(C) Common Dreams This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . How This Climate Activist Justifies Political Violence [1] ['David Marchese'] Date: 2024-01-14 Photo illustration by Bráulio Amado Talk How This Climate Activist Justifies Political Violence With the 2021 publication of his unsettling book, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” Andreas Malm established himself as a leading thinker of climate radicalism. The provocatively titled manifesto, which, to be clear, does not actually provide instructions for destroying anything, functioned both as a question — why has climate activism remained so steadfastly peaceful in the face of minimal results? — and as a call for the escalation of protest tactics like sabotage. The book found an audience far beyond that of texts typically published by relatively obscure Marxist-influenced Swedish academics, earning thoughtful coverage in The New Yorker, The Economist, The Nation, The New Republic and a host of other decidedly nonradical publications, including this one. (In another sign of the book’s presumed popular appeal, it was even adapted into a well-reviewed movie thriller.) Malm’s follow-up, “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown,” written with Wim Carton and scheduled to be published this year, examines the all-consuming pursuit of fossil-fuel profits and what the authors identify as the highly dubious and hugely dangerous new justifications for that pursuit. But, says Malm, who is 46, “the hope is that humanity is not going to let everything go down the drain without putting up a fight.” I know you’re saying historically this is not the case, but it’s hard to think that deaths don’t become inevitable if there is more sabotage. Sure, if you have a thousand pipeline explosions per year, if it takes on that extreme scale. But we are some distance from that, unfortunately. Don’t say “unfortunately.” Well, I want sabotage to happen on a much larger scale than it does now. I can’t guarantee that it won’t come with accidents. But what do I know? I haven’t personally blown up a pipeline, and I can’t foretell the future. Your 4-year-old? Yes. There were a couple of scenes that stayed with them, particularly when people were wounded. They found this fascinating. They know that their father is a little politically crazy, if I can put it that way. A scene from the film “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” adapted from Andreas Malm’s book. Neon Don’t you think, with companies as wealthy as the oil giants, if activists smash their stuff, they’ll just fix it and get back to business? Here’s a big problem that we deal with quite extensively in the “Overshoot” book: stranded assets. ExxonMobil and Aramco and these giants exude this worry that a transition would destroy their capital and that this shift could happen quickly. So in this context, the rationale of sabotage is to bring home the message to these companies: Yes, your assets are at risk of destruction. When something happens that makes the threat of stranded assets credible, investors will suddenly realize, there’s a real risk that if I invest a lot of money, I might lose everything. Explain the term “overshoot.” The simplest definition of “overshoot” is that you shoot past the limits that you have set for global warming. So you go over 1.5 or 2 degrees. But the term has come to mean something more in climate science and policy discourse, which is that you can go over and then go back down. So you shoot past 1.5 or 2, but then you return to 1.5 or 2, primarily by means of carbon-dioxide removal. I think this is extremely implausible. But the idea is that you can exceed a temperature limit but respect it at a later point by rolling out technologies for taking it down. A few minutes ago, you said you’ve never blown up a pipeline. If that’s what you think is necessary, why haven’t you? I have engaged in as much militant climate activism as I have had access to in my activist communities and contexts. I’ve done things that I can’t tell you or that I wouldn’t tell others publicly. I live my life in Malmo, pretty isolated from activist communities. Let’s put it this way: If I were part of a group where something like blowing up a pipeline was perceived as a tactic that could be useful for our struggle, then I would gladly participate. But this is not where I am in my life. I don’t want to encourage you, but if people did only the activism that was congruent with where they were at in their life, hardly anybody who lives a comfortable life would do anything. Like I said, I’ve participated in things that I can’t tell you about because they’ve been illegal and they’ve been militant. I’ve done it recently. But I can do that only as part of a collective of people who do something that they have decided on together. We shouldn’t think of activism as something that is invented out of thin air, deduced from abstract principles, and then you just shoot off and do something crazy. I can’t tell you what things I have done, but the things that I do and that any other climate activist should be doing cannot be an individual project. In “Overshoot,” you write this about the very wealthy: “There is no escaping the conclusion that the worst mass killers in this rapidly warming world are the billionaires, merely by dint of their lifestyles.” That doesn’t feel like a bathetic overstatement when we live in a world of terrorist violence and Putin turning Ukraine into a charnel house? Why is that a useful way