The case for a more radical climate movement
Excerpt from this story from Vox:
Has the climate movement failed?
It’s hard to look at the world at this moment and not conclude that the answer is yes. Despite all the activism, despite all the protests, despite all the warnings, the world is still in many ways hostage to the fossil fuel industry.
A new book by Andreas Malm, a professor of human ecology at Sweden’s Lund University, asks a simple but perplexing question: Given the stakes, why hasn’t the global climate movement become far more radical than it is?
It’s a fair question. If we as a species were serious, if we really believed what we already know about climate change, we would be doing everything humanly possible to shift course. And yet we’re not. Even the most ambitious policy proposals on the table, with little chance of passing, are scarcely sufficient. This is the starting point of Malm’s book, and if you follow his logic it leads to some conclusions you may find uncomfortable.
He says it bluntly: We should “[d]amage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.” For Malm, we have a choice: Destroy the property that’s destroying the planet, or sacrifice the Earth on the altar of that property.
Malm’s book — it’s titled How to Blow Up a Pipeline — is obviously meant to provoke. But embedded in the provocation is a morally serious challenge to how we think about, and act on, the crisis humanity faces. And to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how I feel about it. For instance, I think his summons to violence vastly overstates our ability to “control” such violence once it’s unleashed. I’m also less confident in the strategic utility of violence (even if it’s limited to the destruction of property, as Malm recommends) considering the enormous blowback that might result from it.