Rev Left Radio - Dismantling the Infrastructure of Ecocide: Toward a More Militant Climate Movement

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

Andreas Malm is a Swedish Marxist, professor of ecology at Lund University, and is the author of "How to Bl*w up a P*peline". He joins Breht to talk about the need for the climate movement to abandon its middle class nonviolence fetish and engage in more militant acts of direct action against fossil fuel infrastructure.  Outro Music: "Knife Talk" by Drake ft. 21 Savage, Project Pat

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have on the show Professor Andreas Maum to talk about one of his books, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. And the book basically argues for an escalation of tactics on the climate movement. It does some pushing back against the ideology of passivism, moral and strategic passivism. And it's just overall a really interesting and important, I think, thing to think through on the left as the climate crisis itself becomes more obvious and more impactful every single day.

I think this goes without saying, but given the title of the book of the author I'm having on, I'll say it anyways. Rev Left Radio and I myself am not. advocating anybody do anything illegal. This is a theoretical analysis of movementism and is not in any way advocacy for crime. We do not want any buddy listening to this to end up in prison or to hurt themselves or do anything that would negatively impact their life. But as a movement, as a left community internationally and within national borders, to think about how our tactics are limited, the ones that we've been trying so far, particularly in the

Imperial Corps and how a different set of tactics or a broadening of the range of tactics we consider will be, I think, without a doubt, it will be more and more urgent and important as the crisis itself develops. And so Professor Andreas Malm helps us think through that process. And for that reason, I think it's really important. So this is a fun conversation and I think you'll enjoy it. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can support us at patreon.com. forward slash rev left radio and in exchange for supporting the show a couple dollars a month you get bonus monthly content rev left is always has been always will be 100% listener funded we really depend on our supporters to keep this thing going and to feed our families and it means the

world to me and david that we have so many people willing to support the show and if you don't have the money no worries at all sharing the show helps leaving us a positive review on iTunes helps a lot and it helps increase I reach, so every little thing matters. Without further ado, here's my discussion with Professor Andreas Maugham regarding his book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. Yes, my name is Andrea Smael. associate professor of human ecology at Lund University. Yeah, thank you so much, Professor Mom, for coming on the show.

I'm a fan of your work, and I'm really interested to talk with you today. I'm sure some people listening will have basic understanding of who you are, as we have many Marxists in our audience in general. But for those that don't, could you maybe describe yourself politically a little bit and talk about your personal history of activism? Yeah. Well, I mean, I live in Sweden, which is a totally insignificant, and pointless country, but for whatever it's been worth, I've been part of the far left that

used to exist in this country. There's not much left of it these days, but I became an activist in the mid-90s on the extra parliamentary far left in Sweden. I was an anarchist for a period in the mid-90s. There is a tradition of an arc of syndicalism in this country, sort of IWW similar stuff but I gravitated towards the Trotsky's movement in the late 90s, more specifically the fourth international

what I would consider the heterodox undogmatic and sane part of the Trotskist movement in contradistinction certain more orthodox, dogmatic and insane currents within that movement I

have identified with the fourth international since then I've been formerly a member of the Swedish section since 2009, but I'm not active. I mean, since I became an academic, I have stopped being an organizer. I try to imagine myself as an activist in so far as I participate in actions, mostly in the climate movement. Climate actions, demonstrations, when I have the opportunity, when I can do it. I have two pretty small kids, so that's another constraint, and I'm unable to combine my academic work with being an organizer. I'm an occasional ad hoc activist in the climate movement.

I try to do as much as I can. Yeah, politically, I mean, I identify as a revolutionary Marxist, and I'm proud of that. Absolutely. Well, yeah, and today, you know, you have many books, and I would love to have you back on in the future discuss more of them, But today, I think our interview is going to focus on your book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Learning to Fight in a World on Fire.

But before we get into your book specifically, I think it might be helpful because obviously we're going to be talking about climate activism. If you can just sort of remind listeners where warming currently is and just sort of what's at stake in this struggle overall. Well, so the warming that has taken place so far is now at an average, of something like 1.2, maybe 1.3 degrees above pre-industrial temperature on Earth. So that's the average, of course.

And it's going to be very, very hard to avoid a breach of the 1.5 threshold. Nearly impossible. That certainly doesn't mean that the fight is over once that threshold is breached, to the contrary, it only becomes more urgent to eradicate fossil fuel combustion and greenhouse gas emissions from our economies. Once or if that happens, and it will have to require even more radical measures the longer we wait. We just had a summer that was a real season in global hell with one climate disaster. after another week after week

from the extreme heatwave in British Columbia to the flooding in Henan in China to the wildfires in Turkey and Greece and the wildfires in the Pacific Northwest in the US, California, Oregon. Flooding in Germany and yeah, you recently had the storm Ida in New York

and I mean most of the mystery of course is playing out in the global south, in countries like Madagascar, where there is an extreme drought, likewise in Kenya, in Iran, in Iraq, to mention just a few places where the suffering is much more intense and devastating than what's going on, what's experienced in a country like Germany or the US. But the general pattern, and the one that's the one that's, that's difficult to remember, at least for quite a few people, is that it's very bad and it's going to get worse because climate change is a cumulative problem. So everything that happened this summer was the result of the CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere so far. If more CO2 is put into the atmosphere than what's already in there, then temperatures will rise further and all of these impacts that we've seen this summer will exacerbate.

