The New York Times, a legacy outlet with 10,000,000 subscribers, published an interview with an environmentalist militant who advocates for violent acts of terrorism to stop climate change. The lengthy interview released on Sunday is complete with a center-spread image and various footnotes for further reading.
Andreas Malm, 46, is the author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Verso, 2021) and is a semi-regular contributor to Jacobin, where he writes about climate change from a Marxist perspective. He obtained a PhD from Lund University after submitting a thesis about the origins of environmental degradation in the Industrial Revolution. Malm was also a member of the Socialistiska Partiet, a Trotskyist political group in Sweden.
The Times assures readers that Malm’s book does not actually contain any instructions to blow anything up, but instead “function[s] both as 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.”
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Malm advocates for destroying infrastructure like pipelines and powerplants, eliminating sources of electricity and heat for millions of homes and fuel for critical delivery trucks and emergency vehicles, in order to grind the so-called “fossil fuel” economy to a halt. Recently, protestors influenced by Malm in France destroyed the water pump system of a vast agricultural water reservoir in the belief that it represented “water hoarding.” Malm also calls for people to deflate the tires on gas-guzzling SUVs, and said he hopes his son gets the idea to do it on his own.
With his 2021 book, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” Andreas Malm established himself as a leading thinker of climate radicalism. “The reason that people contemplate escalation is that there are no risk-free options left,” he told us. https://t.co/twtNuFkvZc
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 14, 2024
When asked if he was okay with the prospect of people dying in these acts of property sabotage, Malm said that would only happen if there were “a thousand pipeline explosions per year,” which, he added, is “unfortunately” a long way off.
“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,” Malm said.
The soft-spoken academic says he has never personally blown up a pipeline. But when asked if that makes him a hypocrite, he merely said he does not want to admit to any crimes “as a matter of principle and political expediency,” adding that people close to him “know” his personal track record of militant “activism,” which is good enough for him.
To justify his calls for violence, Malm re-frames climate disasters as acts of violence perpetrated by capitalists against innocent victims. Terroristic activities against pipelines, then, are really acts of “disarmament” against the violent capitalistic class, which he describes as “a machine that actually kills people.”
“The reason that people contemplate escalation,” Malm said, “is that there are no risk-free options left.”
Shane Devine is a writer covering politics, economics, and culture for Valuetainment. Follow Shane on X (Twitter).
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