Climate Change Is Violent, That’s Why We Need Sabotage — Andreas Malm Interview

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: In the last 10 years, issues around climate change and political transformation have become ever more relevant. And one of the leading voices in bringing that debate to a wider audience is my guest today, Andreas Malm, a Swedish writer and academic, and most recently author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Purely provocative, may I add. Andreas, thanks for joining us on Downstream. Thank you so much, Aaron. It's a pleasure to be here. We are talking in the run-up to COP26, in the week of COP26, and one of the people who has shifted the debate around climate change in the last several years has been Greta Thunberg. She's Swedish, [00:00:38] Andreas Malm: you're Swedish. Any coincidence? Well, to be honest, I do think it is just an accident. It's a coincidence. I mean, she or I could have come from another Scandinavian country just as well. Do you think? Well, I have a hard time seeing myself embodying anything particularly Swedish. That would very much go against my self-image, at least. I'm such an anti-nationalist and [00:01:05] Speaker 1: self-hating Swede. But from the sort of ruins of 20th century social democracy, the possibility of a sort of radical discourse on climate, I'm not saying that's not the mainstream, but the possibility of [00:01:15] Andreas Malm: one. Do you think there's something in that, perhaps? No. I mean, I personally come from far left has always been very much in opposition to reformist social democracy in Sweden. And I don't think that Greta Thunberg has any kind of lineage, that there's a genealogy from Swedish social democracy to her and what she represents. I mean, my understanding of her political biography is that she does not come out of any, I mean, she doesn't have, she didn't have any organic links to a particular social movement or anything when she started her. I mean, she invented her movement out of nothing. And it didn't really take off in Sweden. I mean, she became famous in Sweden because she had become famous in other countries. And the, her movement is infinitely larger in Germany than in Sweden. I mean, even if you measure by per capita or something. I mean, the school strike movement in Sweden is extremely small compared to other countries. So she could just as well have come from Germany, I think, or some other countries. I mean, people have these misconceptions about Sweden being this, I mean, it's still sort of post utopian almost somehow a little bit of a welfare state miracle or vestiges of it, that's not how I see the country I live in. And I think the sort of fantasy about Sweden that is cultivated not the least by the comrades in Jacobin is pretty much of a fantasy. [00:02:50] Speaker 1: Sometimes fantasies can move people to action though, that's the thing. [00:02:52] Andreas Malm: I know, yeah, for sure. It's just that it doesn't really square with the historical record that I, that's how I see it. [00:03:00] Speaker 1: Yeah. See, your most recent book, and you've been, you've been prodigious in your output recently. Your most recent book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, is highly provocative. It's not a manual for sabotage, or at least I didn't read it as such. But what it does is to pose a very simple question to the climate movement, which is to say, we all know and constantly articulate the scale of the crisis and what this means. And it is existential in the long term. And even in the medium term, it's awful this century. And yet politically, the response is, is limited. It isn't just with reference to governments failing to enact various policies, but actually from radical activists themselves, not adopting the kind of tactics and protest repertoires we would associate with various movements in the 20th century, which for, you know, by any objective understanding was fighting for something which was far less dangerous. So what's your explanation for that? We all recognize the scale of the challenge, what needs to change. And yet actually the tactics are very timid. [00:04:03] Andreas Malm: Yeah, I don't know that I have a good explanation for it. I think it's a puzzle. It's a paradox. It's something that's difficult to explain. And the general deficit of popular action on the climate front is somehow in correspondence with the general deficit of governmental action. Obviously, governments have a particular duty to do things and they are not living up to this duty, but you would also expect there to be more in the way of social unrest around these things, not the least in the global south, I should stress, given how frightened people are, how terrified, how upset, and how much anxiety people tend to have. Again, particularly in the global south. But there is very little in the way of confrontation against the drivers of the catastrophe as such. So, I mean, just one case. This summer was a season in global hell with one climate disaster after another. And there was, to my knowledge, only one such event that sparked a popular revolt. This summer was the water crisis in southern Iran that triggered the so-called water protests in July. And these protests targeted the Islamic Republic and its repressive apparatus and articulated a lot of anger about the regime being unable to fulfill basic needs of the people in Khuzestan in southwestern Iran. But none of these protests targeted the source of the problem that actually exists in Khuzestan in the form of an enormous oil and gas industry that is not benefiting people there, but contributing to the destruction of their livelihoods and, of course, contributing massively to global heating itself. So that's just one, in a sense, paradoxical absence of popular anger that is difficult to explain fully. And I don't think I have a complete explanation. I mean, I can offer a few comments on it. [00:06:19] Speaker 1: Well, which brings me to my next point, which is Extinction Rebellion in the Global North has been probably the most important movement of the last several years. I think that's kind of inarguable. And they sought to make climate change a more salient political issue. I think they succeeded in doing that. And they did so adopting a position of what you refer to as strategic pacifism. And you think that's quite limited. And that also relates to my previous question about why aren't people being more antagonistic in their response? So this thing about strategic