It doesn't necessarily mean that next year's flooding in Germany will kill 10 times more people than it did this year. But the pattern of the trend will be for everything to get worse for as long as CO2 emissions continue. People tend to believe that what we experience this summer is like, aha, this is what global warming is like. But no, global warming has no baseline, no stable average. It's hardwired to deteriorate precisely because of its cumulative. nature. So a few years down the road, what we experienced this summer might look very benevolent. And this is absolutely central to all reflections, I think, on the politics of the climate crisis. It's temporality that it gets worse, the more CO2 is put into the atmosphere. That means

that it's already very bad, and all emissions that are made make a difference. So, Every ton that is put out into the atmosphere makes a situation worse. There is another misconception which is that the emissions that we make in our single nation state or whatever doesn't really matter. So Greeks, for instance, might tell themselves that, okay, we're burning. Athens is about to become the first uninhabitable capital in Europe, if this goes on. But we can't do anything about it because we are such a tiny country. so we don't care what's going on within our borders because if we stop our emissions it doesn't matter

but that's entirely the wrong way to think about it all emissions that are made exacerbate the situation including those made in Greece including those made in Chad and Afghanistan in any country but countries like Chad and Afghanistan are extremely poor and therefore have very limited capacity to do anything about their emissions which anyway are extremely diminutive of course Whereas a country like Greece has coal mines, it has pipelines, criss-crossing the Adriatic, it has a lot of super yachts in that sea and so on. So a country like Greece, after going through what it went through this summer, really it should be clamping down on all fossil fuel combustion in that nation state.

Instead, what you have is a discourse completely focused. on adaptation. So Mediterranean countries just the other week unveiled a coordinated project for trying to better prepare themselves for coming wildfire seasons. On the assumption that what we experienced this summer is going to happen again on a roughly similar scale. So therefore we have to be better prepared and more efficient in fire prevention. What this completely ignores is that this year, this summer was only a foretaste of what's coming, virtually by definition. There is no adaptation to continued business as usual. And if business as usual continues, as it looks set to do, we are doomed to seeing far worse events than what we saw

this year. Absolutely. Yeah. And the latest IPCC report made it clear that even if we stop emissions tomorrow, the built-in lag effect would continue to destabilize the climate for 30 years to come. So, you know, this is a temporal thing that really needs to be taken account of on that level. But let's get into your work itself, how to blow up a pipeline. Why did you write it? And what were you hoping to accomplish with it? So I started thinking about writing a pamphlet of that sort during the summer of 2018, which was very bad. bad in northern Europe. We had unprecedented wildfires and heat waves and drought. And I felt desperate about the absence of a climate movement at all corresponding to the scale of the problem.

Now, fortunately, I was not the only one who felt that way because it was by the end of that summer that Greta Thunberg sat down in front of the parliamentary building in Stockholm and started her school strike movement. So in 2019, we saw, the greatest wave of popular mobilization around the climate crisis in the global north so far. And that's when I wrote this book towards the end of 2019. So it really became a product of the conjuncture of 2019. So the year and a half before the pandemic broke out when the climate movement reached this historical peak so far in the north. And one face of it was the school.

school strike movement, another was Extinction Rebellion, which was very significant, particularly in the UK. And then, of course, there were climate camps and other forms of activism proliferating as well. And the book was written in a moment when I, as many others, felt great excitement about the state of the movement and the momentum that was built up during 2019, but also a bit of frustration with the fact that the movement continued to adopt tactics that have been used for a very long time and refusing to even contemplate going further and escalating tactics beyond completely, absolutely peaceful civil disobedience. So the book is a critique of the position that was most forcefully laid down by XR,

Extinction Rebellion, namely that the climate movement must not ever be. go beyond absolutely peaceful civil disobedience. And this for XR was based on a particular reading of the history of social struggles, from which they concluded that all struggles that have diversified into something that can be classified as violence have failed. The only ones that have succeeded are the ones that have stayed absolutely peaceful. And that, so, you know, I can, I have a sort of schizophrenic image of activists, academic, I do historical research, and as a historian, I find their reading of history

extremely strange and hard to square with their basic facts. And as an activist, I find it limiting as well. Absolutely. Well, and I want to get into that in one second, especially the history of successful liberatory movements and how, assuming that the nonviolent ones were the successful ones, I think, is obviously something we both agree is wrong in that analysis. But before we go into that, you wrote this book right before COVID, and you've written a book about COVID and the intersection of a lot of these issues since then. In what ways did COVID impact the climate movement or maybe even act as a sort of prelude of, you know, a global crisis that the world had to come together and try to work together on and in many

ways failed to do that. What has COVID taught us about the state of the climate movement and the global nature of the threat, in your opinion? One of the first political victims of the pandemic was the climate movement because it fell dead when the pandemic broke out in Europe. Or you could say that it, well, it didn't commit suicide because it's back in action. as of today, I would say I'll come to that in the moment, but it

decided to suspend all activities in the global north at least, yeah, to an extent of the global south as well, in the early spring of 2020. And that decision, I think, was

a great mistake. We know in hindsight that it's possible to have social mobilization and the people out on the streets under the conditions of a pandemic, because that's what we had in the U.S. with a George Floyd uprising when more people were out on the streets than ever before in American history.

