How to Blow up a Pipeline
by Andreas Malm · first published 2020
15mentions
4recommended by
11HN commenters
2022–2026first – last mentioned
36% recommend64% neutral
Property will cost us the earth. 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 c
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Once you finish some of the other good recommendations in this thread, I recommend How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm. The title is not really representative of the content. I thought it was a very thoughtfully written, nuanced perspective on the challenges facing those trying to prevent climate change.
on “Ask HN: What is the best book on the climate problem and solutions?” ↗Good reading on this is “How to blow up a pipeline by Andreas Malm” … the disruptions we see right now are pretty mild & maybe this preventive detention is an attempt to reel in the more extreme activists before they do something truly disruptive?
…‘pressure’ on the incumbent power being supported and made more tenable in comparison to the potential for a more radical approach. I have seen anything widely popularized discussing this outside of ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’ which does have some good references and particular examples.
on “The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world” ↗> good-cop/bad-cop The first essay in "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" deals with this dichotomy and how it's been used many times. Great read.
on “Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.] (1963)” ↗…openly contemplate the possibility — in their eyes, the necessity — of directly sabotaging the infrastructure of the carbon economy. Foremost among them is the academic Andreas Malm, whose recent book, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” [1] calls for smashing the tools of fossil-fuel extraction as a last-ditch means of averting ecological collapse. In interviews with mainstream outlets such as Vox and The New Yorker, Malm contends…
on “Nordstream: An Accident?” ↗"How to Blow Up a Pipeline" by Andreas Malm, published by Verso Press in 2021, ISBN 1-839-76025-7 There's always the wealth-transfer option if you object to the ethics of property destruction! The other options are even more…
on “Do venture capitalists want forever war?” ↗…became the PRC, that degraded into the cultural revolution and police state, and resulted in a bourgeoisie state with spicy capitalism. Andreas Malm also took a relatively anti violent perspective in "How to Blow Up a Pipeline," though he analyzed the usefulness of a small subset of incredibly violent people functioning as a contrast to the vast majority of dissidents who then look much more reasonable. He also spent a lot…
on “The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world” ↗There's an internally consistent moral argument that terrorism is warranted in this situation eg Malm's "How to Blow Up a Pipeline." The basic argument is that peaceful protest is effective when it is an alternative to a more militant and disruptive extremist movement with the same goals. You negotiate with the peaceful side so…
on “Nearly the hottest place on Earth, India swelters under intense heat wave” ↗…topic are shallow. I've seen the Philosophy Tube video I linked to, and read a few related essays. If you really want the "how", I'm the wrong person to ask for details. The video references Malm's "How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire" - perhaps look there instead. My shallow views on this specific example of keying SUVs are: 1) not everyone will be caught, 2) what happens if the activist doesn't…
on “Berating climate sceptics isn’t enough. Disruptive protest the only way forward” ↗The author of 'How to Blow Up a Pipeline' is from Sweden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Blow_Up_a_Pipeline
on “Gas Leak in the Baltic Sea” ↗…probably similar people throwing stuff against the wall about why it was Russia until they find something with enough versimilitude that it sticks in the mind. It also made me revisit the recent book "how to blow up a pipeline" as I had the same question when I heard that title. How can you justify the short term ecological damage against the long term. I assume it's possible, I just hadn't read an in depth argument on it.…
on “Nord Stream: Tie-ins and hyperbaric welding” ↗There's a book about this called "How to Blow up a Pipeline". One interesting factoid in it was how much this tactic has already been used in the middle east.
on “Keystone pipeline shut after 14,000-barrel oil spill in Kansas” ↗…Cookbook (new version) https://www.foodnotbombs.net/anarchist_cookbook.html is free to read and gets into the effectiveness of peaceful protest and direct action, and the counter-effectiveness of violence. How to Blow Up a Pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Blow_Up_a_Pipeline takes a slightly different perspective, analyzing the possible necessity of extremely limited, targeted destruction of property, that strives to…
on “EU: Definition of "potential terrorists" opens door to broad information-sharing” ↗…Canada, but similar things happened in US universities. Do I need to find specific examples or will you trust me on that? > Why don’t the students seem to go after any datacenters Ahh, you mean the "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" approach? Quite simple - polls are warning signs, and data center owners, like pipeline owners, have a lot of money and security, and with the government backing them up. The civil rights movement…
on “Campus deplatformings hit record high” ↗https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Blow_Up_a_Pipeline
on “Ask HN: What is the best book on the climate problem and solutions?” ↗