pacifism, why have Extinction Rebellion adopted it? And why is that the limit of political antagonism for activists in the Global North? [00:07:00] Andreas Malm: Yeah, so strategic pacifism, the doctrine that says that we should never, we must never move beyond absolutely peaceful civil disobedience. That's as far as we can ever go. And as soon as we were to go any further and adopt anything that would be even remotely linked to violence, we'd immediately lose all popular support, alienate the masses and disappear into the margins. Now, this view, I think, is fairly unique for the climate movement in the Global North, at least if you compare it with certain other major social movements in the Global North in recent years, such as Black Lives Matter and the Yellow Vests, which have adopted a rather different attitude to physical confrontation with the... with the guardians of the ruling order, police forces and property destruction. So the line taken by Extinction Rebellion and by much of the US-based white climate movement, I'm not here referring to indigenous movements, but figures like Bill McKibbin. This line, I would say, needs to be explained with reference to the sort of demographic base of the climate movement in the Global North. Unlike BLM or the Yellow Vests, this has been a movement that has come out of educated white middle class circles. And it hasn't expressed that class rage, or obviously in the sense of... In the case of BLM, it's a lot of... The race aspect is more predominant than class, but that sort of social anger that these two movements have articulated, you haven't seen in the climate movement because it hasn't... It hasn't emerged, it hasn't developed, in this country and in the US, from those strata of the population. It has evolved out of fairly privileged strata that have cultivated a notion of their environmental politics as uncontaminated by... By confrontational attitudes as a morally pure, righteous project that shouldn't be polluted with any kind of violent acts, if you see what I mean? [00:09:22] Speaker 1: And there's a binary here, isn't there? So there's moral pacifism, which is a moral commitment to pacifism, because it's the right thing to do. But then, particularly with Extinction Rebellion, and they assert this through a quasi-scientific lens of strategic pacifism. Moral pacifism, you refuse to engage in anything but totally peaceful means for moral reasons. I think nobody actually believes that. Of course, it's always contingent on what you're trying to achieve and what conditions you're subjected to. But then the strategic pacifism argument is quite interesting, and it seems quite new in its certainty. Yeah. So you have people involved around Extinction Rebellion saying, "Well, actually, if you look at abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement and anti-apartheid, we know what they did, we know how they did it, we need to copy them." And what you claim is that actually that's a complete misreading of history and how these movements evolved and took on power. Can you explain that, that mistake they've made? [00:10:25] Andreas Malm: Well, a comrade in some conversation called this "peacewashing," and I really think that's what's going on here. The sort of erasure of all the messy, turbulent, and often quite violent aspects of these histories. I mean, as if the abolition of slavery happened through some kind of nice, gentle NGO kind of politics. When, first of all, it started with the Haitian Revolution, that's where slavery was first abolished. That wasn't exactly a bloodless affair. It culminated with the U.S. Civil War, which still claimed more lives in the U.S. than all other military conflicts the U.S. has been involved in. So, obviously, this is not to say that we need the equivalent of the U.S. Civil War to solve the climate issue. It's just to show that this kind of history writing has very little relation to easily available evidence about what happened in these various episodes. But I don't think we need to go very far back in history to see that there's something wrong about this story. We could look at what happened in the U.S. last year with the uprising after the murder of George Floyd, which was the single largest uprising in American history, if you count by the number of people who took to the streets. And this uprising really took off three days after the murder when the people in Minneapolis stormed the police station in the third precinct and burnt it down. And not only did this action have a support from a majority of the Americans, according to polls afterwards, it served as a catalyst for people because it broke the paralysis around the problem of systematic police violence and made people realize that this kind of police violence isn't our natural fate. It's not predetermined. It's not a law of nature. It's not something that we have to resign ourselves to something that we can go in and interrupt physically putting an end to it. And property destruction was present at the edges of the BLM uprising all through at the various hotspots, you know, from Minneapolis to Seattle and Portland to Kenosha and all of these other places. And I don't think you can discount that element and say that it wasn't there or say that the BLM movement would have achieved more if it had stayed perfectly peaceful. That would be a counterfactual scenario, I think, very hard to substantiate. But instead of what you saw was the opposite of the prediction from the strategic pacifists, namely that this radical action in Minneapolis brought people into the streets and made them run into the cause as never before. Because the illusion of the untouchability, unviability, supremacy of the police order was shattered. And that's precisely what we need in the climate movement. We need a similar shattering of the paralysis around fossil fuel infrastructure. The perception that this infrastructure is just something that expands and is in our lives and we can't do anything about it. And governments are not going to do anything about it. It's some kind of a quasi-natural law that it just continues to expand and balloon. And we can't do anything about it. And this is the kind of despair that feeds inaction and passivity on the climate front. And the task of the climate movement is to break this. [00:13:52] Speaker 1: So where does this come from? This impulse, this desire, because it does seem to be born out of desire, it's not born out of empiricism. To look at anti-apartheid movement, I