Speaker 1: Welcome to zero. I'm Austra. This week protests, pipelines and
Speaker 1: property destruction. It seems like every day a new bit
Speaker 1: of climate activism makes the news a vang covered in soup.
Speaker 1: What is worth more? All life? The two of the
Speaker 1: France halted by protesters dragging them off the road. You
Speaker 1: can actually see him the dragging off the road. Prascalino
Speaker 1: extet de France Yellow Jersey obviously threw one down in
Speaker 1: the ditch. There scenes here and we don't need that
Speaker 1: disrupt in this bicycle right. Fights breaking out between enraged
Speaker 1: drivers and activists blocking roads scraps. They are picking up
Speaker 1: protesters one by one and dragging them. As alarm and
Speaker 1: urgency grows about the lack of action on climate change,
Speaker 1: the tactics employed by activists are escalating, with frequent examples
Speaker 1: of direct action and civil disobedience, many that annoy people
Speaker 1: but succeed in attracting the attention they seek. My guest
Speaker 1: today is Andreas Maum, an associate professor of human ecology
Speaker 1: at Lund University who has thought long and hard about
Speaker 1: how to make the climate movement more effective. He is
Speaker 1: the author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, where
Speaker 1: he argues that if the climate movement wants to be successful,
Speaker 1: it must embrace even more radical action, including violence in
Speaker 1: the form of property destruction, alongside peaceful protests. We have
Speaker 1: to escalate, I mean, will be completely irrelevant if we
Speaker 1: continue to march dressed in polar bear costumes in twenty
Speaker 1: thirty five, If, as seems likely to be the case,
Speaker 1: the world is on fire, it's an even greater extent
Speaker 1: then than what it is now. On this week's episode,
Speaker 1: Andreas discusses the moral case for property destruction, why he
Speaker 1: thinks the climate movement can't succeed without it, and whether
Speaker 1: capitalism can survive the end of fossil fields. Andreas, Welcome
Speaker 1: to zero. Thank you so much. Chance. So, in How
Speaker 1: to Blow Up a Pipeline, you argue that no revolution
Speaker 1: throughout history has succeeded without accompanying violence, and that for
Speaker 1: the climate movement to succeed, it needs violent action. But
Speaker 1: violence is a very high threshold to cross. Can you
Speaker 1: first make the case why the world is in such
Speaker 1: a dire position that the violence is needed as an antidote. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Let me just first point out that what I argue
Speaker 1: in the book is that we should use property destruction,
Speaker 1: So violence against things. I explicitly say that we should
Speaker 1: not engage in violence against people. We shouldn't aim to
Speaker 1: extinguish lives, but we should aim to extinguish SUVs and
Speaker 1: coal mines and oil pipelines and all the machines that
Speaker 1: are killing people around the world and are affecting should
Speaker 1: real violence against people, Yeah, I mean the dire state
Speaker 1: we're in, it should be pretty obvious to anyone who's
Speaker 1: following the news who's not living under stone. I mean,
Speaker 1: a lot of Pakistan is still underwater as we speak.
Speaker 1: A lot of Nigeria is also submerged under water after
Speaker 1: unprecedented floods. There is a very bad and protracted drought
Speaker 1: crisis on the Horn of Africa, and on and on
Speaker 1: it goes. And all of these extreme weather events that
Speaker 1: we see now are the results of the emissions that
Speaker 1: have accumulated over the past two centuries. What we're experiencing
Speaker 1: this year in twenty twenty two is but a foretaste
Speaker 1: of what is to come. It's a mistake to think that, ah,
Speaker 1: this is what global warming looks like. No, it's not.
Speaker 1: Global warming is hardwired to deteriorate in so far as
Speaker 1: emissions continue, and they do continue. Not only do they continue,
Speaker 1: but what we're experiencing right now after the pandemic and
Speaker 1: the rebound and reinforced by the war in Ukraine, is
Speaker 1: an exceptional profit bonanza for the oil and gas companies
Speaker 1: used to reinvest in even more pipelines, gas terminals, coal mines,
Speaker 1: exactly what we cannot have anymore. So clearly, what the
Speaker 1: climate movement or anyone else for that matter, has done
Speaker 1: so far has been insufficient. We haven't done enough because
Speaker 1: we have come nowhere close to reining in the forces
Speaker 1: that are bent on just pouring more fossil fuels on
Speaker 1: the fire. But dug me through the historical examples that
Speaker 1: you write about in your book, where you say, for
Speaker 1: any large movement there is usually a violent arm that
Speaker 1: is helping bring about change. That it's not always the peaceful,
Speaker 1: the non violent arm, which may be larger, but a small,
Speaker 1: targeted violent arm that also does it. Yeah. So I
Speaker 1: should point out that the discussion of historical cases in
Speaker 1: this book that I wrote is brief and superficial, and
Speaker 1: it's formulated in response to a particularly kind of narrative
Speaker 1: that was developed by people in the climate movement. Notably
Speaker 1: extinction rebellion that says that we had these precedents, these
Speaker 1: examples in history where people have successfully defeated injustices through
Speaker 1: exclusively non violent means, and we're going to do the
Speaker 1: same on the climate front. So the cases that are
Speaker 1: usually adduced here are the struggle against slavery in the Americas,
Speaker 1: suffragets on the struggle for women's right to vote, the
