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Review

Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a book that wears its incendiary title as both a literal instruction and a philosophical grenade rolled into the well-mannered protest camps of the climate movement. It is part scholarly polemic, part activist memoir, part historical revision, and entirely an argument against the strategic pacifism that has defined climate politics for three decades. Malm, a Swedish human ecologist and longtime participant in Ende Gelände and other direct actions, is not the first to wonder why the movement has remained so scrupulously non-violent in the face of an existential emergency. But he is the first to build a book-length case that this restraint is not merely insufficient but historically illiterate, and that the only credible path left to the climate movement runs through the deliberate, discriminate sabotage of the infrastructure pumping carbon into the atmosphere. This review argues that the book’s most durable contribution is not its tactical prescriptions—which, however compelling in their historical sweep, reveal a gap between analogy and strategy that Malm does not fully close—but its demolition of the sanitized histories the movement tells itself and its recovery of the radical flank effect as the engine that has always powered successful non-violent campaigns.

Malm opens with a puzzle he calls, after an essay by the British novelist John Lanchester, “Lanchester’s paradox.” The essay, published in the London Review of Books in 2007, observed:

It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as, say, animal rights.

Malm reframes the paradox around five features that should, in any other political crisis, have generated a wave of property destruction: the magnitude of the harm, the ubiquity of vulnerable targets (pipelines, refineries, diggers, superyachts, SUVs), the ease of disabling them, the intensity of popular awareness, and the stark injustice of a crisis whose costs fall overwhelmingly on the poor while its benefits accrue to the hypermobile rich. And yet, through three cycles of climate mobilization—the failed COP15 buildup, the Keystone XL and Standing Rock era, and the current wave of Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and Ende Gelände—the movement has remained almost entirely within the bounds of non-violent civil disobedience. Malm’s opening chapter is a cold-eyed inventory of the results: “In the twenty-five years after the delegates left, more carbon was released from underground stocks than in the seventy-five years before they met.” The COPs, the marches, the arrest records have all coincided with an accelerating emissions curve. For Malm, this is not a failure of effort but a failure of strategy, rooted in a historical mythology that has been allowed to harden into dogma.

The bulk of Chapter 1, “Learning from Past Struggles,” is a sustained assault on that mythology. The strategic pacifism codified by Extinction Rebellion’s “civil resistance model” and by Bill McKibben’s Gandhian theology of “unearned suffering” draws its authority from a set of historical analogies: slavery was ended by Quaker petitions and parliamentary reform, not by slave revolts; women’s suffrage was won by the peaceful suffragists; the US civil rights movement triumphed through non-violent marches; South African apartheid fell to mass civil disobedience. Malm re-reads each of these episodes against the primary sources and finds that property destruction and armed self-defence were not incidental but central. The suffragettes, far from being the gentle petitioners of XR’s imagination, conducted a year-and-a-half-long arson campaign against villas, tea pavilions, churches, and at least one steam yacht. He quotes the Pankhurst dictum that XR has conveniently forgotten: “To be militant in some form, or other, is a moral obligation … It is a duty which every woman will owe her own conscience and self-respect, to women who are less fortunate than she is herself, and to all who are to come after her.” The abolition of slavery, Malm argues, deploying the scholarship of Robin Blackburn and others, was driven not by moral suasion alone but by the terror of slave revolts—Haiti above all—that made continued slavery appear the greater risk to metropolitan elites. The South African anti-apartheid struggle pivoted when Nelson Mandela, having exhausted non-violent methods, founded Umkhonto we Sizwe with a founding doctrine Malm quotes at length:

Our strategy was to make selective forays against military installations, power plants, telephone lines and transportation links; targets that would not only hamper the military effectiveness of the state, but frighten National Party supporters, scare away foreign capital, and weaken the economy. This we hoped would bring the government to the bargaining table. Strict instructions were given to members of the MK that we would countenance no loss of life.

