How to Blow up a Pipeline

Andreas Malm, a Swedish climate scholar and activist, opens with a preface written as COVID-19 has halted the climate movement's mass mobilizations. Planned actions, including Shell Must Fall in Amsterdam and assemblies by the German direct-action coalition Ende Gelände in Berlin, have been cancelled. Malm observes that if a pandemic can induce governments to break taboos against interfering with private property, the climate crisis warrants the same response. He warns that business-as-usual will rebound once the pandemic subsides and that the tactical questions the book raises will only grow more urgent.

In Chapter 1, Malm grounds his argument in personal experience, recalling his attendance at COP1, the first UN climate summit, held in Berlin in 1995. As a young activist, he participated in peaceful actions: blocking traffic, staging street theater, and chaining himself to gates. In the quarter century that followed, total annual CO₂ emissions grew roughly 60 percent, atmospheric concentrations climbed from 363 to over 410 parts per million, and the US, Germany, and Sweden all expanded fossil fuel infrastructure. He catalogs escalating disasters, from wildfires within the Arctic Circle to Hurricane Maria devastating Dominica in 2017, and recounts how Dominica's prime minister addressed the UN General Assembly pleading for emissions cuts and framing the crisis as a war waged by wealthy nations against impoverished ones.

Against this backdrop, Malm introduces "Lanchester's paradox," drawn from a 2007 essay by British writer John Lanchester, who observed that climate activists had not undertaken any property destruction despite the enormity of the stakes, the ubiquity of targets, and the ease of acting. Malm then traces three cycles of climate activism that grew in scale while remaining strictly non-violent. The first (2006–2009) peaked at COP15, the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen, where the US killed mandatory emissions cuts. The second (2011 onward) centered on US pipeline resistance and the divestment movement, stalling when Donald Trump took office. The third began in 2018 when Swedish student Greta Thunberg launched school strikes in Sweden, spawning global Fridays for Future protests peaking at 4 million participants and Extinction Rebellion (XR), which shut down central London through mass civil disobedience. Throughout all three cycles, the movement refused even property damage. Yet fossil fuel investment surged: The International Energy Agency reported in 2019 that two-thirds of energy investment went to oil, gas, and coal.

This disconnect leads Malm to question whether non-violence alone will suffice. He critiques moral pacifism, which holds violence is always wrong, and strategic pacifism, the dominant doctrine codified by XR cofounder Roger Hallam, which claims non-violence is tactically superior. He then dismantles the historical analogies strategic pacifists invoke. Abolition was driven by slave revolts and the Civil War, not peaceful persuasion alone. The British suffragettes conducted a systematic campaign of property destruction. Mohandas Gandhi, the Indian independence leader most closely associated with non-violence, supported British military campaigns in the Boer War and World War I. The US civil rights movement relied on armed Black community protection, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed partly because the threat of Black urban unrest made civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent demands appear as a lesser evil to federal authorities, a dynamic political scientist Herbert H. Haines called the "radical flank effect." Anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, head of the African National Congress (ANC), formed Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC's armed wing, after concluding non-violence had achieved nothing. The Iranian and Egyptian revolutions both involved unarmed collective violence alongside mass demonstrations. Malm also critiques Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan's Why Civil Resistance Works, the scholarly basis of XR's strategy, arguing it contains systematic omissions and concluding that strategic pacifism rests on "sanitised history."

In Chapter 2, Malm builds his case for militancy. He describes the tightening crisis: relentlessly rising emissions on one side, collapsing ecosystems amplified by feedback mechanisms like thawing permafrost on the other. Staying below 1.5°C of warming requires both a global prohibition on new CO₂-emitting devices and early retirement of existing fossil fuel infrastructure, conditions ruling classes will never implement voluntarily. He calls on the movement to damage fossil fuel property to deter investment and force states to act.

To demonstrate feasibility, he surveys the global history of fossil fuel sabotage. The ANC attacked South African hydrogenation facilities in 1980. Nigeria's Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) shut down a third of the country's oil production between 2006 and 2008. In 2019, Houthi rebels in Yemen launched drones into Saudi Aramco's Abqaiq facility, knocking out half of Saudi production. None of these actions were undertaken for climate reasons. Malm also recounts his 2007 participation in a Swedish campaign that deflated tires on over 1,500 SUVs in wealthy neighborhoods, leaving leaflets explaining the climate rationale. Swedish Volvo SUV sales dropped 27 percent in the second half of that year.

He develops an ethical framework for targeting luxury emissions. Drawing on Indian scholars Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, he distinguishes between subsistence emissions, produced by the poor to survive, and luxury emissions, produced by the rich for pleasure. The richest 1 percent of humanity has a carbon footprint 175 times larger than the poorest 10 percent. He concedes that property destruction qualifies as a form of violence but insists it differs in kind from violence against people, and he distinguishes it sharply from terrorism. He holds up Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, two Catholic Worker activists who sabotaged the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2017 without harming anyone, as models of disciplined action.

Malm critiques XR's October 2019 action at Canning Town Tube station in London, where activists blocked a train during rush hour and one white activist kicked at a Black commuter trying to pull him down. He calls this "the stupidest action ever undertaken by the climate movement in the global North" (125), citing XR's flawed strategy of disrupting public transport rather than fossil fuel infrastructure, its aloofness from class and race, and the irony that its first physical violence struck a worker rather than property.

In Chapter 3, Malm attacks climate fatalism. He examines American essayist Roy Scranton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and We're Doomed. Now What?, which argue warming is irreversible and collective action futile. He critiques novelist Jonathan Franzen's similar arguments in the New Yorker. He characterizes fatalism as a "bourgeois luxury," noting that people facing climate death in Dominica or Mozambique never adopt this stance. Drawing on philosopher Catriona McKinnon, he argues that fatalism inflates a probability assessment into impossibility, an anti-political move since all political action requires rejecting probability as grounds for inaction. Scientific literature affirms that every gigaton of emissions matters and that the precise degree of future warming depends on infrastructure not yet built.

Malm evaluates ecological sabotage movements of the 1980s through 2000s, including Earth First!, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), which produced over 27,100 recorded actions with only four fatalities, all by unaffiliated individuals. These campaigns achieved little because they operated in isolation from any mass movement. He rejects the deep ecology ideology that animated them, especially Deep Green Resistance by Aric McBay, Lierre Keith, and Derrick Jensen, which calls for dismantling all human civilization including agriculture.

Malm closes by articulating his positive vision: Climate militancy must target not civilization itself but the civilization erected on the foundation of fossil capital, and it must connect to a broader anti-capitalist movement. He recounts the 2016 Ende Gelände action at Schwarze Pumpe, a brown coal power plant in eastern Germany. After Swedish Green Party leader Gustav Fridolin broke his promise to close the plants and instead allowed their sale to Czech fossil fuel investors, activists tore down security fences, forcing the suspension of all electricity production for the first time at a fossil-fueled power plant in Europe. Invoking anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon's concept of violence as a "cleansing force," Malm suggests that while there has been a time for a Gandhian climate movement, there may come a time for a Fanonian one.