Speaker 1: civil rights movement in the US, anti colonial movements with
Speaker 1: a focus on India, the struggle against Apartheide, and various
Speaker 1: democratic revolutions. And if you go through each and one
Speaker 1: of these cases, you see that that isn't exactly what happened.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of peace washing required to establish the
Speaker 1: storyline that there was no militancy, no violent confrontation, no
Speaker 1: property destruction, no riots or anything like that. It was
Speaker 1: just peaceful civil disbeinience I mean slavery to begin with,
Speaker 1: Where should you even start? The historical interpretation of these
Speaker 1: events is biased. To put it mildly, the Suffragets used
Speaker 1: very extensive campaigns of arson and even bombing, and tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of property destruction to fight for the women's right
Speaker 1: to vote. The civil rights movement in the US had
Speaker 1: a very productive relation to a more radical flank in
Speaker 1: the form of urban riots and movements like the Nation
Speaker 1: of Islam and the Black Power movement. This is the
Speaker 1: classical case for the theory of the radical flank. These
Speaker 1: groups made the civil rights mainstream represented by Martin Luther King,
Speaker 1: appear less dangerous in the eyes of the institutions of
Speaker 1: white supremacy, and therefore they were inclined to concede to
Speaker 1: their demands because they knew that unless we do this,
Speaker 1: we'll end up with Malcolm X and stoke the carmac
Speaker 1: on of those people who are ten times worse. The
Speaker 1: various democratic revolutions, including the toppling of the Berlin Wall,
Speaker 1: included property destruction. I mean, people didn't go up to
Speaker 1: the Berlin Wall and caressed the cement. They broke it
Speaker 1: into pieces. So if you look into the evidence, the data,
Speaker 1: which isn't hard to come by, for all of these
Speaker 1: historical cases that the strategic pacifists point to as examples
Speaker 1: and models for how we're going to win the climate battle,
Speaker 1: the narrative falls apart because that's just not what happened.
Speaker 1: Although in these violent cases, even in the places where
Speaker 1: property destruction was the main motive, there were related debts.
Speaker 1: So let's just understand that you are advocating for violence
Speaker 1: against property, not humans. So first, why is it okay
Speaker 1: to do that to property? And second what happens when
Speaker 1: humans are unintentionally harmed in the process. Yeah, so this
Speaker 1: is a very important and tricky question. I mean, morally,
Speaker 1: there is a significant difference between slashing tires of an
Speaker 1: suv and stabbing piercing someone's lungs. I think that's the
Speaker 1: example I use in the book. I mean the moral
Speaker 1: difference between destroying an inanimate objects that doesn't have a life.
Speaker 1: It's something qualitatively different from going after a person with
Speaker 1: a life and ending that life or harming that person deliberately. Now,
Speaker 1: if you want to way to campaign that exclusively targets things,
Speaker 1: not people, you have to have a collective discipline in
Speaker 1: that movement where people agree that we're going to sabotage things,
Speaker 1: We're going to destroy things, but are not harming individual
Speaker 1: human beings. We're not assassinating executives or shooting corps or
Speaker 1: something like that. This kind of collective discipline isn't easy
Speaker 1: to establish, but I don't think it's impossible. We have
Speaker 1: quite a few examples from history and from more contemporary
Speaker 1: periods where that collective discipline has been successfully pursued. There
Speaker 1: were environmental movements that had their own disadvantages in my
Speaker 1: view in the nineteen nineties in the US and elsewhere
Speaker 1: that waged quite methodic, systematical campaigns or properly destruction without
Speaker 1: ever harming human beings. I think the uprising after the
Speaker 1: murder of George Floyd is another example where people in
Speaker 1: the US destroyed a lot of property, including police property,
Speaker 1: and that included riots, but there was a general implicit
Speaker 1: understanding that we're not going to assassinate corps or you know,
Speaker 1: guns and shoot them or something like that. And that's
Speaker 1: not for lack of guns in the US. There's any
Speaker 1: country in the world where you can get hold of
Speaker 1: a gun and shoot a corp is probably in the US.
Speaker 1: But I think the movement new and this collective self
Speaker 1: discipline extended to that gigantic movement that developed in the
Speaker 1: wake of the murder of George Floyd, that was a
Speaker 1: step that shouldn't be taken. And I think that now
Speaker 1: that the climate movement is beginning to experimenting with sabotage
Speaker 1: and discussing it and reflecting on property instruction. There is
Speaker 1: a very strong consensus that it's out of the question
Speaker 1: that we would use arms to physically injure the lives
Speaker 1: of people who engage in fossil fuel extraction or whatever.
Speaker 1: It would be morally wrong and it would also harm
Speaker 1: our cause. Now we've seen a number of high profile
Speaker 1: groups that have taken direct action in the name of
Speaker 1: climate There is a group called the Tire Extinguishers, which
Speaker 1: does not slash tires but deflates them. We have groups
Speaker 1: in the UK like Insulate Britain that stop motorway traffic,
Speaker 1: and Extinction Rebellion has been doing actions that have stopped
Speaker 1: many parts of London from completely operating, including stopping public transport.