The US civil rights movement, far from the sanitized tableau of the March on Washington, was girdled with armed self-defence. Malm draws on Charles E. Cobb Jr.’s This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed to document the stockpiled guns in movement homes, and he notes that Martin Luther King Jr. himself kept loaded weapons in his parsonage. When King defended the urban riots of 1967 by distinguishing property destruction from violence against persons—“A life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being”—he was articulating a moral grammar that the contemporary climate movement has entirely lost. Malm’s point is not that these movements were secretly violent; it is that they worked through a division of labour in which a militant flank made the non-violent mainstream appear as the lesser evil. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, he argues, passed not because of the moral witness of the sit-ins but because John F. Kennedy’s administration feared the alternative was Malcolm X and the urban rebellions. The 1968 Fair Housing Act passed “amid the roar of more than one thousand businesses damaged or destroyed in Newark alone.” This is the radical flank effect, developed by Herbert H. Haines and extended by Verity Burgmann, and Malm places it at the center of his strategic theory: Greta Thunberg is the Rosa Parks of the climate movement, but the Angela Davis has not yet appeared.

Malm extends the argument to the empirical bible of strategic pacifism, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s Why Civil Resistance Works. He contends that their dataset systematically excludes what Mohammad Ali Kadivar and Neil Ketchley call “unarmed collective violence”—the sticks, stones, and Molotov cocktails that accompanied virtually every democratic transition between 1980 and 2010. He points to specific omissions: Hezbollah’s role in the 2005 Lebanese uprising, the Maoist insurgency’s contribution to the end of the Nepalese monarchy. On Malm’s reading, Chenoweth and Stephan have produced not a finding but a sanitized artefact, one that serves the interests of a white, middle-class movement whose relationship to state repression is structurally different from that of the racialised protesters at Tahrir Square or in the banlieues. The charge is severe, and while the methodological debate remains open, the cumulative effect of Malm’s re-readings is hard to dismiss: the climate movement has built its strategic pacifism on a historical foundation that crumbles the moment one looks closely at the sources.

If Chapter 1 is demolition, Chapter 2, “Breaking the Spell,” is construction. Malm’s thesis is that the climate movement must impose a “de facto prohibition” on new CO2-emitting infrastructure by physically disabling it, and that this is not only morally justified but technically trivial. He draws on a long tradition of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist sabotage: the 1936 Palestinian revolt’s attacks on the Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s 1969 campaign against Israeli pipelines and refineries, the African National Congress’s 1980 strike on the Sasol coal-to-oil facility, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta’s shutdown of a third of Nigerian oil production between 2006 and 2008, and the September 2019 Houthi drone strike on the Abqaiq facility in Saudi Arabia, which temporarily removed 7 percent of global oil supply. Malm quotes the trade journal Pipeline and Gas Journal from 2005: “Pipelines are very easily sabotaged. A simple explosive device can put a critical section of pipeline out of operation for weeks.” The point is driven home with a first-person account of his own 2007 campaign with the affinity group “Indians of the Concrete Jungle,” which deflated over 1,500 SUV tyres in Stockholm’s wealthy Östermalm district using nothing more than a grain of gravel and a mung bean, leaving a leaflet on each windshield:

We have deflated one or more of the tyres on your SUV. Don’t take it personally. It’s your SUV we dislike. … But what you seem to not know, or not care about, is that all the gasoline you burn to drive your SUV on the city’s streets has devastating consequences for others.

Malm then develops a careful taxonomy to distinguish property destruction from violence against persons, a distinction he anchors in the just-war tradition and in the ethics of insurgency. Sabotage, he argues, can be discriminate, explainable, and casualty-free; it is, in Michael L. Gross’s framework, a form of “kinetic harm”—damage to objects, not bodies—that sits at the “farthest remove” from terrorism. He further sharpens the moral argument by drawing on Henry Shue’s distinction between subsistence and luxury emissions. In a CO2-saturated world above 400 parts per million, he contends, the hypermobile consumption of the rich—private jets, superyachts, SUVs, frequent flying—ceases to be a lifestyle choice and becomes a criminological category: the harm is immediate, the victims are randomly selected poor people on the front lines of climate breakdown, and the resources squandered could fund climate adaptation many times over. Malm endorses the argument of Michael Lynch and his co-authors that “conspicuous consumption of fossil fuels ought to be classified as a crime,” and he insists that any climate militancy worth the name must be built on class anger: “without social anger,” he writes, the movement “will not acquire the required striking capacity.” The Gilets Jaunes revolt against Macron’s regressive carbon tax is held up as the class-correct response that XR’s “beyond politics” framing cannot accommodate.