That's what happened in Poland with a women's uprising, in Belarus, with a Democratic revolt, and a lot of other cases. But the sort of caters or leadership strata within the climate movement, they were in a shock in early spring 2020 and thought that we can't go on as we have so we're going to go home and sit in front of our computers

and just wait until this is over the tragedy here was that all the momentum that was built up in 2020 was lost and that the climate movement should ought to have been present as a social and political force

in 2020 because of the opportunity that the pandemic presented. So there was almost from the start, a lot of talk about green recovery and using the opportunity presented by the pandemic to enforce a transition away from fossil fuels. Now, it's quite clear that that would have required mass pressure from below. And the climate movement would have been essential

to creating such mass pressure. But the climate movement was nowhere to be seen in 2020, So, of course, this opportunity was missed. Also, the climate movement and the environmental movement more broadly would have been the agent that could have pointed to the urgent need to address the sources of those diseases that come jumping from wildlife populations into wild animals into the human species and urged an end to deforestation on the tropical. topics and things like that. So it was a great tragedy that the movement was nowhere to be seen in 2020. But as I said, as of today, the Fridays for Future movement is back in action. There were 100,000 people on the streets of Berlin, which is the de facto capital of this movement now, as in 2019. And hundreds of thousands of people in other locations in Germany and other parts of the world. regains momentum, at least some of what was lost, although it would take some time, I think, before we see the movement being as strong as it was in 2019.

Now very briefly, the other part of your question is, what can we learn from how states have dealt with this crisis? Well, at a very early stage of the pandemic, it might have looked as though the states intervened very forcefully into our economies to beat this virus but now I think it's pretty clear that what they did and what they've continued to do has only been at the level of combating the symptoms so the management of the crisis quite quickly became focused on the arrival of a vaccine and it's now all about rolling out that vaccine at least in the global north and the vaccine is a measure for for treating

the symptoms of zoonotic spillover so holding this virus in check while there has been no effort whatsoever to deal with the sources of this problem to the contrary deforestation in the tropics during 2020 was the third reached the third highest rate since comprehensive measures again two decades ago. So the source of the problem has been left completely untouched. And that's exactly what you see on the climate front as well. During the summer, you could see capitalist state apparatuses evacuating people from the danger zone. So, for instance, there was this, for a while at least viral film clip where you could see people evacuated from the Greek island

of Evian, I think it's called. I don't know if you're with these people on a ferry, yeah, and the hillside's just completely on fire glowing around the ferry. And that's a very clear image. This is what the state can do.

We can take people away from the fire with a boat, but it's absolutely incapable of quenching the fires as such, of doing anything about the combustion of fossil fuels. that is setting our role on fire.

And it's been very similar with the corona pandemic. The states have treated the symptoms, but never the causes of the problem. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you 100%. And you make a great point about the zoonotic spillover, the viral outbreaks that come are from these leaps from animals into humans are often the product of deforestation or just our terrible agricultural practices the world over, which factory farms are also hot spots for this sort of stuff so there was a there was an enough

material there for the climate movement really to make a robust argument but that has been completely left by the wayside and you see for example also this this argument about it was actually a lab leak and that's used to saber-rattle against China even more yeah which we need to be cooperating with China to actually address the crisis but that's not even you know talked about whatsoever do you think really quick, before we move on, that that 2021 and the summer and how just global and brutal it was represents a sort of turning point in at least the awareness of average people to really understand that this is a crisis. Are you optimistic at all that this was something like a

turning point? Or do you think people will just go back to their normal lives once winter hits? I mean, I hope it was a turning point. But I'm certainly not, I'm not certain that it's been a turning point because there have been quite a few occasions for turning points in the past decades. I mean, there was a turning point in the conversation about climate change in the US in 1988 when it was an extremely hot summer and James Hansen held very famous, give a very famous testimony to US Congress and the climate change was in the news. And there have been quite a few occasions since then for people to wake up to reality. And of course, course, some have woken up to reality, but there is still a very considerable redoubt of

climate denialism in the global north, in the U.S. and in Europe. And in some countries, including my own, the climate denialists of the far right are gaining in political influence, not losing. But that's something we can return to later. Yeah, absolutely. So let's go ahead and get into the climate movement itself. Why does the climate movement seem so wedded to nonviolence? what are the weaknesses of that approach and what does history actually tell us about that strategy? That's a huge question.

I, so, for a start, I disagree with the interpretation of the history of social struggles that strategic pacifists offer. And strategic pacifists are those pacifists who say not so much, it's always morally wrong to engage in violence. Rather, they say it's always an efficient.

and counterproductive to do so. And they adjews a number of examples, struggles for democracy in the Arab world during the Arab Spring and other contemporary struggles to topple dictatorships. The Iranian Revolution, the Palestinian Intifada they sometimes refer to. The civil rights movement in the U.S. is a very popular example for this sort of argument. the struggle of the suffragettes and even the abolition of slavery. And yeah, there are many others as well. And in all of these cases, if you look at what actually happened,

forms of militant action that went beyond absolutely peaceful demonstrations and civil disobedience were an absolutely integral part of all of these movements. So, I mean, we can get bogged down in history and discuss these cases in detail if we like. But if we just accept that, that these struggles contained an element of what we might call violence. Then the question, one question becomes for me, why would we imagine that the climate movement could do without militant methods? it's not as if we are facing an easier battle than any of these other movements did with a weaker enemy that's more amenable to toppling it seems rather the other way around

and of course I have a number of other arguments for why the movement should escalate beyond this one being that we are so extremely short of time and have already seen so much damage done to the planet and still emissions are not going down. So it might be time to try something else and diversify and experiment with more types of action than only peaceful civil disputes. There are other reasons to do so as well.

But to reach the final element component of your question, why is the climate movement so wedded to strategic passengers? in the global north. And I think that we need to examine this deeper than what I have done, certainly to get a good answer to this question. But the climate movement really stands out as an exception. If you compare with movements like the BLM movement in the US, the uprising after the murder of George Floyd,

or the Gilles-Ljean, the yellow vests in France, probably the most important, at least the most important working class-based social movement in Western Europe of the past half decade or so. Both of these movements have had a very different approach to these things and not being as dogmatic about absolute pacifism as the climate movement has. Now, one difference between the climate movement in the Global North and these two movements is that the climate movement comes primarily our, of a white middle-class environment. And that probably has something to do with attitudes towards violence and militancy. Another reason might be that the environmental movement has an idea of purity or an ideal of purity and cleanliness and imagines itself as a kind of model of behavior.