Speaker 1: These all get attention and they are succeeding in highlighting
Speaker 1: climate change. You know, there are people who love them,
Speaker 1: they're people who hate them. But are these good examples
Speaker 1: of the kinds of action you'd like to see? Well?
Speaker 1: I advocate a diversity of tactics, which means that I
Speaker 1: think we should try almost everything. Like I said, we
Speaker 1: shouldn't engage in assassinations or terrorism, or use arms or
Speaker 1: anything like that, but until that line or boundary, we
Speaker 1: need virtually everything, which means that we need petitions, we
Speaker 1: need court cases, we need parliamentary campaigns. We need in
Speaker 1: gels and lobbing efforts. We need actions of the time
Speaker 1: that extinction Rebellion has undertaken. We need mass demonstrations, school strikes,
Speaker 1: trade unions, all the way up to sabotage and property destruction.
Speaker 1: That said, and with the greatest respect to everything that
Speaker 1: Extinction Rebellion or XR has accomplished over the past three years,
Speaker 1: I do think that targeting general urban life has a
Speaker 1: particular logic that makes some sense. It attracts a lot
Speaker 1: of attention, but it can also be quite imprecise in
Speaker 1: its targeting of virtually anything and anyone. I think that
Speaker 1: it's more strategically productive to do things such as just
Speaker 1: stop oil, another of these offshoots from XR has done
Speaker 1: when they have blockaded the actual distribution and processing of oil,
Speaker 1: because that is to go to the source of the problem. Likewise,
Speaker 1: I think the tire extinguishers when they deflate SUVs, have
Speaker 1: a high degree of precision because they go after machines
Speaker 1: that are completely pointless and that cause luxury emissions, and
Speaker 1: that's much more effective and politically fruitful than, for instance,
Speaker 1: stopping a subway train, which the x Are did infamously
Speaker 1: in late twenty nineteen in London, which had no political
Speaker 1: logic to it whatsoever. Because that's even part of the solution,
Speaker 1: it's not part of the problem. My personal preferences are
Speaker 1: for mass actions or small group direct actions that target
Speaker 1: fossil fuel infrastructure and machines for luxury emissions with a
Speaker 1: high degree of precision, could you explain the difference between
Speaker 1: luxury and subsistence emissions and why it is okay to
Speaker 1: target one and not the other. Yeah, So the classical
Speaker 1: distinction hereness between emissions that are the outcome of subsistence
Speaker 1: like ativities as in farmers cultivating vice for instance, and
Speaker 1: the rice paddies producing methane. You don't attack that because
Speaker 1: these emissions are byproducts of activities that reproduce these humans lives.
Speaker 1: Luxury emissions are emissions that stem from economic activities that
Speaker 1: have no such function. So people who drive SUVs or
Speaker 1: take private jets for seventeen minutes when they could just
Speaker 1: as well have taken public transportation, or who have their
Speaker 1: super yachts or whatever. Don't do this because they wouldn't
Speaker 1: survive otherwise, you know, it's not like their bodies would
Speaker 1: dissolve if they didn't have these machines or commodities. They
Speaker 1: do it primarily to flaunt their wealth. It's part of
Speaker 1: a luxury lifestyle, which means that these emissions are completely pointless.
Speaker 1: But they're all are the most damaging ones because they
Speaker 1: produce these excesses of CO two. So the carbon inequality
Speaker 1: in populations is increasing all the time, where it's you know,
Speaker 1: the distribution of emissions gets more and more skewed, and
Speaker 1: it's more and more concentrated at the top. And these
Speaker 1: emissions would presumably be the first that you take down
Speaker 1: because they can be easily done away with, because no
Speaker 1: one would die from not having to write a super yacht.
Speaker 1: The problem is that governments are beholding to precisely these
Speaker 1: class interests, so they are much much more likely to
Speaker 1: do it the other way around. If they're targeting anyone,
Speaker 1: that's probably working people, because that's usually the people that
Speaker 1: they target. So the climate movement needs to target luxury
Speaker 1: emissions when no one else does. You've participated in direct
Speaker 1: action yourself. In two thousand and six and seven in Sweden.
Speaker 1: You deflated tires of SUVs in twenty sixteen in Germany
Speaker 1: and broke through the fence of a coal power plant,
Speaker 1: which then had to be shut down. Do you think
Speaker 1: those efforts have been more successful than the other, less
Speaker 1: direct or less focused efforts. No, I can't claim that
Speaker 1: there has been any major success on the part of
Speaker 1: these campaigns because they've been extremely limited in scale. We
Speaker 1: don't know yet if sabotage and property destruction will work
Speaker 1: because it hasn't been tried on a significant scale enough.
Speaker 1: I mean, what we do know from the campaign of
Speaker 1: defeating SUVs back in two thousand and seven was that
Speaker 1: it seems to have cost or at least contributed to
Speaker 1: a significant drop in SUV sales in Sweden that year.