Malm does not duck the standard objections. To the charge that sabotage would alienate public opinion, he responds with the radical flank effect: militants should expect and even welcome condemnation from the mainstream, because the “division of labour” between moderate and radical wings is precisely what makes the mechanism work. The Canning Town incident of October 2019, in which a white XR activist kicked a black commuter in the head while disrupting a London Underground train, becomes a key exhibit—not as an argument against direct action, but as the logical culmination of a class-blind, white-led pacifism that “love-bombs the police” while failing to recognize that “throwing oneself into the arms of the police is a sign of privilege” unavailable to racialised and undocumented communities. Malm’s answer is not to abandon mass action but to flank it with a militant wing that “walks ahead” of median consciousness, targeting the infrastructure of fossil capital rather than the daily commutes of working people. The slogan of Ende Gelände—“We are the investment risk”—captures the strategic goal: to make fossil capital itself uninsurable.

The third and final chapter, “Fighting Despair,” is both a philosophical intervention and an emotional release. Malm turns his fire on the climate fatalism of Roy Scranton and Jonathan Franzen, whose essays have argued that climate mitigation is either impossible or already a “done deal.” Drawing on Catriona McKinnon’s “Against Despair,” Malm argues that fatalism is performatively contradictory: by recommending resignation, it actively works to produce the outcomes it purports merely to predict. He marshals the finding of Tong et al. that the precise level of future warming depends largely on infrastructure not yet built—and therefore blockable—and he defends the legitimacy of desperate resistance even where odds of success are vanishingly small. The Warsaw ghetto uprising, he notes, was not a success by any instrumental measure, but no one would argue the insurgents were wrong to fight. “It can never, ever be too late for that gesture,” he writes, a formulation that refuses any “success condition” for the right to resist. But Malm is careful to distinguish this stance from the deep-ecological misanthropy of Deep Green Resistance, which he treats as a “fever dream of despair”—a civilisational war on humanity that would reduce the global population to a few hundred million and which, for Malm, “appears nauseating” precisely because it mirrors the strategic pacifists’ contempt for ordinary people. The book closes with a first-person account of the May 2016 Ende Gelände action at the Vattenfall-owned Schwarze Pumpe power plant in Lusatia, where Malm and fellow activists tore down fences and forced a temporary shutdown of European electricity production. He describes the experience in Fanonian terms as a “cleansing force” that left him “high for weeks afterwards. All the despair that climate breakdown generates on a daily basis was out of my system, if only temporarily; I had had an injection of collective empowerment.” It is the book’s most affectively charged passage, and it functions as a kind of proof-of-concept: an argument that acting, even violently against property, can break the paralysis of grief.

The book’s architecture is polemical, but its scholarly apparatus is formidable—the final third of the volume is given over to page-referenced notes that ground each claim in primary sources, from Cobb on the civil rights movement to Parsa on the Iranian revolution to the IEA’s investment reports. Malm writes as a historical materialist, and the book sits squarely within a Marxist tradition that treats fossil capital as the material form of contemporary capitalism and insists that no meaningful climate politics can be waged without naming the enemy. It is also, however, a work of the anti-imperialist and decolonial left, recovering the sabotage campaigns of the PFLP, MEND, and the 1936 Palestinian revolt as precedents for a climate-era militancy, and centering the Global South as the site of both the deepest suffering and the most instructive resistance. At the same time, it draws on the anarchist affinity-group tradition of monkeywrenching and ecotage that runs from the Earth Liberation Front through the Hambach Forest occupations to the Ende Gelände coal-mine blockades. This is not a book that fits neatly into any single canon, which is part of its intellectual interest: it is an attempt to fuse the class analysis of the Marxist left with the direct-action repertoires of the anarchist and anti-colonial traditions into a coherent strategy for the climate emergency.