And violent or militant action is then, perceived as a kind of political pollutant, if you like, something that contaminates the purity of the environment. These are speculative hypotheses, perhaps, but it might have something to do with it. A certain kind of moral purity in the whole attitude or approach or even aesthetics of the movement. Yeah, I think that is pretty spot on. I definitely agree, and our listeners agree with your take on history. and we have countless shows where we're looking behind the scenes of these historical movements the world over. And even in those moments where, you know, the movement was led or, you know, had a victory on the nonviolent front,

there's always a bigger context in which those victories occur and they're often backed up by militancy of one sort or another. The success of Martin Luther King and the nonviolence approach cannot be divorced from the black nationalist militant struggle led by somebody like Malcolm X. And to try to parse those out and say it was all nonviolence that got the goods is really a historical, to say the least. Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, that's really interesting. And the class basis of a middle class, you know, global north movement, I can clearly see why there would be more of an obsession with moralizing and more of an obsession with nonviolence. But I do want to get into the details of this because rejecting nonviolence and passivism, it can mean many things from light property damage to industrial sabotage,

to physical violence against other people. What do you advocate for on this spectrum specifically? And where do you sort of draw the line? I draw the line in this book at harming human bodies. I think it would be very bad for the climate movement to start physically attacking human beings, as in, for instance, assassinating CEOs of fossil fuel companies, or even workers, God forbid, who perform extractive work

or something like that in a coal mine or whatever. I mean, on a strictly moral plane, it's prima facie wrong to kill someone. So if you sort of isolate the act from the context, it's always wrong to kill somebody. Now, I'm not a pacifist. I'm neither a moral nor a strategic pacifist, so I'm completely open to the idea that in certain situations,

it might be necessary to engage in killings to further very important causes and protect the very central values, such as freedom from slavery, for instance, or freedom from fascism. I would, of course, in retrospect, support the northern, side in the U.S. Civil War and anti-fascist partisans who killed Nazis in the Second World War. But for the climate movement in the Global North, in this situation, it would not benefit the

cause and our strategic interests to engage in acts of killing. And if the act of killing does harm to the very important cause that you're promoting, then the prima facie ban on killing is reinforced, not overturned. And I think that these acts of killings would not find any popular support, any popular appeal. They would be extremely hard to justify, and they would create an enormous backlash against the movement, far beyond what the movement can take. I also think that it makes sense for the climate movement to restrict its violence insofar as that is the right term to property, to machinery, because unlike in other cases where property destruction has been engaged in, as in, you know, having a riot against police violence and therefore smashing windows, in this case, it's the actual property, the actual machinery, that is the problem. I mean, smashing a window in Minneapolis, the window itself has no cause of relation to police violence.

But if you smash an SUV or a pipeline, you go straight to the source of the problem because it's these objects that release the harmful substance of CO2, excess CO2 into the atmosphere. So, precisely because of the extremely material nature, if you see what I mean, of the climate crisis, I think property destruction is intuitively the way to go about this, not going after individual human beings. I see. Now, do you think the, so there's this concern with physical violence against human beings that there will be an alienating effect to other people. It would turn people off from your cause. Do you think that that's not also true for property damage, or do you think that regular people might see these acts of property damage if they're strategic and well placed in a way that they would be accepting of it? But if that exact same action had killed somebody working in that, whatever, that vehicle or whatever may be, that would turn them off. Do you think there's a difference there and that people will actually be won over? I certainly think there's a difference in that if someone gets killed,

the revulsion will be of another kind than if a material object is destroyed, because these are two different acts and two different kinds of violence. But of course, there is a risk that property destruction also elicits popular disgust and condemnation. that depends on how it is conducted and what the target is and what the political and climatic situation is when it happens so if you if you destroy ordinary people's property if you randomly and indiscriminately go after cars for instance or some other type of machine that working class people use then there will be justified anger from people or at least understandable anger but I imagine that I mean if there is some

rationality left in the species if you have more events of extreme disaster as you know of the kind that we saw this summer and we will have those at some point people would be open to the idea

that attacking the sources of this problem is justified. I mean, I imagine that, well, I know because it's clear from reports, that people, for instance, in southern Europe are extremely worried and afraid and upset because their lives are in peril, I mean, in countries like Italy and Greece, because of global heating. The level of concern in those countries is far, far, far above what we have in my own country,

Sweden, for instance, where it's extremely low. And I just imagine that if you had at a moment when, when, you know, so much of Greece or Italy is on fire, you had climate movements calling for actions, calling for demonstrations against the big oil and gas companies in those countries. So we forget, for instance, that Italy has one of the seven largest private oil and gas companies in the world, E&I. and it called for for demonstrations again say the headquarters of ENI and that spiraled into confrontation into attacks on that on that building or attacks on the pipelines that that company operate that at some point this would strike people as a legitimate thing to do and this would this it would be possible to explain this kind of action to people and to say to people that unless we go after these things and close fossil fuel production down, all of what you're experiencing will get worse and your lives will eventually become unbearable. I just imagine, and again, we need to keep in mind the temporality of the

problem here, that these things will get worth. I just imagine that at least a segment of the population and hopefully a fairly significant one would be open to the idea that we need to close down the source of this problem. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you entirely. I do wonder if there could be a point where more human-oriented militancy and violence could become acceptable.

