In his latest book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Malm draws on both his academic and activist experience to make the case that the climate movement should escalate its tactics. It’s a passionate, powerful, deeply flawed, and profoundly necessary book, by turns exclaim-aloud satisfying and hurl-it-across-the-room frustrating. It’s a book that may excite some readers, anger others, convince still others, and alienate many, but it is unlikely to be forgotten by a single one.

[Malm] advocates powerfully against despair and powerlessness. One of the most satisfying parts of his book comes when he brutally dispatches with 'climate fatalists' like Jonathan Franzen, who argue that we should all just give up ... So Malm wants us to fight back (though I should add that there aren’t any actual instructions here about how to blow anything up) ... Sure. But the problem with violence, even if it’s meant only to destroy 'fossil capital,' is that ultimately it’s impossible to control.

I regret to inform the reader that Andreas Malm’s new book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, does not in fact contain instructions on how to blow up a pipeline. The title is aspirational: how to get enough people to realize that (a) drastic measures are now required to prevent or ameliorate the worst effects of global warming, (b) the usual protests and appeals to institutional authority are getting nowhere, and therefore (c) direct action against the instruments and agents of climate disaster is justified ... Malm’s account of his time in climate camps and occupations occasionally succumbs to romanticism.[...] But much of the book is given over to dismantling ahistorical arguments for the climate movement’s commitment to nonviolence ... If Malm’s argument has a flaw, it rests in its reliance on the state ...

Plenty of readers will react (as I did) with a sort of instinctive skepticism to Malm’s case that only widespread property destruction can forestall civilizational suicide, but his case deserves a hearing ... Eloquent as Malm is (in a second language, no less), his brief for 'ecotage,' as he calls it, provokes a few natural objections. One is: Would it actually work? Particularly for an American audience, the specter of ecological sabotage is likely to call up images of the hapless campaigns of such radical green outfits as Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front during the 1980s and 1990s. If peaceful protest, on Malm’s account, has proved unable to redirect the stream of events during the first two decades of this century, the eco-sabotage of the last two decades of the prior century surely matched and exceeded it for pointlessness. The militants involved spiked some trees, destroyed some SUVs, wrote out some graffiti, and (thrillingly, from my point of view at the time) burned down a ski lodge in the Colorado county where I grew up. But this delirious monkey-wrenching did approximately nothing either to derail the juggernaut of ecocidal capitalism or to convert the voting public to the cause. Its main result was long prison sentences for some activists, from a federal government intent on classing vandalism as 'terrorism,' and exile abroad for others ... The events of the last year suggest (but by no means prove) that in fact peaceful protest and technocratic undertakings may be sufficient to induce leading powers to bring their emissions down to a survivable level, no property destruction required. And, ultimately, Malm applies the same standard of efficacy to sabotage that he does to nonviolent protest.