Yet the book’s weaknesses are as revealing as its strengths. The central empirical claim—that a sabotage campaign waged by climate activists in the global North could achieve the systemic disruption of a MEND or a Houthi strike—is asserted far more often than it is demonstrated. Malm treats the September 2019 Abqaiq attack as if it were a template, but the geopolitical conditions that allowed a Yemeni rebel group to knock out 7 percent of global oil supply with cheap drones bear almost no resemblance to the conditions facing a small affinity group in Germany or the United States. The “receptivity” he posits—the idea that public tolerance for property destruction will rise as climate impacts intensify—is plausible but wholly speculative, and the history of the ELF and ALF, which Malm himself admits were politically sterile despite decades of property destruction without casualties, suggests that the radical flank effect is not automatic. A sabotage campaign can just as easily trigger a repressive crackdown that isolates the militants and discredits the broader movement, especially in a political environment where security services are already rehearsing “climate terrorism” scenarios. Malm acknowledges the far right’s appropriation of anti-establishment anger, and he warns that a climate movement that refuses class distinctions risks ceding violence to the enemies of mitigation, but he does not offer a convincing account of how a sabotage campaign could avoid strengthening the very forces of “fossil fascism” he fears.

There are also tensions within the argument itself. Malm describes sabotage as a “last resort” and insists it must remain supplementary to mass civil disobedience, yet he also urges militants to “walk ahead” of majority opinion, to act after major climate disasters when the “political weather” is on their side, and to welcome the condemnation of figures like McKibben and Hallam because the division of labour is what makes the flank effect work. The simultaneous calls for restraint and escalation, for a supplementary tactic that is also supposed to serve as the radical pole that makes the moderate center viable, create a strategic ambiguity that the book never quite resolves. His most speculative claim—that the deeper cause of the climate movement’s pacifism is “one of the deepest gaps between the present and all that happened from the Haitian Revolution to the poll tax riots: the demise of revolutionary politics” since 1989—is evocative but under-argued, gesturing toward a historical sociology of militancy that the book does not supply.

And yet, none of these weaknesses undo the book’s core achievement. How to Blow Up a Pipeline is not a blueprint for a bomb; it is a demand that the climate movement grow up and examine its own pieties. For activists who have never questioned the Gandhian catechism, who believe that the suffragettes were polite petitioners and that the US civil rights movement triumphed through love alone, this book will be a deeply unsettling read, and that is precisely its purpose. Malm does not, in the end, need to prove that sabotage will work; he needs only to demonstrate that the strategic consensus that forbids it is built on a historical falsehood, and that a movement that cannot countenance property destruction in the face of an unfolding apocalypse has lost the capacity to think strategically at all. The book draws its closing energy not from tactical blueprints but from Rebecca Solnit’s line, which Malm deploys as a kind of epigraph: “Hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.” This book is that axe, sharpened and handed to a movement that has too long been knocking politely. Its real contribution is not to settle the debate over what the climate movement should do, but to make it impossible for that debate to continue on the terms that have governed it for a generation.

Notable Quotes

At what point do we escalate? When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different? When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?

The central question of the book, posed after Malm traces the climate movement's three cycles of escalating but strictly nonviolent mobilisation — escalation, climate movement, core argument

To say that the signals have fallen on the deaf ears of the ruling classes of this world would be an understatement. If these classes ever had any senses, they have lost them all.

Malm surveying three decades of rising emissions, expanding fossil fuel infrastructure, and wildfires across Siberia and the Amazon — ruling class, inaction, climate crisis

The commitment to the endless accumulation of capital wins out every time. After the past three decades, there can be no doubt that the ruling classes are constitutionally incapable of responding to the catastrophe in any other way than by expediting it.

Malm's assessment after reviewing the total failure of COP summits and the continued expansion of fossil fuel investment — capitalism, fossil capital, structural critique

Strategic pacifism is sanitised history, bereft of realistic appraisals of what has happened and what hasn't, what has worked and what has gone wrong: it is a guide of scant use for a movement with mighty obstacles.

Malm's verdict after revisiting the actual histories of abolition, suffragettes, Gandhi, civil rights, and anti-apartheid — each involving significant violence that strategic pacifists suppress — strategic pacifism, historical revisionism, movement strategy

Talk! Talk! Talk! That will never free the slaves! What is needed is action — action.

John Brown's exclamation after yet another convention of a pacifist abolitionist society, cited by Malm to challenge the nonviolent narrative of abolition — abolition, action, John Brown

To be militant in some form, or other, is a moral obligation. It is a duty which every woman will owe her own conscience and self-respect, to women who are less fortunate than she is herself, and to all who are to come after her.