Speaker 1: And you see I think similar signs now with the
Speaker 1: tire extinguishers. That you have mainstream outlets such as telegraph
Speaker 1: advising car consumers to not purchase SUVs because then they
Speaker 1: run the risk of waking up in the morning to
Speaker 1: deflated tires. But it needs to happen on a much
Speaker 1: much greater scale for us to know its full effects.
Speaker 1: What I argue in the book is that there is
Speaker 1: a potential here that awaits expiration and activation that we
Speaker 1: should make the most of this tactic. As for the
Speaker 1: tire extinguishers, what's so great about their particular tactic is
Speaker 1: that it's so easy for people to copy it. We
Speaker 1: just need a little bit of courage to go out
Speaker 1: in the cover of the night and deflate SUV tires.
Speaker 1: So that's a type of action that spread very easily,
Speaker 1: and I think we'll continue to do so. You say
Speaker 1: it hasn't been tested at scale, but here is an
Speaker 1: ongoing test right in turning off gas supplies to Europe.
Speaker 1: Russia has in a metaphorical way, if not a literal sense,
Speaker 1: blown up its pipelines to Europe. And what has that done.
Speaker 1: It has brought many European economies to their knees. Sri
Speaker 1: Lanka ran out of petrol and diesel. Okay, there was
Speaker 1: some money problem, but also it was at a time
Speaker 1: when petrol and diesel prices were so high Pakistan couldn't
Speaker 1: buy natural gas that it had built infrastructure to be
Speaker 1: able to provide subsistence emissions, which is real power to
Speaker 1: people who really needed, not luxury emissions. So if we
Speaker 1: do take it to the logical extreme and blow up pipelines.
Speaker 1: If these are the impacts that we will see, how
Speaker 1: do you think people would join such a movement. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but this isn't the first time in history that we
Speaker 1: have oiler price shocks with metaphorical suspension of pipelines. That's
Speaker 1: exactly what we had in nineteen seventy three with the
Speaker 1: first circled oil crisis, or in nineteen seventy nine eighty
Speaker 1: with the second oil crisis with the Iranian revolution, and
Speaker 1: none of these acts, just like with what's happening with
Speaker 1: Putin's pipelines of gas to Europe, had any kind of
Speaker 1: client him, its agenda behind them. And I mean Putin
Speaker 1: isn't doing this because he wants to stop fossil fuel.
Speaker 1: To the contrary, he wants to continue as much as possible.
Speaker 1: And it's virtually a climate denialist as far as I know.
Speaker 1: A climate movement that would shut down fossil fuel infrastructure
Speaker 1: would do it in a completely different kind of political
Speaker 1: context than with another logic and message, and it would
Speaker 1: have to be combined, of course, with a demand to
Speaker 1: roll out solar and wind power at the highest possible
Speaker 1: speed through public investment, and that is the response that
Speaker 1: has to be provided to questions of energy poverty and
Speaker 1: energy crisis that we're seeing unfolding in the world and
Speaker 1: hitting of course poor people primarily. The absurdity here is
Speaker 1: that solar and wind are becoming cheaper and cheaper and
Speaker 1: cheaper year by years, so that in most places around
Speaker 1: the world there are cheaper per unit of energy than
Speaker 1: fossil fuse. However, for big energy companies, that's not an
Speaker 1: incentive to invest in them because the profits are much
Speaker 1: higher in oil and gas. So big big companies such
Speaker 1: as you know, Saudi aramcoor or Xon or BP, what
Speaker 1: they're doing right now is that they're using these high
Speaker 1: profits on fossil fuels that are partly caused by the
Speaker 1: war in Ukraine to invest even further in fossil fuels,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that we have a situation where the
Speaker 1: world economy as a whole would gain strictly financially from
Speaker 1: a complete shift from fossil fuels to renewabooks. And that's
Speaker 1: a perversity of the system that has to be challenged somehow.
Speaker 1: Let's take that and split it open a little bit more. So,
Speaker 1: what's happening right now with the Russia situation is that
Speaker 1: access to fossil fuels has been suddenly cut off. What
Speaker 1: you're suggesting is you would do it in a way
Speaker 1: where you wouldn't have such sudden disruptions, even though blowing
Speaker 1: up a pipeline is a sudden action, so to speak.
Speaker 1: But you'd do it strategically such that you are not
Speaker 1: bringing entire economies to the knees. But the driving mantra
Speaker 1: for oil and gas companies, and this is the term
Speaker 1: they themselves invented. It's called the social license to operate.
Speaker 1: They say, we need a social license to operate, and
Speaker 1: currently that license comes from providing energy that the world
Speaker 1: needs and doing it in a way that is cheap
Speaker 1: enough and reliable enough for them to be able to afford.
