How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Category: Book
By (author): Malm, Andreas
Subject:  POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory
  POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Economy
  POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Process / General
  POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Environmental Policy
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: January 2021
Format: Book-paperback
Pages: 208
Size: 7.75in x 5.00in
Our Price:
$ 25.95
Availability:
In stock

Additional Notes

From The Publisher*Property will cost us the earth

The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest?

In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop--with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.

Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women's suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. In a braided narrative that moves from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.
Review Quote*Praise for Fossil Capital:

"The best book written about the origins of global warming ... Like Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything, Fossil Capital trenchantly demonstrated that capitalism and capitalists are responsible for climate change."
– Michael Robbins, Bookforum

"Malm forcefully unmasks the assumption that economic growth has inevitably brought us to the brink of a hothouse Earth. Rather, as he shows in a subtle and surprising reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution, it has been the logic of capital (especially the need to valorize immense sunk investments in fossil fuels), not technology or even industrialism per se, that has driven global warming."
– Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and Ecology of Fear

"Fossil Capital is a theoretical masterpiece and a political-economic-ecological manifesto. It looks unblinkingly at the catastrophe that could await human society if we fail to act on the words System Change or Climate Change. It is a book that I will return to again and again-and take notes."
– John Bellamy Foster, University of Oregon, author of Marx's Ecology

"The definitive deep history on how our economic system created the climate crisis. Superb, essential reading from one of the most original thinkers on the subject."
– Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine

"A unique reconceptualization of the relationship between nature, capitalism, and Marxism."
– Jacobin
Biographical NoteAndreas Malm is a scholar of human ecology, teaching at Lund University. He the author of The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World and Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, which won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.