This book isn't about how to blow up a pipeline. Obviously, that would lead to [REDACTED], but more about why to blow up a pipeline. Malm poses an interesting question: If we take the climate science seriously, and that we are heading towards a dark Here Be Dragons future of 600+ ppm, mass extinctions, heavy weather, refugee crises, and desperate struggles over the last scraps, why has the environmental movement been so notably ineffective in enforcing policy to keep carbon in the ground? Isn't it time to do more? Isn't it time to quit talking, and start [REDACTING]?

Of course, an energy transition is complex and expensive. Cheap fossil energy has its tendrils everywhere. We all benefit from it. As an ecomodernist, I'm all in favor of cheap, clean and accessible energy. And even though we've seen major progress in solar, wind, storage, and electric vehicles, it simply isn't enough. The clean energy future is smaller than the dirty energy present of new pipelines, new coal plants, new SUVs, let alone the dead fossil weight of history.

The climate movement is notably both because of its abstraction and idealism, and how it has been neutered by an ideological and tactical commitment to absolute non-violence. In thrall to Chenoweth's thesis that non-violent movements are more likely to succeed, and terrified an alienating any part of a democratic coalition, protests are symbolic, mostly delaying rather destroying. A complete deconstruction of the non-violence thesis is a project for another book, but her sample is obviously flawed and incomplete, categorizing movements which did involve violence as non-violence, and somehow ignoring major successes, like the violent movement which toppled governments in Russia, China, and Germany in the 20th century. Seeing that Chenowith is affiliated with Harvard Kennedy School makes me deeply suspicious that the non-violence fetish is literally a CIA op to make dissent easier to manage. Successful movements such as the suffragettes included deliberate violence against property at a scale between vandalism and arson. While deliberate violence often fails, the impromptu mass of a crowd deciding that this will not stand has toppled dictators.

As Malm points out, actual sabotage from the level of letting the air out of SUV tires, to burning down gas stations, to striking vulnerable fixed installations, has rarely been tried, and when it does, it provokes a response all out of proportion to the seeming irritation. If not killing people remains a key moral principle, attacks on Middle Eastern oil infrastructure by violent terrorist groups, political rather than ecological strikes, have very low casualties. Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya carried out multiple attacks against the Dakota Access Pipeline, causing millions of dollars in damage and earning multiple years in prison.

If I may indulge in a moment of conspiracy, the media is silent about Malm's thesis because it would work. Actual, capital-P Power, the people the rule the world, know how much of their strength is tied up with masses sated on cheap energy, and they believe they can ride this out in the New Zealand Apocalypse Bunkers. Fossil fuel infrastructure is omnipresent, impossible to secure, and so very very flammable. At this moment, with gasoline hitting $8 a gallon in the US and Europe's painful lesson about Russian natural gas dependency being to switch from pipelines to LNG terminals so that they're still dependent on fossil fuels, but no Russia, it seems like, well, maybe this is a chance for a few brave people to [REDACTED].