of framing the problem? Precisely for the reason I tried to outline previously, which is that spewing CO2 into the atmosphere at an excessive scale — and when it comes to luxury emissions, it is completely excessive — is an act that leads to the death of people. A protester at the “megabasin” reservoir project in western France last March. Ugo Amez/Sipa, via Associated Press We live in representative democracies where certain liberties are respected. We vote for the policies and the people we want to represent us. And if we don’t get the things we want, it doesn’t give us license to then say, “We’re now engaging in destructive behavior.” Right? Either we’re against political violence or not. We can’t say we’re for it when it’s something we care about and against it when it’s something we think is wrong. Of course we can. Why not? That is moral hypocrisy. I disagree. Why? The idea that if you object to your enemy’s use of a method, you therefore also have to reject your own use of this method would lead to absurd conclusions. The far right is very good at running electoral campaigns. Should we thereby conclude that we shouldn’t run electoral campaigns? This goes for political violence too, unless you’re a pacifist and you reject every form of political violence — that’s a reasonably coherent philosophical position. Slavery was a system of violence. The Haitian revolution was the violent overthrow of that system. It is never the case that you defeat an enemy by renouncing every kind of method that enemy is using. But I’m specifically thinking about our liberal democracy, however debased it may be. How do you rationalize advocacy for violence within what are supposed to be the ideals of our system? Imagine you have a Trump victory in the next election — doesn’t seem unimaginable — and you get a climate denialist back in charge of the White House and he rolls back whatever good things President Biden has done. What should the climate movement do then? Should it accept this as the outcome of a democratic election and protest in the mildest of forms? Or should it radicalize and consider something like property destruction? I admit that this is a difficult question, but I imagine that a measured response to it would need to take into account how democracy works in a country like the United States and whether allowing fossil-fuel companies to wreck the planet because they profit from it can count as a form of democracy and should therefore be respected. Your work is crushing. But I have optimism about the human project. I’m not an optimist about the human project. So give me a reason to live. Well, here’s where we enter the virgin territories of metaphysics. Those are my favorite territories. Wonderful. I’m not joking. Yeah, I’m not sure that I have the qualifications to give people advice about reasons to live. My daily affective state is one of great despair about the incredible destructive forces at work in this world — not only at the level of climate. What has been going on in the Middle East just adds to this feeling of destructive forces completely out of control. The situation in the world, as far as I can tell, is incredibly bleak. So how do we live with what we know about the climate crisis? Sometimes I think that the meaning of life is to not give up, to keep the resistance going even though the forces stacked against you are overwhelmingly strong. This often requires some kind of religious conviction, because sometimes it seems irrational. I think all you need to do is look at your children. Yes, but I have to admit to some kind of cognitive dissonance, because, rationally, when you think about children and their future, you have to be dismal. Children are fundamentally a source of joy, and psychologically you want to keep them that way. I try to keep my children in the category of the nonapocalyptic. I’m quite happy to go and swim with my son and be in that moment and not think, Ah, 30 years from now he’s going to lie dead on some inundated beach. You know what I mean? Which of your arguments are you most unsure of? 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. What about you, psychoanalytically speaking? I have my weekly therapy on Thursday. But what’s your deal? You mean in my private life? Yeah. On a deeper level, the point for the psychoanalysis is that you go back to your childhood and try to process your relation to your parents and how they have constituted you. Do you really want me to go there? I asked why you aren’t blowing up pipelines, and you gave this answer about how action has to happen in the context of a community and “Oh, but I have done very serious stuff” — there’s something fishy. You have actually engaged in property destruction? Or are you just scared of somebody calling you a hypocrite? There are things that I have done when it comes to militant activism recently that I, as a matter of principle and political expediency, do not reveal. Part of the whole point of it is to not reveal it. Sure, someone could accuse me of being a hypocrite because I don’t offer evidence that I have done anything militant. But those close to me know. That’s good enough for me. I also said, “Give me a reason to live.” I will always remember this. No one ever asked me this before. Opening illustration: Source photograph by Jeremy Chan/Getty Images This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/14/magazine/andreas-malm-interview.html Published and (C) by Common Dreams Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/