mean, people like Nelson Mandela quite openly saying in the 1960s, we need to move away from totally peaceful forms of struggle, openly saying we need sabotage. You know, so just a gross rewriting of history by Global North tend to be white middle class people. Again, you look at, even in Britain, poll tax, the student movement in the early 2010s, you know, it was catalyzed, like you say, by actually something which should have destroyed it at its inception, according to these people. So where does it come from? Does it come from a class position? [00:14:34] Andreas Malm: I think this idea of perfectly peaceful civil disobedience as the only route to success would have been completely impossible in the 1970s or in the 1980s, even. When the tradition of revolutionary politics was still alive. It's not alive in that sense today as it was three decades ago. Up until three decades ago, I would say. And that's, I mean, in this political void or vacuum that we live in, that's where a totally ahistorical idea such as this one can get a healing, I think. [00:15:12] Speaker 1: So when somebody says to you violence is never the answer and they talk about Martin Luther King, Gandhi, et cetera. I mean, how do you as an activist or as a as a theoretician respond to that? Because obviously it's very difficult to say, no, violence is the answer. Yeah, but of course. Because often it isn't. [00:15:27] Andreas Malm: No, but violence is never the answer, as in the solution to something. I mean, violence isn't an energy source, for instance, by which you can replace fossil fuels. Violence isn't a form of public transportation. But violence, certain types of violence, if you define property destruction as a type of violence, can be necessary to break down the inertia and the resistance of a deeply entrenched order. And all the power interests that come together, come with it. And the scale of the transformation of our society that we need. I mean, changes of this proportion, I think, have never in history been accomplished without confrontation. I mean, the the interests at stake in maintaining business as usual are so powerful that it's extremely difficult to see us overcoming those interests without taking them on. I mean, just let me give you one example. The company of Total, the single largest private corporation in France, headquartered in France, which is one of the major entities for climate crimes right now. Soon to begin constructing the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline, which will be the world's longest heated oil pipeline, carrying 216,000 of crude oil every day from Lake Albert to the coast of Tanzania. And I could go further into the details of the insanity of this project. They just signed a major deal with Iraq to build even more installations for oil and gas in that country. They want to go into the Arctic to get more fossil gas. This corporation has to cease to exist as an oil and gas corporation. We can't have capital accumulating through constantly increasing output of oil and gas and coal. That just has to come to an end. Now, OK, the single largest capitalist company in France has to be taken offline. Who would imagine that we could do this without some very serious confrontation with the power that is crystallized in that company? I mean, it's not like Total is going to go out of business voluntarily. And a state would need to go in and take over the company, nationalize it, and turn it into something different. But Macron is not prepared to do it, obviously. I very much doubt that Le Pen or Zemmour, if, God forbid, any of these people were to win the presidential election next year, were to do it. Now, what needs to be done is for France, for popular progressive forces in France to build a movement targeting Total. And here again, we come to that paradox. Why don't we see this in France, which is a country that's not foreign to militant social struggle? Yeah. Yeah. Fortunately, there is a campaign that will start just after COP26, where the climate justice movement all over the world is calling for actions with a diverse array of tactics targeting Total. This campaign is called Collapse Total. And it's, to me, exactly the kind of climate campaign that we need right now. [00:18:44] Speaker 1: And so what kind of tactics would be appropriate there? Yeah. Obviously, there's boycotts and so on. But how far do you think that goes in terms of legitimacy? [00:18:51] Andreas Malm: Now, I don't know exactly what's being planned by activists around the world. In the abstract, I don't mean in regards to Total. I would personally be all in favor of, and if I had the logistical opportunities to do it, I would gladly participate in it in trying to destroy the property that Total has established in Uganda and Tanzania for building this pipeline. I would see that as a form of death prevention, because this pipeline will cause the death of thousands of people every year. I actually did a very simple calculation of this based on a paper that came out in Nature Communications recently that calculated how many people will die strictly from the rise in temperature, so from heat, from extra heat, by one million metric ton of CO2 emitted in 2020. And if you use the same modeling assumptions, you'll find that this pipeline will kill nearly 8000 people every year. And that's only the deaths caused by heat. So not the floods, not the hurricanes, not the drought, the food supply shocks, which means that we're talking probably about tens of thousands of people that will be killed by the CO2 that comes from this pipeline. So if you had a campaign in East Africa, and there are climate movements in East Africa participating in the Collapse Total campaign, and if you had them, I don't know what they're planning, but if they were to start breaking apart segments of the pipeline, carrying them off or rupturing the pipeline that's already installed or destroying the construction equipment. And this campaign were to escalate to the point where the pipeline would have to be called off, then that would, to me, count as preventing mass death. And I don't see how you could morally oppose that. And likewise, if you had a campaign in France targeting Total property, because it's all over Europe, it could and should happen all over Europe, with the same result, just speculating that the pressure on Total would raise to the point where Total said, "Okay, we're going to cancel this pipeline." And what that would mean would mean that tens of thousands