For example, just to lay out a possible scenario, and I just really want to pick your brain on this, so we see Bolsonaro in Brazil. And part of the Bolsonaro policy is the destruction, deforestation of the Amazon. Now, he has actually a minority of support in the country, and Lula is going to challenge him in 2022 to take over Brazil, and one would think implement much more sane environmental policies. But Bolsonaro, and I think the right has looked at Trump and is wondering if they're going to do the same, which is to basically do a big lie 2.0, arguing that the election was fraudulent, Bolsonaro really won, et cetera. In that case, especially with majority support for a lula type figure, violence against Bolsonaro or his highest cabinet levels.

And again, this is theoretical. This is academic. I'm not urging anybody to do anything illegal. But could very well be seen by a majority of Brazilians and perhaps a majority of people around the world as a propaganda of the deed that actually works, that people would have support in that. And you can think of a million more context in which something like that would become acceptable. So what are your thought on that threshold where you could even see that not being alienating the people? No, I mean, what you would have in that kind of scenario is a question of anti-fascist defense of Brazilian democracy against the coup attempt or something like that. And of course, I would be open for interpersonal violence in a situation of struggle.

with more or less explicit fascists because then it takes on another structure. I mean, the situation becomes different. This has already, I mean, this has already appeared. There was a climate camp in LaSatia in the Eastern German coal mining districts in 2016, which was attacked by Nazi activists. And of course, people had to defend themselves.

No one was killed, but in a situation like that, personal self-defense is legitimate. But the climate movement should not initiate this kind of violence, I believe. But of course, in situations where you face violent physical attacks from the far right, antifascist self-defense, and with a climate component to it as well, would to me be just, I see. And would stand a chance of, of course, maintaining popular support. Now, I should point out that in other political contexts, I think it makes sense to engage in interpersonal violence. So I, for instance, I am in full support of the rights of the Palestinian people to engage in armed resistance against their colonial occupiers. But that is a political situation very different from the one that we've faced.

with a struggle against fossil fuel production in the global norm. I see. It's the addition of other political variables that could push it over the line, but climate in a vacuum and as a movement strategy, you should not do that for the reasons you outline. I can definitely agree with that. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, we have to, we have to, when we think about strategies and tactics,

we have to think about what works where we are in space and in time, and what has a potential to work. And, of course, we have to be open to revise our positions. I mean, if anyone engages in property destruction, it turns out to have terrible results, of course, you should be open for abandoning that tactic. On the other hand, if in the very late 21st century, we are at six degrees and there's still no attempt to end business as usual,

then perhaps you need to think about violence in other terms. But this book, as I said, was an intervention in the conjuncture of 2019, and I don't think that the basic parameters around these things have changed yet. Fair, absolutely. With your sort of outlook and the barring on interpersonal violence in lieu of other variables, something I've seen in the U.S. lately and specifically around the Black Lives Matter uprising was this, at least for a time, concerted public. harassment of the rich and the powerful. So you go out to a restaurant, a bunch of people show up

and make it to where you cannot enjoy your meal, right? They even have shown up at people's houses like Tucker Carlson got confronted in a fishing store. Other powerful people have had their houses the site of protest for many days, making it very uncomfortable, even just to exist with your family and your home. But that is not violent as well. So do you think that has a place in your outlook? Hey, I wouldn't oppose that. I haven't thought about it. I don't think I would oppose someone doing that. I mean, I don't know, stalking or making the life of fossil fuel executives uncomfortable in that manner.

I mean, certainly, I mean, I, there was a time when, you know, the globalization movement used to throw pies or cakes into the faces of, of various obnoxious figures. And I participated in an action of that kind myself two decades back. And certainly that. kind of imposition or you know imposing discomfort on on human beings

who are part of the of the problem or you know personify the enemy in some in some sense I wouldn't oppose that but I would oppose going up to those buildings and spraying them with machine guns

and I think there is a reason why activists and us have refrained from that and that reason is not that there are no guns to get to to get hold of in the u.s but there is i i think a collective self-discipline and insight that that would damage the cause if we were to do that i mean it's someone would actually assassinate Tucker carson would probably not only kill him but also kill whatever movement that person represented absolutely and invite blowback of all sorts yeah yeah exactly and i'm curious because you know before the war on terror here in the u.s there was a war on

quote unquote eco-terrorism and the eco-terrorists in the u.s. quote-unquote i do not believe they are terrorists but they would do basically what you're doing which is property damage ensuring that nobody physically got killed and perhaps it wasn't a different time where the climate crisis wasn't as widespread and seen by enough people but there was a huge state crackdown and those and many of those people are still in prison to this day even though not anybody has died do you have any thoughts on on that and if the political context has shifted such that that wouldn't be as viable for the state to do now yeah i mean obviously there is a massive risk for anyone who does the kind of activism that these comrades did back in the 90s earth first and animal

liberation front of those groups but they would end up in jail i mean if you if you form a small group and you do actions of that kind you run a great risk and there's no reason to believe that the state would treat this any more kindly now than in the 1990s. A couple of differences are, first of all, the ecotage movement in the 1990s was, to my understanding, at least, fairly isolated and disconnected from a mass movement. I don't think that it makes sense. sense to try out more militant tactics for the climate movement without having a sort of relation to the climate mass movement.

We cannot engage in substitutionism, the idea that we can have tiny radical cells substituting from replacing the mass movement. If you look at what happened during the Floyd uprising, the moments of violence that you had, and that cannot be denied and discounted, starting from the storming of the police station in the third precinct in Minneapolis and continuing in all the hotspots, most of them at least, that violence that happened was part of the whole groundswell of discontent. It wasn't an isolated phenomenon like what you saw with the Ecotage movement in the 90s. And I think that if the climate movement is going to diversify, it will have to be much more on the model of the Floyd uprising than on the Ecotage model. Then another difference is precisely what you mentioned, that in the 1990s, we were not in a situation of climate breakdown. down getting worse year after year. This is what we're facing now.