Speaker 1: The thing that they are worried about is when climate
Speaker 1: change takes the social license to operate out, because people
Speaker 1: know that the products they're using and the emissions that
Speaker 1: are being caused by those products is exactly what's harming
Speaker 1: the world. This is the moment where that social license
Speaker 1: to operate swings back into their favor. You mean this
Speaker 1: moment of the war. Yes, yeah. If they are successful
Speaker 1: in establishing the notion that the only option on the
Speaker 1: table is more fossil fuse, and governments have largely gone
Speaker 1: with that. Early in the war there was a moment
Speaker 1: a little bit similar to early in the pandemic, where
Speaker 1: people thought that, oh, now this might be the big
Speaker 1: opportunity to get rid of fossil fuse, because now it's
Speaker 1: demonstrated to everyone that the reliance on Russian fossil fuels
Speaker 1: has made us vulnerable. So let's just ditch fossil fuels
Speaker 1: and have the transition finally to renewables. It didn't happen
Speaker 1: with the pandemic. It didn't happen with the war, and
Speaker 1: with the war instead, what you've seen is, of course
Speaker 1: countries in Europe trying to replace Russian fossil fuse with
Speaker 1: other kinds of fossil fuse. What you could do is
Speaker 1: you could massively roll out solar and wind, but that
Speaker 1: would require public investment on a large scale, and it
Speaker 1: would require a degree of coordination and a degree of coercion.
Speaker 1: You would have to overrule local resistance against certain wind
Speaker 1: projects and stuff like that. There's no technical reason for
Speaker 1: the failure to use the war as a spur to
Speaker 1: the transition. It's a political thing. It's clear that property
Speaker 1: destruction can be viewed as a form of violence. But
Speaker 1: with climate change causing more and more destruction and death,
Speaker 1: why don't we see fossil fuel use as similarly violent.
Speaker 1: That's coming up after the break. Let's talk through one
Speaker 1: thing that you have mentioned in the past that I'd
Speaker 1: love for you to explain in a different way. So
Speaker 1: you're talking about violence against property. Here you explain to
Speaker 1: us the moral case, Like, you know, you shouldn't be
Speaker 1: going out and killing humans, but there are studies that
Speaker 1: show clearly that every million tons of C or two
Speaker 1: that is put out into the atmosphere does kill people.
Speaker 1: So there is a moral act of violence being committed.
Speaker 1: But that moral act of violence isn't seen today as
Speaker 1: a moral act of violence. Why is that? Exactly? This
Speaker 1: is the big problem, or one of the big problems.
Speaker 1: So I think that it's becoming clearer by the day
Speaker 1: that taking up fossil fuels out of the ground and
Speaker 1: putting them on fire is an act of violence. It's
Speaker 1: an act of sending indiscriminately projectiles into the human population,
Speaker 1: blindly hitting primarily civilian populations in the global cut. The
Speaker 1: reason that this isn't yet seen by the broader public
Speaker 1: as the kind of violence that it is is that
Speaker 1: it's mediated through the atmosphere. You will never see a
Speaker 1: fossil fuel executive standing on the top of the Pakistani
Speaker 1: farmer and having his knee on the neck of someone
Speaker 1: in the way that Derek Chovin had his body on
Speaker 1: top of George Floyd in a kind of immediate body
Speaker 1: to body, direct hands on violence. Violence in a warming
Speaker 1: world is filter, is mediated through the atmosphere, and it
Speaker 1: hits people at a great distance away from the sources
Speaker 1: of extraction and combustion, and therefore it's very difficult to
Speaker 1: see it for what it is. The task for the
Speaker 1: climate movement is to make clear for people that these
Speaker 1: are acts of violence. Building new pipelines today, a new
Speaker 1: gas terminals, opening new oil fields, or acts of violence
Speaker 1: that need to be stopped. They kill people. We know that,
Speaker 1: and it's it's again. You have to be aware that
Speaker 1: it's we are at a different point in history. So
Speaker 1: doing these things one hundred years ago might not have
Speaker 1: caused a lot of harm because the atmosphere wasn't yet
Speaker 1: filled with seal two. Now that it's filled, it's over
Speaker 1: filled with seal two. Adding more C two to the
Speaker 1: atmosphere means you're doing direct harm to people and other
Speaker 1: forms of life. Now, the other thing that has made
Speaker 1: a big difference is that the climate movement has been
Speaker 1: growing in number, and that's for many reasons. There's better organizing,
Speaker 1: there's better connection of science to an extreme weather event,
Speaker 1: there's obviously more awareness of the impact. But also when
Speaker 1: somebody goes out and does an action, it emboldens other
Speaker 1: people to join that movement. Most of that, however, just
Speaker 1: because of the nature of movements as they have existed
Speaker 1: so far, has been through non violence. But what you
Speaker 1: are suggesting is property damage, and that is a violent activity. Now,
Speaker 1: I struggle with the idea of joining a protest at all,
Speaker 1: and I definitely will struggle with one where I knew
Speaker 1: that there's going to be some sort of property damage involved.
Speaker 1: And so, how do you think this movement will grow
Speaker 1: if violence or property damage is supposed to be one
Speaker 1: central tenet? Yeah, So, first of all, I emphasize in
Speaker 1: the book, and I hope I've made a clear elsewhere too,
Speaker 1: that the bulk of all activities to the climate movement
Speaker 1: undertakes will continue to be non violent in nature. That
Speaker 1: has to be the case. Question is should we add
Speaker 1: something more to our arsenal, And I think there's a
Speaker 1: case to be made for that, including that some people
Speaker 1: would be more maybe not you, maybe not me, but
Speaker 1: some people would be more inclined to join if there
Speaker 1: was a greater moment of antagonism and militancy. And I
Speaker 1: do think that the climate movement needs to be better
Speaker 1: at articulating anger as a key emotion in climate politics.