perhaps of lives would be saved every year by that pipeline not being built. So I don't see how you could morally, you would have to evoke some kind of a sanctity and sacredness of private property as standing above all other concerns to justify absolute respect for a project like this. And I don't see how you could, I mean, there needs quite a lot of philosophical work to establish that sanctity. [00:21:31] Speaker 1: So that seems quite common sense to me. Yeah. The idea that you would destroy property or sabotage property to save lives. I think most people adopting sort of basic utilitarian ethics would say, yeah, that seems quite fair. So, so why are so many people resistant to precisely that then? Instinctively. Even once presented with the facts. [00:21:51] Andreas Malm: Our entire capitalist culture and bourgeois civilization are built around the idea that private property is sacred. I mean, in the U.S. in particular, it's the most sacred thing there is. I mean, if you've ever been to the U.S., you've come close to someone's garden or wherever, you immediately have someone shouting, "Private property! Get off my property!" and this kind of thing. I mean, the idea that property is inviolable and that it can't be tinkered with is fundamental to how our society is operating. [00:22:23] Speaker 1: But I think if you spoke to most people in the U.K., I don't know about the U.S. or anywhere else, but in the U.K., if you said, look, if we damage X, then it will save X number of people, that person would say, yeah, fine. Yeah. And if you then say, okay, is it therefore legitimate to destroy this pipeline in East Africa, you know, and it will save X number of people? No. So when it comes to the speculative and the general, I think people don't seem to have a problem with it, at least in the U.K., but when it gets to the particular, no. And so I wonder where that comes from. And you think that's just because of the political moment we're in, the end of the possibility of revolutionary politics? Or is it something else? Is it because we're all, we're all to an extent, you know, we all collaborate with fossil fuel capitalism in a way that we don't all collaborate with, you know, apartheid? I mean, it's close to actually in many ways to sort of, let's say, slavery and the Caribbean economy in the early 1900s. So the fact we're all a little bit, you know. [00:23:18] Andreas Malm: Yeah, but Naomi Klein has actually pointed out that even though the English economy was very much, you know, entangled with Caribbean slavery, that didn't prevent parts of the working class movement here from sympathizing with emancipation and encouraging and supporting it. So people being integrated into a structure over which they don't have any actual influence and power is not in itself necessarily an impediment to them mobilizing against it. But I think it's more a question here of, so in the case of Total, I mean, I don't think you are collaborating with Total. I don't feel like I'm collaborating with Total. I don't even think that most people in France, ordinary working class people in France, certainly not, you know, racialized communities from the parts of Sub-Saharan Africa that Total is destroying, in collaboration with other companies, of course, that they feel that they are, you know, colluding with Total. So I think it's much more to do with the difficulty people have in envisaging making a difference to how society works. The general sense of powerlessness that people have, that the fate of the planet looks very dark and it's not something that I feel that I can influence. I can't, you know, many people even have the feeling that I can't even influence what's going on in my country. It's beyond me. I mean, the dominant classes are just having their say, whatever I do. That's, I think, a major obstacle to people supporting in or engaging in confrontational actions of this kind. [00:25:01] Speaker 1: So you've obviously got an array of sort of political views amongst politicians on climate change. You've got climate deniers. There are a few of those, I think, in the last couple of decades. They increasingly sort of veered towards, well, it does exist, but we can't do anything about it. And then you've got progressives who say climate change exists, we need to act, but then they either offer something which is really underwhelming or actually they just sort of ignore it. And a good example here in the UK is Sadiq Khan, Labour mayor of London, tries to brandish his green credentials, says he wants a green city. But then he OKs a multi-billion pound piece of infrastructure like the Silvertown Tunnel. Equally, you've got Marvin Rees, another Labour mayor, who talks about a zero carbon airport in Bristol. Obviously, this is a ridiculous idea. It means the airport would be zero carbon, not the planes, which is kind of a problem. How dangerous is that as a political view? Because ultimately, people think these people are offering solutions when actually they're generally not. Are they as dangerous as climate deniers in their own way? [00:26:01] Andreas Malm: Well, yeah. I mean, for climate breakdown, they're obviously just as dangerous because they are as effective in encouraging fossil fuel production and consumption as the denialists are. Another very spectacular case here, of course, is Joe Biden, who by the end of this year will have reached a pace of handing out licenses for drilling for oil on public land, exceeding the pace under Donald Trump. So he's been more generous during his first year in office in handing out those licenses to oil and gas companies to drill than what Trump managed to be. You have to go back to the days of George W. Bush to find anything similar. Despite him having said that climate policy will be all over, will be everywhere in his presidency. And the same happens everywhere. It happens in my own country, Sweden, where the Greens are in government. And they have also just approved a massive highway project around Stockholm that was opposed even by the Swedish equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency. So there is something compulsive and something deeply, irrationally uncontrollable about how governments of all hues, of all persuasions, keep on fanning the flames or pouring the fuel on the fire or whatever metaphor you want to use. And what I mean is that virtually every advanced capitalist state, well, I actually do think it's everyone. I don't know of any single really important exception. All of them are continuing