And that means that the, how shall I put it, the yardsticks for acceptable tactics might change pretty fast. I mean, if they could change as fast as they did in the US, to my understanding, the parameters for what at least the sort of left-leaning progressive spectrum of the U.S. population could accept moved after the murder of George Floyd. So there was a wider

acceptance of militant tactics than before. Correct me if I'm wrong. You're American. You're correct, yes. Then I think we should expect something similar on the climate front, given how bad the situation is and the fact

that it will get worse. And that should also put the question of repression in a somewhat different light. So in the 1990s, there was an ecological stability of a kind, of course, this is relative, but compared to what we're facing now, there was an ecological stability in which the state acted. Of course, we don't have any guarantees that when the climate crisis deepens, states will become more lenient. It could be the other way around, but we should at least open up for the possibility that when the

crisis deepens, more people will be ready to take action, and the phenomenon of property destruction wouldn't have to be condemned to the kind of marginal existence that it had in the 1990s. Maybe I'm guilty here of overestimating reason and rationality and factors like that. I'm open to that possibility. Let me also just say that I think there is a lot to learn from positively from the experiences in the 1990s, not the least the fact that thousands of actions were made and no one was killed. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that for sure.

And just to your point about mass support during the Black Lives Matters moving left, there was a moment where, and this is unheard of in America, where the majority of people in polls would outright say that the burning down of the police station in Minneapolis was justified. And that might have shrank since. I mean, there's the reaction and everything has sort of moved on. But for a brief moment, there was, you know, that and that's unprecedented. So I totally agree with what you're saying. What kind of forms of organization, you know, thinking that there's a climate movement, assuming it sort of moves in the direction that you're advocating, which I also agree with.

what forms of organization or maybe multiple forms of organization do you personally think would be the most efficacious to really building up a movement with the robustness needed for it to meet this moment? Oh, I think that we need to try a lot of different organizational forms and experiment and embrace diversity of tactics and organizational forms. So if we're thinking specifically about property destruction it can happen in two basic ways it can be premeditated or it can erupt spontaneously in the heat of the moment so it's been and again if you look at what happened during the floyd uprising some property destruction was of course premeditated so when when people went out to the statues of the confederate generals or slave traders in the

UK and brought with them tools for taking those statues down there was a moment of planning and deliberate concerted action in there. And that worked very well. On the other hand, you had moments of rioting and property destruction that developed spontaneously out of demonstrations. And the climate movement is still remarkable and exceptional for not having allowed any demonstration that I know of in the Global North to evolve into a riot.

And that's not because we're not facing a powerful enemy. It's not because the crisis we deal with is a limited one. It's a small problem or something like that. It has to have other reasons. And I think that what I think you in the U.S. sometimes call the peace police. The peace police in the climate movement has been absolutely ubiquitous and dominant and therefore prevented any kind of evolution of this. kind of. But it doesn't have to be that way. I mean, 20 years ago, exactly 20 years ago,

we had in Europe a wave of protests against G7 summits and other meetings of the dominant class of that kind that very often contained moments of confrontation. And we can discuss what what effects those moments had, if they were always good or if they were sometimes bad. It's quite possible that they were sometimes bad. But what I want to argue here is that now that we're looking at COP 26 in Glasgow in November, and it's 20 years since Genoa and Gothenburg and those other occasions, and it's, what is it, 22 years since Seattle, where is the kind of summit protest culture that we had in those days.

And why does it feel unlikely that we'll see similar scenes in Glasgow? I mean, I for one, would find it quite legitimate if people at the end of that summit realized which is the likely outcome. It's another summit, the 26th in order, which has only produced empty words. And it might not even be a sufficient representation of people. nations from the global south at that summit and we're looking down this abyss and businesses usually just continues

I mean people really should feel outraged and there should be potentials for having mass action on the streets of Glasgow or in conjunction with the Glasgow summit that contain for the first time a moment of militancy

that's one aspect of it which I mean this doesn't require necessarily organizational forms, but it requires an opening up in the movement for the idea that you can go beyond just gently, kindly, politely, demonstrating as we have for 26 years without government doing anything effective to cut the missions. Instead, they've just presided over a doubling of emissions almost since this whole process of COP summit started. or at least yeah it's i mean since it started i think more than half of total emissions in history have been made on the other hand you can also i think consider uh situations where you

have pre-mediated property destruction as in small groups affinity groups or cells or brigades call it what you want that plan and execute intelligently property destruction and explain why they're doing it and do it in communication with the rest of the movement. And you're already seeing signs of this. So at the most recent Endigelenda action in Germany, that's the climate camp movement that I have identified mostly with. This summer, against fossil gas sites in pipelines and other sites in Western Germany, there was a gas that was, sorry, there was a pipeline that was ruptured by a group calling themselves Fridays for sabotage. And the Enderglende, official Ender Glenda movement endorsed that action.