Speaker 1: I think obviously there's a great risk that sabotage, property
Speaker 1: destruction in any form will deter people, and that's one
Speaker 1: reason why we need to be careful and intelligent about
Speaker 1: what kind of sabotage we're undertaking. So we're not going
Speaker 1: to blow up a pipeline in the middle of a
Speaker 1: I don't know, Latino community in Houston that accidentally sets
Speaker 1: on fire houses and people have to flee or something
Speaker 1: like that. That would be very bad thing to do.
Speaker 1: But there might be other kinds of fossil fuel installations,
Speaker 1: including you know, just the other week and now, speaking
Speaker 1: about what happened in August in Germany, you had in
Speaker 1: the Gillende going into a site where a gas pipeline
Speaker 1: was under construction, and conducting quite extensive sabotage against that site.
Speaker 1: And I think that is something that can be explained
Speaker 1: to people and people can make sense of it, because
Speaker 1: it's clear that this is precisely the kind of installations
Speaker 1: that we can't have any more of. So it depends
Speaker 1: on how you do it. Right now, you can imagine
Speaker 1: that one act of property destruction can lead to another
Speaker 1: act of violence, so and aggravated ASUV driver whose tires
Speaker 1: have been deflated might end up being more aggressive to
Speaker 1: cyclists on their road, or if you're in the US,
Speaker 1: there's a very real danger of getting shot because guns
Speaker 1: are so easy to come by, And of course there
Speaker 1: is the sort of reaction that state power brings in
Speaker 1: where harsh sentences are given to protesters and activists. Do
Speaker 1: you think these are just inadvitable consequences of what you're
Speaker 1: proposing and that we should just be ready for them,
Speaker 1: well to an extent in the sense that I don't
Speaker 1: know that history can generate a single example of the
Speaker 1: movement that has challenged deeply entrenched interests without having to
Speaker 1: grapple with the problem of repression from state apparatusis and
Speaker 1: various kinds of backlash from people who are deeply invested
Speaker 1: in the status quo. That's part of the game that
Speaker 1: we're playing here, and we can't really run away from it. However,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that we should be sanguine or cynical
Speaker 1: about this and say that inevitably people will be shot
Speaker 1: by infuriated suv owners, so let's just go with it,
Speaker 1: or sooner or later we'll all end up in jail.
Speaker 1: We should try to minimize this kind of reaction and
Speaker 1: minimize the harm that it can do to the movement
Speaker 1: that begins. I think with the break with the idea
Speaker 1: that part of climate activism is to get arrested and
Speaker 1: stand trial and subject yourself to repression, and that's part
Speaker 1: of the classical civil disobedience protocol. You know that once
Speaker 1: you've done your action, you also allow yourself to be arrested,
Speaker 1: and you make your case in the court, and you
Speaker 1: assume responsibility for what you've done by doing your prison
Speaker 1: and sentence or something like that. I really think that
Speaker 1: we've had enough of that and that we should from
Speaker 1: the climate movement instead think of it this way. We
Speaker 1: want to accomplish as much as possible ball with as
Speaker 1: little repression as possible. So it's a much better gain
Speaker 1: or a much better win for us if we managed
Speaker 1: to shut down a coal fired power plant or something
Speaker 1: like that with zero activists being arrested. That's not going
Speaker 1: to guarantee, of course, that we will always out with
Speaker 1: the courts. No, we won't. If we're in a running
Speaker 1: battle with an existing, deeply entrenched social order. Yes, people
Speaker 1: will suffer costs. That's what social struggle means virtually by definition,
Speaker 1: if it's a real confrontation that shakes things up properly.
Speaker 1: So we are seeing a significant backlash to the existing
Speaker 1: non violent protests in the UK. The Police and Crime Bill,
Speaker 1: which was strendened in twenty twenty two, provide specific provisions
Speaker 1: that tackle protests like extinction rebellion to block traffic and
Speaker 1: can put people into jail for ten years if laws
Speaker 1: are broken. If we go down the property instruction route,
Speaker 1: I'd real likely to see more politicians and more of
Speaker 1: the status quo campaigning on law and order to bring
Speaker 1: in even stricter punishment. That's what always happened when you escalate. Yes,
Speaker 1: so if you go from just nice demonstrations to civil
Speaker 1: disobedience of the XR kind, you will have these more
Speaker 1: punitive laws that you see if you take the next
Speaker 1: step and go into sambotage and property destruction, yes there
Speaker 1: will also be tougher sanctions. But this is how the
Speaker 1: vested interests of business as usual or the prevailing order
Speaker 1: always react to challenges. We cannot from that draw the
Speaker 1: conclusion that we have to opt for tactic that doesn't
Speaker 1: incure the wrath of the existing structure, because that means
Speaker 1: basically staying at home or not posing any danger to
Speaker 1: the system. As soon as you do pose a danger
Speaker 1: to the system, this is what you'll get in return,
Speaker 1: and that's a sign that you're doing something good, that
Speaker 1: you're actually challenging some interests. Now, I do think that
Speaker 1: when we're looking at the climate crisis, we need to
Speaker 1: take into account that this crisis will only get worse
Speaker 1: and we have to escalate. I mean, will be completely
Speaker 1: irrelevant if we continue to march dressed in polarbial costumes
Speaker 1: in twenty thirty five, like within the nineteen ninety five, If,
Speaker 1: as seems likely to be the case, the world is
Speaker 1: on fire, it's an even greater extent then than what
Speaker 1: it is now. Also, I think that the social license
Speaker 1: for repression against climate activists, if you see what I mean,
Speaker 1: will inevitably undergo some kind of change the worst this
Speaker 1: crisis becomes. At least, that's what you have to hope,
Speaker 1: if there's any rationality left in the species and in
Speaker 1: our societies, that people will have a greater degree of
Speaker 1: understanding and sympathy with climate activists who are fighting against
Speaker 1: spiraling death. In the book, you tell the story of
Speaker 1: two climate workers, Jessica Rasnichick and Ruby Montoya, who sabotaged
Speaker 1: the Dakota Access Pipeline in twenty sixteen. Now, Resnichick has
Speaker 1: been sentenced to eight years in jail with a terrorism enhancement.