to enable the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, even if they're paying lip service to climate mitigation. And of course that's extremely dangerous. I do, however, not really agree with the idea that climate denialism is disappearing. I think if you look at European politics, it's grown far stronger in recent years than what it was 10 or 15 years ago. Germany being perhaps the most important case because that's the powerhouse of the European economy. And really, if there's going to be a transition away from fossil fuels, it would really have to focus on Germany because that's where the auto industry is and that's where the largest coal mines are. And in Germany, you didn't have organized climate denial until the AFD showed up and became a vociferous proponent of the craziest form of climate denial and still is. Fortunately, they lost a little bit of support in the recent election, but they also reinforced their position as the single largest party in the coal districts in Eastern Germany. In my own country, in Sweden, we have a similar far right party, although it comes out of the neo-Nazi movement, which the AFD doesn't. And they are also completely committed to climate denial and they will probably be part of the next government coalition in Sweden. So then we would, for the first time in Sweden, have organized climate denial wielding direct influence over the policy in our country. So I don't really see this as a disappearing force. I rather see this as communicating vessels. The nominally climate committed delaying of any meaningful action and the explicitly denialist rejection of meaningful action. These are feeding off each other, I would say, and they represent two strategies for not dealing with the problem. [00:29:46] Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a perfect way of putting it. It's a continuum. And that's effectively what I was trying to sort of insinuate, I suppose. What you're seeing is less... Boris Johnson's a good example. Yeah, he is a good example. Ten years ago, he was saying things like, you know, climate change, the jury's out, and now he's not saying that. Now, whether or not the sort of program for change is adequate, it probably isn't. Whether even that program be achieved, definitely won't, I don't think. But he's clearly shifted. And you see this in the politics of Poland, certain far-right countries, certain far-right parties or countries with far-right formations, the Rassemblement National, I think. They sort of, they acknowledge it exists, but either they say, it's not as bad as people are making out, or, oh, well, we're a small country, so actually, it doesn't matter what we do. And then this kind of veers into, I think, often a racist or Malthusian critique of the Global South, which is, we're only 1% of the global emissions output here in the UK. China's 30%, so why should we decarbonise if they're not decarbonising? Do you think there is a shift? I mean, that's what I said at the beginning. So, outright climate denial is becoming something a bit more complicated, and often something which is more focused on failures of the Global South. And actually, we can carry on. [00:31:03] Andreas Malm: There is a swing here in the pendulum towards what we call capitalist climate governance in a book that I wrote together with the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel on the Danger of Fossil Fascism. So, with the victory of Joe Biden in the US presidential election and the disappearance of Donald Trump from the scene, we have a general swing in that direction. Biden being one representative of it, Boris Johnson another. I think it's more complicated with the cases of Poland and the Rassemblement National, but let's leave it there. However, I don't think that we can rule out that you'll get another swing because you cannot be entirely certain that three years from now you won't have either a comeback of Donald Trump himself or another crazy Republican who, and whoever that might be, will be, as far as I can predict, totally beholden to explicit climate change. Because that is the official ideology of the Republican Party in the US and it's easy to get lulled into a full sense of security that with Donald Trump, these ideas have gone. But if you look at what the reading American public is consuming, it's literature that explicitly denies climate change. So, the most best-selling non-fiction book in the US this year is a book called American Marxism by Mark Levin that just hammers on the standard tropes of climate denial. It sold something like 700,000 copies in three weeks and was the top Amazon and New York Times bestseller throughout the summer while the US was burning and, you know, sweltering and drying out and being battered by hurricanes. These were still the ideas most easily sold to at least people who read books in the US. And I think that you cannot rule out that this sort of Trump phenomenon will return. And if you go back to the time around the Paris Agreement, the COP 21, there was almost a consensus that now climate denial is going out of business. It's not viable any longer. It has to disappear. There is a kind of rationalist assumption here that people will have to be rational and stop denying climate change. But this kind of denial refuses to disappear. And it just keeps on reinventing itself by rehashing the ideas that have been in circulation since the 1980s and 1990s. But it's also correct, as you're saying, that it sort of mutates to saying, well, OK, climate might be changing, but it's not something that we can influence. It's perhaps not even anthropogenic or we can't do anything about it because we're so such a small country. This can be applied, of course, to every country. China can apply it to itself, too, because it's small in historical terms and things like that. So, yes, climate denial is an incredibly multifaceted phenomenon that that is shifting and taking on various guises. But it's also a tremendously powerful force. [00:34:18] Speaker 1: Yeah, I think for me, the idea that a progressive Labour politician who sort of tries to sort of really, like I said, brandish their green credentials, somebody like a Marvin Rees, talks about a zero carbon airport, even the idea, to me, that is climate denial. [00:34:32] Andreas Malm: Absolutely, yes. [00:34:33] Speaker 1: I don't see any difference between him saying that. I mean, it sounds like something that would come out of the mouth, like you say, of Donald Trump or somebody seeking