And that was an instance of pre-mediated sabotage, and I think we'll see more than. Yeah, definitely. And I really like your point, too, about in the context of these actions, a thorough explanation of why you're doing it to connect up the action with the broader struggle. I think, of course, we would love to see, you know, communist parties and internationalist organizations coming. together but there's also a role for decentralized cell structures antifa in the u.s. for example has been an example of that and a successful one um yes absolutely but experiment experimenting and not

being dogmatic and allowing lots of different you know flowers to blossom as it were i think is the way exactly yeah exactly for sure well um in the u.s as in many countries around the world like Brazil, like the Philippines, like Bolivia, etc. The indigenous are and have been on the front lines against extractive industry, the devastation of the biosphere and the overall climate fight. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of indigenous struggle globally and how the climate struggle has manifested in the global south more broadly? Yeah, I mean, the indigenous struggles that have played out in the past, they could have been, of course, absolutely

foundational for the climate movement. So the tactic of the climate camp, for instance, at least in its more recent iterations, is largely inspired by things like Standing Rock and similar indigenous protest camps. And not only that, but of course,

because fossil fuel production has expanded into unconventional fuels, unconditional oil and into the sort of margins of what's left of fairly easily exploitable oil, there has been this collision between fossil fuel companies and indigenous peoples from Ecuador to various places in Canada and in Australia with coal mines and so on and so forth. And these indigenous populations then are on the front line of extraction itself, while often also being on the front line of the effects of global heating.

And they have developed various tactics to defend their lives against those companies. So clearly absolutely central to the movement. What I've been discussing primarily is the movement in the global north. And because I live in Sweden, I have all my experiences of climate activism in Europe. I've never flown over to North America to engage in climate activism there. It would seem an incongruous thing to do. And I think that the – I mean, in Europe, there isn't that indigenous component to the struggle. So this is not my field of expertise, and I also think that from a climate justice perspective, we should remember that the climate injustice, the climate violence, is primarily perpetrated at a distance from the most impacted, the most affected people and areas in the world.

So people might suffer most from global heating in Madagascar or in the Sunderbonds in Bangladesh, but the historical responsibility for accumulating CO2 is rather concentrated in Europe and the U.S. And fighting climate injustice means enforcing extremely radical emissions cuts in the richest part of the world. This is very clear from the declaration of the Fridays for Future movement today, which has really turned significantly to the left in the rhetoric. If you read their declaration from today, it's really quite extraordinary how left there they sound. And our message to world leaders begin with point one. The global north needs to cut emissions drastically by divesting from fossil fuels and ending its extraction, burning and use.

that means that the global movement, sorry, the movement in the global north, including in Europe, has a very central task in making these emissions cuts happen. And indigenous populations have a crucial part to play in this, particularly in North America, but not in Europe, because the indigenous populations that we have in Europe, including the Sweden, the Sami population, they have, they suffer the consequences of. the climate crisis but there's no fossil fuel extraction in their territories in sweden i see i'm really curious about your thoughts on china and whether or not you're optimistic about the role they'll be playing they're a global leader in the development of green technology but they're also currently the emissions leader just because of their their huge population and the fact that they're developing are you optimistic about the role china is and is going to be playing or are you more pessimistic on that for it. Let me say

just as indigenous struggles in North America are not my field of expertise. China is not my field of expertise either. I have no particular insights into the political economy of China. I started it a little bit almost a decade ago,

but I haven't done so since then. I mean, just the other day, maybe it was yesterday even, China declared that there will be no more financing of coal power in other countries from China. So you have, for instance, in Egypt right now, that's a country that I know a bit more about.

There you have the construction of what will be the largest coal-fired power plant on the African continent financed with a lot of Chinese money. So China going out and saying that we're not going to do this anymore is significant. And we shouldn't be, you know, a hyper pessimist in the sense that we reject every positive sign as false. If they stick to that, then that is good. But, of course, the next question is, what about the coal power that we have in China? Last year, the Chinese state inaugurated the equivalent of one new coal-fired power plant per week. and they have approved something like 20 cold projects,

including several power plants already this year. And the central question, of course, is when is China going to stop building new coal power plants and not only that, but closing down everything that they have built and replace it with renewable energy? And another very good piece of news on the climate front is that that kind of replacement, and that kind of substitution and absolute shift is possible. Renewable energies are advancing tremendously and are now generally cheaper in producing energy

than fossil fuel. So China and any other country could shift completely away from fossil fuels to renewables as fast as humanly possible. It's just that a lot of capital will have to be liquidated in that process. So all those capitalists have poured money into the roughly 52 coal power plants that were built or inaugurated last year in China. If these power plants were to close, let's say, next year, they would lose a lot of money because they wouldn't have recuperated their investments. And the investment potential of keeping those power plants running for 50 years would be wasted, would be lost. So any shift of that kind means a destruction on an unprecedented scale of capital, of value that has been sunk into fossil fuel infrastructure.

And it's exactly the same logic in a country like Norway, the largest oil and gas producer in Europe that just keeps on opening new oil fields all the time and plan for them to keep running until 2070 or even longer. as for China's ability to really, really break with the pattern of development that they've had within China in the past decades, I really can't say because I don't know enough about Chinese politics. Yeah, fair enough for sure. I think that China, at least compared to the United States, is more rational and more able to plan long term. And I think that they see the strategic opportunity in leading the world against the climate. you know, fight. And I also think that there gives me a little bit of optimism. Maybe

