How to Blow Up a Pipeline

208, pagine

lingua English

Pubblicato il 29 Aprile 2021

ISBN:
978-1-83976-025-9
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3 stelle (8 recensioni)

Why resisting climate change means combatting the fossil fuel industry

The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven’t we moved beyond peaceful protest?

In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop—with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.

Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions …

2 edizioni

Made me start believing in a positive change… again

4 stelle

I went into this book being a bit negative about climate change and the climate movement worldwide. I thought we “lost” and wouldn’t be able prevent enormous damage to the planet. I saw myself in a situation similar to the ending of the movie “Don’t look up” but I don’t think of that anymore.

The book gives you a decent amount of history of the different climate movements (pacifist and not so pacifist) and compales them to other social movements and the type of violence or lack there of that they used in order to achieve their goals.

I really recommend this book a lot!

ha recensito How to Blow Up a Pipeline di Andreas Malm

Instead of provocative questions, Malm offers disregard for the reader and the future

2 stelle

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 …

frustrating

2 stelle

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 …

Interessante Gedanken, guter Überblick

4 stelle

Für mich eine spannende Zusammenfassung von Gedanken über Protestbewegungen im Allgemeinen und die Klimabewegung im speziellen. Gute und interessante Referenzen und Beispiele, an welchen der Autor darüber sinniert wie weit gewaltfreier Widerstand gehen kann, und wo seine Möglichkeiten aufhören. Das Buch gibt keine definitiven Antworten, stellt aber interessante Fragen, die mich sehr wahrscheinlich noch einige Zeit lang beschäftigen werden

a book with all the right pieces and some very weird conclusions

2 stelle

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 …

Excellent at What It Does

4 stelle

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 …

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4 stelle