Speaker 1: Do you think it was worth it? Yeah, obviously. I
Speaker 1: think she's a heroine and I have the greatest respect
Speaker 1: for her. Now, it's a very complicated legal case, with
Speaker 1: a lot of back and forth and the infiltration and
Speaker 1: FBI and collaboration of things like that. I'm not fully
Speaker 1: up to date with the latest twists in the story,
Speaker 1: but anyway, what we know is that these two activists
Speaker 1: ran up and down the Dakota Access Pipeline and destroyed
Speaker 1: as much of it as they could. Then they ended
Speaker 1: their campaign, and after a while they decided to give
Speaker 1: themselves in and went public with their act to inspire
Speaker 1: others and let themselves be arrested. That's one way of
Speaker 1: doing it. Another way of doing it is what people
Speaker 1: did in British Columbia in late February twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: when you had twenty activists storming a site where the
Speaker 1: coastal gas link pipeline was being constructed in the wet
Speaker 1: Suit and First Nation territory, and they chased the way
Speaker 1: guards and took over the site and used trucks and
Speaker 1: bulldozers to smash every equipment that they could. When the
Speaker 1: police came to the site, they kept the police away
Speaker 1: until they were all gone, these activists, and they had
Speaker 1: also destroyed methodically all video surveillance cameras, so there was
Speaker 1: no evidence of who had done this, and as far
Speaker 1: as I know, not a single of these twenty activists
Speaker 1: has been arrested. That's another way of approaching this problem
Speaker 1: of having a very high profile action of property destruction
Speaker 1: and then making sure that no one is arrested, and
Speaker 1: to me, that's more productive. I talked to the novelist
Speaker 1: Amitav Koch, who you probably know, who's written nonfiction books
Speaker 1: about climate change, and we were talking about your book
Speaker 1: and he said this which has stayed with me. He said,
Speaker 1: if you and I, as brown people were to get
Speaker 1: involved in property damage, imagine what would happen. And honestly,
Speaker 1: it was a scary thought. And the more I've thought
Speaker 1: about it, the more I've been scared. Because I came
Speaker 1: to the UK as an immigrant. I was on a
Speaker 1: visa working in organizations where my visa was tied to
Speaker 1: my work. And you know, even if I was not brown,
Speaker 1: I would still be very careful, and I was, and
Speaker 1: I've always been very careful about making sure everything is
Speaker 1: done right because I never want to be caught out
Speaker 1: as doing something wrong. You know, I'm a journalist. Another
Speaker 1: reason why you have to do it so to do
Speaker 1: anything of this level of disruption in a public setting
Speaker 1: is it's so hard for me to appreciate how much
Speaker 1: courage it takes that I fear it's not enough. I
Speaker 1: don't know if people understand why they should even be
Speaker 1: taking this step. So you're talking about brown or non
Speaker 1: white people in the global North. Yes, so, yes, I
Speaker 1: mean I get your point, but I think this situation
Speaker 1: here is very complicated and it has a lot of
Speaker 1: different answers to First of all, if we're looking at Europe,
Speaker 1: it's not exactly the case that racialized communities are the
Speaker 1: most adverse to various kinds of political violence. If you
Speaker 1: look at France, for instance, or my own country, Sweden,
Speaker 1: when riots happen, if they happen at all, I mean,
Speaker 1: in Sweden, rioting is an extremely rare phenomenon. But if
Speaker 1: anyone is ever rioting, it's non white people. And why
Speaker 1: is that because at the bottom of the pile, and
Speaker 1: they are angry about being systematically discriminated against. So it's
Speaker 1: not like political violence in Sweden or in France or
Speaker 1: anywhere else in Europe is some kind of a white
Speaker 1: privilege or a white monopoly. And I also think that
Speaker 1: the relation to the cops here is it's more like
Speaker 1: the other way around. In Extinction rebellion in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: in its first iteration was extremely cop positive. If you
Speaker 1: if you know what I mean. You know, they would
Speaker 1: send flowers to the police and say we're doing this
Speaker 1: for the you two and stuff like that. And if
Speaker 1: anyone got upset about that, it was non white people
Speaker 1: who would argue that no people from racialized communities would
Speaker 1: would you know, love bomb the police the way you do,
Speaker 1: you're really telling us that this is not a movement
Speaker 1: for people who are systematically harassed by the police. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, of course, there is something to it
Speaker 1: that certain people can engage in more high profile, provocative
Speaker 1: political actions than others and risk less consequence. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think me, being a white man, even just saying
Speaker 1: and writing those things, is a way for me to