I'm grasping as straws, but there's a certain subservience that capital has to the Chinese state, that in a place like the U.S., that relationship seems exactly opposite, where the state itself is more subservient to capital. So those little things give me a little bit of

hope, but clearly China's going to have to follow. I hope you're right, but if I would be the pessimist here, I would say that the Chinese state is yes you're right the Chinese state is stronger as an economic actor than in the US but that's partly because so much of the Chinese capital accumulation has been organized directly through the state so that you know the state-owned Chinese oil and coal companies for instance are capitalist companies as any others it's just that they happen to be state-owned and that the capital accumulation is organized

through the state rather than through private entities as in the U.S. And that doesn't necessarily mean that the state is more prone to shut these things down, unfortunately. True, fair. And a lot of the largest oil and gas companies in the world are state-owned. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So state ownership in itself, of course, is no guarantee for anything progressive. On the other hand, you can argue, and I guess this is what you're saying as well, that if you already have those companies in the hands of the state, as in the case of China,

you can just from one day to another give them the directive to do something else in the U.S. or in the U.K. or in the Netherlands or in Germany where the oil and gas and coal companies are privately owned, first you need to put them under some kind of public control and then tell them to instruct them to terminate their production. Right. Yeah. Important. point for sure so one thing that's happening a lot and we're getting towards the end of this conversation you've been very generous with your time and I appreciate it but in the in the face of climate chaos a lot of people including myself and I'm sure you I'm a father of soon to be three

children I know you have well congratulations yeah thank you and I know you have kids yourself it can be very despairing you can get very anxious and very depressed looking at the state of things but at the end of your book you argue against climate fatalism and I think it's important for the left to do this because it is something that is taking over parts of people's minds. So can you talk about the main ways in which climate fatalism is articulated and kind of lay out some of your main arguments against being fatalist in that way? Yeah, I mean, there have been a few fairly prominent intellectuals who have argued in recent years along the lines that we're doomed, we're fucked, it's too late, so we just need to learn to die or perhaps

adapt as best as we can and try to live a good life and then just go down in the night. And I think that's pernicious argument. Well, it's wrong to begin with that it's too late. It's wrong in the sense that it's not too late to make a difference. If emissions were to end tomorrow, vis-a-vis continuing at full throttle would create very different futures. And this is the parameters within we have to fight.

And as I said earlier, every ton of emissions that is made or avoided makes a difference. And it's not a black and white question of avoiding climate change or not. It's about minimizing it. And actually, we should keep that in mind also potentially reversing, at least parts of it, by drawing CO2 down from the atmosphere, which is technically possible, these things can be done. And it's, in this sense, it's never

going to be too late to make a difference. It's always going to be the case that additional tons of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere make the situation worse. And if these emissions are avoided, then you make a difference on the positive side of things. Clearly, there is a risk that eventually you have runaway global heating where feedback mechanisms take over and human actions have little impact on the process. And we are still some distance from that situation. Thankfully, if we were to ever reach it, well forbid, then I argue in the book that it would still be right to resist. There are situations in history when you are doomed and it's actually too late and it's still right to resist. And one analog eye sort of allude to there is the resistance in the Warsaw ghetto when the fighters knew that they had no chance of defeating the Nazis and it was already too late.

they were going to die and they were not going to save their people but they rose up and it's very hard to say that they did the wrong thing that resistance was right and in our hypothetical scenario where it would be too late to win in any meaningful sense i think it still would be right to register our defiance our resistance our refusal uh and rejection of fossil capital now this might be many decades away and hopefully we'll never reach the situation but I think fatalism is wrong now that it's not too late and it would be wrong even if it were too late resistance is in a sense always the right thing in climate breakdown could not agree more every tenth of a degree matters it's never too late resisting it is is the way we maintain our humanity through the whole thing and exactly yeah I totally agree with you um we unfortunately were not able to get to your book white skin black fuel um and i would love to have you back on it a future time to talk about that but can you just quickly

let listeners know about that book and sort of what its main thesis is yeah well so that's a very different based from this little pipeline pamphlet it's a research product it's a book i wrote together with the zetkin collective well and which i'm a member of and um we are 20 people who've been working on the far right in the climate crisis. So we've looked at what the far right has said and done about climate and energy in certain countries in Europe and the US and Brazil. And we have tried to understand why it

is that the far right denies the climate crisis generally and why this far right has been surging in recent years. We also look at the part of the far right that pays lip service to climate science and nominally recognizes the existence of the problem and says that the solution to the climate crisis is reinforcing the white nation by closing borders and getting rid of immigrants and things like that.

That's a position that's very strong on the French far rights in particular. We are, this is a very big book. it's almost 600 pages and we try to grapple with this sort of intersection or articulation between racism and energy and fossil fuels

from a number of different perspectives so we try to go deeper into history in the 19th century and 20th century and look at how notions of white supremacy were tied to fossil fuel technologies how the classical fascists adored those technologies and the yeah and also of course the the sort of green

brown Nazi ecology eco-fascist tradition as well and it's an attempt to try to map out where the far right is in the climate crisis and what it might do in the future really crucial really crucial I personally come out of the world of anti-fascist organizing and I've always focused on that and we've seen what the Syrian refugee crisis did to the far right in Europe, times that by 100, and you're starting to look at what mass migration and climate chaos will look like. So really crucial work, and I would love to do more work on that and to highlight that book more.

Really quick, though, because you just made me think of this while I was reading it. And I actually think you put the blurb on the title of this book, but I'm reading Climate Leviathan right now. Have you read, you've read that book, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it's a helpful way to think about possible trajectories. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Their climate behemates.

I think we say it in white-skinned black field as well, that they really pioneered the exercise of sort of politically modeling climate scenarios. I mean, there's a lot of, of course, metrological climate modeling, but what they engage in is political modeling. So seeing how different configurations of climate politics can play out in the future. And we're sort of following that initiative or that line of inquiry. that they opened up. Beautiful, beautiful.

All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Love the book. Love your work more broadly. Can you please let listeners know where they can find you in your work online before I let you go? Yeah. I mean, you should, well, the books that I've written can be found on the Varsal website.

My email can be found on the Lund University website. That's it. All right. I will link to those in the show notes so people can follow those leads if they want. And yeah, thank you so much. And I would love to have you back on. Thank you so much, Fred. I really appreciate it.

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