a Republican nomination. It's like saying a circle, you know, has edges or a triangle has four sides. It's the flight as it exists cannot be zero carbon. [00:34:48] Andreas Malm: It's a kind of post-truth politics, as it was called a couple of years back, which in its turn sort of feeds explicit climate denial. Exactly. Because if you can deny this basic thing, why not only this other basic thing, even more basic thing as well and so on. [00:35:05] Speaker 1: So, Intulate Britain, an outgrowth of Extinction Rebellion, slightly different in so much as Extinction Rebellion were doing quite mediatised actions in central London, trying to get press attention, trying to get saliency for the issue to go up. Intulate Britain is directly shutting down roads and often sort of off the beaten track. It might be a motorway, it might be, you know, inside a city or whatever, and impacting people's daily lives in a far more comprehensible way than Extinction Rebellion, which was, you know, zone one central London. Now you're seeing parents screaming at activists, I need to take my child to school and whatnot. What are your thoughts on what they're doing and how they're doing it and is it effective? [00:35:46] Andreas Malm: Yeah, I have a lot of contradictory thoughts and I'm very torn on this topic, to be honest. First, I've noticed that there have been almost outbreaks of violence against these activists and a lot of furious aggression from motorists in recent days. And then I think it's important to stand in solidarity with the activists who get whatever they get, beaten up or sprayed with ink or having abuse shouted at them or whatever, dragged away physically. And that sort of motorist impulse to aggression and frustrated violence is almost, if I dare say so, proto-fascist. It's a theme that we write on at some length in White Skinned Black Fuel. So I sort of, you know, you can recognize this, you know, the angry white motorist just can't countenance a limit to his machine. There's something quite disconcerting about that. So that's on the one, also on the same note, I understand these activists and their desire to disrupt mass automobility, this being a major source of CO2 emissions. And with a country like this that seems to be, you know, wrapped in motorways, I also understand the temptation to target these things. But I mean, I have felt uncomfortable with watching these scenes from afar. So I haven't been on the ground here in the UK while this has been happening, really. And I haven't been at any of the sites. But seeing those film clips of people who are not only expressing surplus aggression, but who are also actually saying things like, Why, why do you target me? Someone said this at an action that was reported in The Guardian. Am I stopping you from insulating Britain? Go after the millionaire oligarchs instead. I need to get to my job. I mean, I understand that. And I understand people who are commuting to their work place and trying to put food on the table of their for their for their children. And then they are not only stopped, but also implicitly almost blamed for the lack of of insulation as, you know, as the reaction that, OK, I'm at the bottom of society. I'm I'm I'm I belong to working people who have to struggle to to get food and cover my bills and everything. And you're stopping me from doing this. And by that, you seem to be saying that I, who am at the bottom, am in charge of the society. I can I see that people get offended by that. And I find it very strange that insulated Britain hasn't come up with a tactic that is more fundamentally in line with the demand, because the demand is obviously a correct one to insulate Britain and to improve people's housing situations, which I take to be part of. This is part of the demand that I mean, that's that's that you can you can even see that as a class demand. It's something that would benefit working class people. OK, but if you want to push that demand, then you need to devise a tactic that that articulates that demand that has some kind of link to the demand. But just randomly targeting commuters doesn't seem to be linked to the question of insulation and to the class politics that that demand could potentially express, if you see what I mean. Yeah, then I mean, when it comes to climate activism of this kind, and I do I do think that insulated Britain represents this new phase of the climate struggle where we're in, where the climate movement is searching for effective escalation and more disruptive tactics, and this is the right thing to search for. I'm just not sure that insulated Britain has hit on the proper kind of escalation because to me it would make much more sense if you want to escalate the climate struggle to go after fossil capital. And what I mean by that is to to begin with target the companies that invest in fossil fuels. That should be the main target. And the climate movement in Germany has, in my view, been infinitely more intelligent and successful about these things than either XR and its general targeting of zone one London or insulated Britain. By, by, by going into the actual lignite mines or shutting down fossil gas infrastructure, you're striking at the core, at the heart of the problem, the source of it. And if, on the other hand, you want to mess with the consumption of fossil fuels, then the consumption you should target to begin with is that of the rich. I mean, the richest 1% of humanity has, by its consumption, emitted twice as much CO2 as the poorest half of humanity since the 1990s. And the ultra rich have a presence in Britain too. I'm sure that there exist extremely rich people in Britain who have their multiple SUVs, their super yachts, their private jets, their energy guzzling mansions. Why don't you go and spoil their days instead of the days of working people? If you want to protest fossil fuel consumption that is of the most egregious and indefensible kind, go after the luxury emissions of the rich. I'm sure you would get a lot of media attention if you did that and somehow physically disrupted the consumption of fossil fuels that the ultra rich are doing. And that represents a form of violence, in my view, against the people around the world that suffer the consequences. So, I think it's, again, I mean, I have participated in dozens and dozens of road blockades myself. But, I'm trying to wrap my brain here, but I can't really recall this sort of random targeting of car traffic. I mean, normally when we would blockade a road, it would