How to Blow Up a Pipeline

It's not clear how this book is intended to be used. There are four main threads running through the text: 1. Malm regaling his own protest experiences deflating car tires and marching on coal mines. 2. Bemoaning how the rich are destroying the planet and condemnation for city-dwellers who own SUVs 3. References to protest movements, both violent and non-violent, around the world 4. Questions about when and how people concerned with climate change should take physical action.

I'll address each on its own.

Malm's personal experience The first, in which Malm describes his own participation in protests, is unimpressive. He's very proud of the time he and his friends snuck around a city and deflated the tires on SUVs. But it's not clear what good it did. The owners were annoyed, some of them threatened the perpetrators online, and there was a drop in SUV sales in Sweden the following year. Malm implies a connection between the protest and the sales drop, but doesn't explain why such a minor act would have a large effect.

He also participated in groups that got in the way of coal mining equipment. In these cases there's a clearer line to the impact on the companies. It makes sense why he would include the anecdotes, but the descriptions come off more as bragging than informing.

Incitement against the sinners This thread is intended to make the reader angry at the evil people responsible for causing the climate crisis. First at the super rich, whose mega yachts and private jets release huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Then also at people who perpetrate smaller yet common acts of destruction. City-dwellers with SUVs and people who take commercial flights more than necessary.

Here begins the problem. Malm neatly divides humanity into benign and evil. The super rich are evil, of course. Residents of the Global South, though they use more pollutant fuels per joule than their counterparts in the Global North, are trying to survive and it's unfair to place the burden of halting the climate crisis on their shoulders, especially as they are far less destructive on a per capita basis. So far, so good. But what about everyone else, particularly us? Malm assumes the reader is a middle-class person in North America or Europe who is aware of the climate crisis and wants things to improve. He wants us on his side and treats us as benign. Yet he also points out that most cars sold in the US are SUVs and SUV owners in general are evil. This means that a good portion of the readers are likely evil. There's no explanation for this contradiction or indications on how such a person should feel.

Overview of other protest movements Malm brings up a number of different protest movements including India, South Africa, the UK, the US and various locations in the Middle East and Central Asia. He points out that many such movements that are held up as peaceful also included at least the threat of violence. He also discusses the difference between moral non-violence (using violence is wrong) and tactical non-violence (violence will not help our cause). Again, these topics are important to the book but they aren't handled well.

He seems to care more about taking action than getting results. He praises the suffragettes, who got women the vote, and the Civil Rights Movement, which improved conditions for Blacks in America, but offers similar admiration for the 2011 Egyptian revolution, which brought down the authoritarian Mubarak but led to the current authoritarian rule of el-Sisi. In Iran he writes in favor of both the revolution against the Shah and later opposition to the Islamic Republic, glossing over the fact that the 1979 revolutionaries were the ones who brought in the current theocracy. He also praises the Houthi for their 2019 drone attack on Aramco's oil facilities. The US responded by sending thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia and Iran reported that one of its civilian ships was hit by rockets, presumably fired by either Saudi Arabia or the US.

This section made me question the rest of the book. I don't have a deep understanding of the science behind climate change, but I do know the modern history of the Levant. Malm's take on it is very distorted. If he got the one topic I know well so wrong, even if it is a relatively small part of the book, how can I rely on him for anything else?

What should the climate movement do? This should have been the main thrust of the book. He needed to address questions including: - Should climate activists, whom Malm describes as extremely adverse to violence, employ violent tactics? - If so, should the violence be limited to property destruction or also violence against people? - Should they take up violence now? - If not, at what point should they? - How should climate activists handle the blowback following their violence?

Malm touches on each of these except the last, but only vaguely. It comes across as trying to avoid saying what he actually thinks. All I know from the book is that if some individuals or small groups want to take up violence now or at a later point, they probably should avoid harming people. There should be a clear division between the violent minority and the non-violent majority, but the two sides should also coordination their actions.

My biggest problem with the book is that How to Blow Up a Pipeline doesn't care about the potential fallout from its proposed violence. What happens if climate activists do blow up a pipeline, leading to oil prices increasing, and poor people die because they can't afford to heat their homes?