Speaker 1: use a privilege. I also happened to be an academic
Speaker 1: with a tenure position, so I have a relatively secure
Speaker 1: employment situation, and I'm more or less intentionally use this
Speaker 1: privilege to say and write things that would have been
Speaker 1: much more difficult for a non white woman in a
Speaker 1: precarious working situation. Is that me exercising my privilege? Yes,
Speaker 1: it is. But sometimes this is the way that you
Speaker 1: should exercise your privilege. I think. So if some of
Speaker 1: us can say or do things and get away with it,
Speaker 1: I don't see why that is necessarily wrong in and
Speaker 1: of itself. So it's a it's a complicated picture, but
Speaker 1: I don't I don't think it's the case that this
Speaker 1: is only for white people. No, I don't think you
Speaker 1: were once asked about the fact that is it only
Speaker 1: possible to win in the climate freight by overthrowing capitalism,
Speaker 1: and you said, no, do you still think that. I
Speaker 1: think that what we know is that it's by definition
Speaker 1: impossible to get the climate classes under any kind of
Speaker 1: control and limit its damage without abolishing, forever for good,
Speaker 1: the part of the capitalist class that profits from the
Speaker 1: production of fosil fuse. So we can't have that. We
Speaker 1: cannot have private property and fossil fuse. We cannot have
Speaker 1: capital accumulation based on the extraction of fosiph fuse. Does
Speaker 1: that mean that when we accomplish that, capitalism as an
Speaker 1: entire mode of production also goes out of existence. That
Speaker 1: I don't think we can know for sure. I think
Speaker 1: it's logically conceivable to have capitalism without fossil use. However,
Speaker 1: if we're actually abolishing this core of fossil capital that
Speaker 1: profits from fossil fuse, we are setting in motion social
Speaker 1: processes that might there will take us beyond the existing
Speaker 1: economic system or political order. We talked a little bit
Speaker 1: about anger, and you said the climate movement needs to
Speaker 1: get better at understanding it, at exploring it, at expressing it.
Speaker 1: But anger in society manifests in terrible ways because simmering
Speaker 1: anger has health consequences, has physical health consequences, has mental
Speaker 1: health consequences. But as a tool it can be used
Speaker 1: for good. So what has been through your exploration of
Speaker 1: these topics of of anger, which I feel like is
Speaker 1: one thing that you have been trying to articulate for
Speaker 1: the climate movement that you think is the right way
Speaker 1: to understand anger and use anger. Well, I think the
Speaker 1: deleterious effect of anger come primarily when anger is you know,
Speaker 1: bolted up and kept on the inside and not given
Speaker 1: any kind of vent to. That's when people suffer from it, really.
Speaker 1: But when you have some kind of an outlet for anger,
Speaker 1: and an outlet that is legitimate and justified, then that's
Speaker 1: I think beneficial way of dealing with that emotion. It's
Speaker 1: helpful for the people who have that emotion. And I
Speaker 1: also think that in the case of climate, a lot
Speaker 1: of people feel despair, hopelessness, paralysis, fear, and other kinds
Speaker 1: of emotions that are demobili thing and that tend to
Speaker 1: produce anguish and exciting and the alternative often is anger.
Speaker 1: Because we know from psychological research that if there's any
Speaker 1: emotion that fuels social mobilization. It's anger, be it the
Speaker 1: uprising after the murder of George Floyd, or the Me
Speaker 1: Too movement, or the Yellow Vests, or the struggle against
Speaker 1: slavery or whatever. Anger is normally the psychic fuel of
Speaker 1: the movements of that sort. So this is the emotion
Speaker 1: that the climate movement also needs to learn to give
Speaker 1: voice too, and we haven't seen that at scale yet.
Speaker 1: It's still in the future. Thank you. There was a
Speaker 1: wonderful conversation. Thank you. I appreciate. One thing is clear,
Speaker 1: rewiring the world to run on clean energy will need creativity.
Speaker 1: A political movement, whether it is based on an ideology
Speaker 1: you agree with or not, is the perfect poopore for
Speaker 1: shaking things up. Thanks so much for listening to Zero.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please rate, review, and subscribe
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Speaker 1: want us to look into, get in touch at Zero
Speaker 1: pod at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd
Speaker 1: and senior producer is Christine riscoll Our. Theme music is
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Speaker 1: This week a special thanks to podcast producer Magnus Hendrickson,
Speaker 1: who helps us rest easy by canceling unnecessary meetings. We're
Speaker 1: going to be off for the next couple of weeks
Speaker 1: for the New Year's happy holidays, and thanks for listening
Speaker 1: to Zero in twenty twenty two. I'm Akshatrati. See you
Speaker 1: in the new year. The Ett