my classes. And yet I feel intensely self-conscious every time I do, figuring that what I’m saying is so obvious that I’m boring most of the students. (I usually preface my little lecture with an apology to all those who have heard the basic line before.)

And yet, the other day I was reading this little book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization, and they totally don’t get it. The book is all about climate change, and yet the concept of it being a “collective action problem” just doesn’t show up. Thus they express complete bewilderment over the fact that we might all know that outcome x is undesirable, and yet fail to act to avoid outcome x. So they wind up getting stuck on the dilemma that so many environmentalists wind up stuck on, when it comes to explaining our inaction: either 1. it must be the fault of scientists, for somehow failing to communicate effectively how bad x is going to be, or 2. there must be some “ideology” that holds us prisoner, preventing us from acting. In the end they go with both, but leaning more towards 2 — they wind up positing an ideology, called “market fundamentalism,” which is somehow supposed to explain our inaction.

It’s hard to know what to say, other than that this sort of thing is super-frustrating. The stakes are too high to be making this kind of basic, basic mistake.

The usual solution proposed by economists is to use a steadily rising sales tax on fossil fuels, giving individual households and firms a strong incentive to cut low-value emissions that aren't worth as much as the tax. BC's had one since 2009. Canada brought in a carbon price floor in 2019: each province can either do carbon pricing itself (like BC) or the federal government will do it for them, returning the revenue as a dividend directly to households in the province. (The Conservative opposition is promising to scrap it if they win the next federal election in 2025.) The EU has a system of pricing for industrial emissions; countries that want to join the EU have a very strong incentive to adopt it. More recently they're planning a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism which will also serve as an incentive for trading partners to adopt carbon pricing.
posted by russilwvong at 12:08 AM on January 16 [5 favorites]

If you want to improve the world through violence, the method isn't sabotage. It's assassination. Anything else is just dancing around the issue and pissing off the people you want on your side. And since the powers that be have decreed that violence against objects is as serious as violence against people, well, in for a penny.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:00 AM on January 16 [3 favorites]

The idea that blocking commuters annoys people but they’ll be fine with you restricting supply and whacking up prices is, well, optimistic.

I dunno, I can see a certain contingent of people - people who are concerned about global warming and wish their government was doing more to push transition to renewables - being OK with militancy against oil/gas companies, especially if it puts pressure on their government, but annoyed if they unexpectedly are stuck in traffic for hours. I mean, for one thing people really hate traffic, and for another thing, it's not totally clear how activists creating traffic jams puts pressure on the state besides making the news. I agree with Malm that attacks on gas/oil infrastructure is easier for people to understand. Sure, people who don't take global warming seriously will be annoyed with both, but concern for global warming is increasingly crossing political lines as things escalate.
posted by coffeecat at 6:22 AM on January 16 [1 favorite]

in the end i take solace in the idea that simple life will probably be able to cling to existence around hydrothermal vents, and one day a million years or so from now repopulate the earth.

Oh, good grief.

Humanity is going to survive. We may be in for several pretty rough decades, but we're going to make it.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 3:45 PM on January 16 [1 favorite]

Some folks will always be looking for a reason to justify calls to violence. Those folks are generally unimaginative extremists who are best to be dismissed out of hand.

posted by leotrotsky

eponysterical.
posted by adrienneleigh at 12:31 AM on January 17 [1 favorite]