Returning to the implied reader, it seems that Malm also doesn't expect to have minorities in his audience. He holds up Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, two women who burned machinery in protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, as models of environmental sabotage. The pair turned themselves in and one was sentenced to eight years in prison. Writing three years after George Floyd was murdered, Malm implies that this is how all earnest climate activists can expect to be treated.

On a larger scale, how will governments and massive corporations respond to attacks on their infrastructure? How should activists handle it when they do? Malm has nothing to say.

There's a bunch of other criticism of this book and I don't think I can do any better, but a few notes:

1) This book is way too writerly and the author is way too in love with their flourishes of speech. I almost noped out several times because the author wrote pages and pages of totally frustrating bullshit just to counter it later. 2) The author's clear struggles with the notion that violence might be able to accomplish a goal are understandable but exhausting. I'm honestly not sure that they agree with the premise of their own book. There's so much moralizing and prevaricating about it that I'm not convinced they do. 3) There's an undertone of casual racism throughout the book. I was pretty creeped out by the description of activists sneaking through a dark neighborhood while they deflated tires as a bunch of Indian warriors, There's also a lot of casual comparisons between environmental activists and enslaved people that I don't think hold up to criticism, and there's plenty of Islamophobia scattered throughout the book, especially regarding the notion that terrorism should be a a total non-starter for the environmental movement. 4) This book is basically two really long chapters about how great XR is and how some mild property destruction might help save the planet, and then a third one that purports to offer a little bit of hope at the end of a pretty depressing book but is mostly a chance to slag on a couple of the edgier environmental movements of the last few decades. Malm (rightfully) attacks a few movements that advocated for the need to drop the human population of the globe, but gloms in some movements that didn't advocate for that sort of thing too, and what's worse, a quick web search for "extinction rebellion population control" or something like that will reveal a bunch of XR chapters advocating for the same exact things. 5) A bunch of the actions in the book end with the police showing up and maybe swinging some batons around. I don't think the author has really considered what would happen in the US or China if activists started employing these tactics -- a bunch of people are going to get shot by the police state and their supporters, and they're going to get away with it. It makes the book seem fundamentally unserious.

Anyway, the author could probably get more done by posting a list of all of joe manchin's known addresses and advice on decent sights for a long gun, but I don't think he's ready to admit that.

for a book i should ostensibly agree with on all points i found this deeply dull and fairly insipid. it goes to great lengths to categorize property damage as violence, dedicating only a few paragraphs around page 100 to the "ridiculous" idea that inanimate property maybe can't be subject to violence in the same way that living things can. it then uses this framework of property damage as violence to argue for the necessity of violence in protest, but jumps through incredible hoops to advocate for some sort of violence scale, from damaging luxury vehicles on one side to murder on the other, and is vehement that although the climate movement needs violence to achieve results (it argues against pacifism for almost half the book, albeit it itself is more pacifist than it knows), this can only mean - to malm- damage to fossil fuel infrastructure and luxury goods. it says; storm the coal plants, destroy fences, let air out of tires. fine. good, even. but a european fantasy of a police state that will not shoot you for doing just that, where the question of what do i do when they try to kill me never rises. this book was written before the blm protests in 2020-21 and fairy creek but after ferguson and standing rock. the author should know what it is to be faced with armed police who will hurt you for destroying infrastructure, for stopping traffic, for daring to protest. painfully naive.

if this were my book, and i were to take this deeply weird view - that property damage is violence at all, but somehow useful violence, unlike all other violence - i would at least include a chapter on how to use an acetylene torch. the best it offers is how to let air out of suv tires.

Firstly, this book is really good at what it sets out to do, mainly explain when and why property destruction can be adopted as a tactic for environmental preservation, and avoiding climate despair. For the most part, I agree with other criticisms of it listed here, namely that the title is misleading as it gives no instructions on practically how to blow up a pipeline, and does neglect care work and support infrastructure in doing revolution. However, I don't think that these are massive strikes against it, as it's not trying to be the What is to be Done of the 21st century. It's merely trying to advocate that property destruction is a legitimate tactic at this point in the climate crisis, and I think it does that well. While it is certainly preferable to abolish the state rather than pressure it into passing anemic climate legislation, these tactics, as Malm notes can also be used as tools of liberation against the state itself, and not just the parts of state that are destroying the planet.