be because there would be a particular demand to shut that road down or that road would have a link to a particular project or company or something like that. And also, when you do a road blockade, you have to have a system in place for ensuring medical emergencies or people traveling to hospitals or anything of that kind to get through the blockade. But, I think you need to be more creative and perhaps do some research and find better targets than what these activists are doing. And I'm saying that with all due respect for their persistency and stubbornness. But to me, when XR people went to banks and smashed the windows of banks pouring trillions of pounds into fossil fuels, that was a much more sensible action to me in the sense that it targeted the source of the problem. And it didn't mess with working class people's lives. This is too, to me, it's too reminiscent of the infamous tube action that XR did in late 2019. Just randomly targeting commuters. I mean, commuters, working class people who try to get to their jobs, it's not these people that have built our economy and it's not these people who have the power to decide what to invest in or not. [00:43:41] Speaker 1: So what you're referring to is two people, two men on top of an early hours underground train. It wasn't underground at that point. I think it was its first station in East London, actually. And they were above it and they were stopping it moving. I found that particularly strange because, A, it's a low carbon form of transport, B, it's public transport. But like you say, and I think there's a strange thing going on here because if you criticise those actions, people say, well, we need to do something, we need to escalate. And you're saying, well, yeah, of course we do. I would agree with that as well. But the point is, you can't just target anything or anyone. And if it was that simple, if you just targeted anyone and you could get political change, then political change would be really easy. But the point is the tactics and the target really matter. So that needs to be divorced from the escalation aspect. China, one of my last questions. We've talked about an absence of global leadership on climate change from the US, parts of the EU, like the UK, France, etc. China is often sort of posed as the climate change boogeyman. Obviously, massive consumption of coal. It's going to build new coal power stations. But it's a bit more of a complicated picture when you look at high speed rail, reforestation, although that has its own problems. What it's doing with renewable energy in the last 10 years. Why is there an impulse from the West, particularly the Anglo-American countries, to attack China on climate change when actually on some measures it's doing far more than they are? You know, Canada or Australia haven't got a single kilometre of high speed rail between them. And these are large countries. Do you think this is going to be something we see more of? [00:45:16] Andreas Malm: Yeah. I mean, it's become an incredibly convenient excuse for passivity, just pointing fingers at China and saying, well, it doesn't matter what we do. We're dropping the ocean. It's all about China. China. That's something that the far part of Sweden is banging on about when it doesn't deny climate explicitly. The rational or the irreducible sort of foundation for the claim is, of course, that China is now de facto the country in the world that emits most CO2. What is, again, very conveniently forgotten is that it has reached this position thanks to the relocation of industrial production from all over the world into China to make use of the workers there, of the labor force that used to be extremely cheap until a few years ago. And that's, I mean, so if you actually counted how many of the emissions from China that are generated in the process of producing commodities then imported into the UK or the US or Sweden, you would get a completely different situation. Not to consider the fact that climate change is a result of everything that's accumulated in the atmosphere over time. And China is still very far from overtaking the US here. So the US is the leading country in the world when it comes to actual responsibility for the CO2 that is in the atmosphere and that has been emitted over the past two centuries. And you could make the argument that the UK is in fact the most responsible country because it was in the UK that the very model of self-sustaining growth predicated on fossil fuels emerged to begin with. And it's from the UK that it's from the UK that it's spread across the world. China seems to be on a path of continuous expansion and development and I'm sure that the Chinese share of total annual CO2 emissions will continue to be very big and probably growing over the next few years. So that means that something needs to change in China. It also means that China's potential use as this convenient excuse to do nothing at home will continue to loom large. So we need to challenge that head on in many different ways and debunk the argument, which isn't very difficult to do. I think that so I'm anything but a Chinese China specialist. I have strengths, but my impression of what they're doing there. So building all this high speed rail and and the the what's it called the road initiative. Yeah, yeah. And you know expanding coal while also being the world's best and largest producer of solar panels and all these things. This is just a version of of energy addition. There's no transition underway in China. It's just we're adding everything on top on of everything else, all of the above. And this can't go on. I mean, it's completely unsustainable to have the expansion of coal that you have in China. Last year, they inaugurated the equivalent of one new coal fired power plant per week. And I mean, India isn't much better. And really, it has to stop. It has to change. And the irony here, of course, is that China is suffering quite heavily, quite badly from global heating itself. I'm thinking in particular of the very severe floods in the province this summer. And one wonders if if China will reach a point where the leadership realizes that this is actually something that's going to hurt. Or if the Chinese state is as structurally committed to capital accumulation as any other. And I'm afraid I suspect the latter. So I don't I don't really see China because that's the sort of left version of the sort of left inversion of the standard idea that China isn't as bad as everyone else. They're actually probably a little bit better because they have some sort of state that's in charge of the economy. And I have trouble troubles accepting that. And I have particular troubles with the sort of post Maoist adoration of China that you see coming out of the monthly review environment where they actually believe that China is building some kind of ecological civilization and moving away from fossil. I mean, I mean, that's very niche. [00:49:54] Speaker 1: The final question is, if you look at something like India, they're saying we'll be net zero by 2070. Then people criticize them for that. And, you know, you have Brits or Americans say that's not good enough. And you say, well, you look at their CO2 emissions per head, you look at their historical CO2 emissions. When are they meant to when are they meant to do it? I mean, you've still got hundreds of millions of people who still don't eat. Sure. Enough a day. They still have huge, you know, food poverty in India. So if the US is decarbonizing or getting net zero by 2050, I mean, India, it seems quite reasonable. It's actually quite ambitious to say 2070. At the same time, that's obviously not good enough. That's far too late. So what's the sort of political answer to that? What's the response? [00:50:33] Andreas Malm: Well, here's the thing. If climate mitigation on a global scale would have commenced in the 1990s, there would have been room and time for the argument that countries like India can go on for another few decades expanding their fossil fuel infrastructure. That opportunity was squandered deliberately. That means that there isn't any space left almost literally for these countries to continue expanding their fossil fuel use. And I mean, India is going to suffer even more from global heating is already suffering even more from global heating than what China is doing. So it's not a way for India to develop in any kind of sustainable fashion for its own population to bank on more coal. Unfortunately, that's exactly what the Modi regime is doing. Last year, they plastered India with billboards saying unleash coal and handed out coal mines and coal-fired power plants to private entrepreneurs on a scale that had never been seen before in India. This was the unleashing of coal. Massive privatization and expansion of coal. And there is no excuse for that because it's not that the 250 million people in India who are not connected to the electrical grid need coal. They need electricity. But you can just as well supply them with electricity from renewable sources. In fact, that's cheaper. Now, the renewable energy technology has progressed so far that the world economy would save trillions of dollars in strictly financial terms if you had a complete shift away from fossil fuels to renewables. So, of course, you could supply these Indians with electricity from sun and wind in India. There are tremendous potentials for both in India. And it's not like these people need specifically coal, but there is a lot of profit to be made from coal by Avani and other major coal companies operating in India and exporting, of course, coal into India because India is also importing coal. So, yeah, I mean, I don't I don't give much for this declaration of net zero by 2070. I mean, it's it's one of those dates that's so far off into the future that it's completely I mean, it's it's somewhere in the hazy future. It's it's it doesn't come with any actual concrete commitment to anything. [00:53:01] Speaker 1: But what I never understood was this seems to me quite new in so much as now people in the global north are saying, oh, we need countries in the global south. I mean, South Asia has South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. This is basically where all the sort of food deprivation in the world really exists today. It seems quite new to be saying, oh, they need they need to meet net zero at the same time as the global north. I don't recall that being a thing five, ten years ago. The whole point was we needed to transition as quickly as possible to buy more time for the global south. But you're saying if we want to stay at one point five, let's be realistic, probably two degrees warming a century. You don't think that's viable. [00:53:32] Andreas Malm: Well, I think everyone needs to stop producing, consuming fossil fuels, rich and poor countries alike. Of course, we can't have the same expectation that poor countries should do it as quickly as rich countries. But I think that we have we are so deep into the climate crisis that we cannot say to the poor countries that you can go on with fossil fuels for another couple of decades. Because to begin with, they will hurt themselves by doing so. I mean, I think India is the country where where you have the largest concentration of people vulnerable to sea level rise. And, you know, the impacts of unlivable heat in northern India can soon become hyper lethal. There are studies showing that, you know, hundreds of millions of people could potentially succumb to these heat waves this century. The good news here is that renewable energy has advanced so far that it's not about leaving people in the lurch and saying we're not going to let you take advantage of modern technology. You will have to stay mired in poverty forever because you can't use fossil fuels. They can't what's called in climate discourse leapfrog the face of fossil fuels and move directly from poverty and deprivation to access to electricity based on renewable technology. There is on the environmental left a kind of resistance to renewable energy that sort of implies that you shouldn't expand energy technology in places like India. I had a conversation with people in XR in Paris a few months back where these people argued that you shouldn't you shouldn't take those 250 million people into the electrical grid. They should stay outside of it and we should have some kind of degrowth and make sure that you don't bring more people into an environmentally destructive modernity. But that strikes me as an extremely privileged thing to say because we take for granted that we have access to electricity. So that our kids can study after the sun has set or that you know we can charge our devices or whatever. And of course people in India have the right to do the same thing. That means in this situation that you have to envision a massive expansion of renewable energy while at the same time shutting the fossil fuel industry down in India as much as anywhere else. Not just anywhere else I would say.