Emmeline Pankhurst on the suffragette commitment to militancy, including systematic arson and property destruction that Malm argues is airbrushed from the pacifist narrative — suffragettes, militancy, moral duty

Our policy to achieve a non-racial state by non-violence has achieved nothing, and so we will have to reconsider our tactics. In my mind we are closing a chapter on this question of a non-violent policy.

Nelson Mandela pushing the ANC toward forming Umkhonto we Sizwe after the Sharpeville massacre, the pivotal shift from nonviolence to sabotage — Mandela, ANC, anti-apartheid, sabotage

I called for non-violent protest for as long as it was effective, as a tactic that should be abandoned when it no longer worked.

Mandela's explicitly anti-Gandhian position, which Malm contrasts with strategic pacifism's treatment of nonviolence as a timeless fetish — Mandela, tactical pragmatism, nonviolence

Damage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.

Malm's most direct call to action, following the scientific finding that staying below 1.5°C requires a global prohibition of all new CO2-emitting devices — sabotage, direct action, fossil fuel infrastructure

Sabotage is a sort of prefigurative, if temporary, seizure of property. It is both a logical, justifiable and effective form of resistance and a direct affront to the sanctity of capitalist ownership.

R. H. Lossin quoted by Malm on how sabotage demonstrates that fossil fuel property can be stranded — breaking the spell of its inviolability — sabotage, property, capitalism

A life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being.

Martin Luther King defending the urban riots of 1967, endorsing the distinction between violence against persons and violence against property that is central to Malm's argument — property destruction, Martin Luther King, violence

Is not a woman's life, is not her health, are not her limbs more valuable than panes of glass?

Emmeline Pankhurst's question, which Malm transposes to the climate crisis: on one side, pipelines and diggers and SUVs; on the other, a weight tending toward the infinite — suffragettes, proportionality, property vs life

Even in an emergency one pawns the jewellery before selling the blankets.

Henry Shue's argument that luxury emissions must be cut before subsistence emissions — a principle Malm argues becomes more urgent as carbon budgets deplete — luxury emissions, climate justice, Henry Shue

People don't need yachts — they want yachts.

A CEO of a top superyacht manufacturer, inadvertently articulating the moral distinction between luxury and subsistence emissions that grounds Malm's targeting framework — luxury emissions, inequality, consumption

The context for hope is radical uncertainty; anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it.

Rebecca Solnit quoted alongside Catriona McKinnon in Malm's philosophical demolition of climate fatalism — hope, uncertainty, agency

Hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.

Rebecca Solnit, deployed by Malm as the antithesis of the climate fatalism preached by Scranton and Franzen — hope, emergency, resistance

Every gigaton matters, every single plant and terminal and pipeline and SUV and superyacht makes a difference to the aggregate damage done, and this is just as true above 400 ppm and 1°C as it is below.

Malm's core argument against climate fatalism — the cumulative science means it is never too late to reduce emissions, and overshoot calls for more, not less, resistance — climate science, fatalism, cumulative emissions

Climate fatalism is for those on top; its sole contribution is spoilage. The most religiously Gandhian climate activist, the most starry-eyed renewable energy entrepreneur, the most self-righteous believer in veganism as panacea, the most compromise-prone parliamentarian is infinitely preferable to the white man of the North who says, 'We're doomed — fall in peace.'

Malm's final verdict on the fatalist position, after demonstrating its philosophical incoherence and class character — fatalism, class, despair, resistance

Imagine that diminished human populations eke out an existence near the poles. They will be around for a couple of more decades. Some of their offspring might have a chance to hold on a little longer. What would we want to tell them? That humanity brought about the end of the world in perfect harmony? That everyone willingly queued up for the furnaces? Or that some people fought like Jews who knew they would be killed?

Malm invoking the Warsaw ghetto uprising to argue that even in a worst-case hothouse scenario, resistance retains its moral dignity — resistance, worst case, moral dignity, Warsaw ghetto

I was high for weeks afterwards. All the despair that climate breakdown generates on a daily basis was out of my system, if only temporarily; I had had an injection of collective empowerment.

Malm describing the aftermath of storming the Schwarze Pumpe coal power plant compound with Ende Gelände activists in 2016, tearing down fences and forcing a production shutdown — direct action, empowerment, Ende Gelände, despair

There has been a time for a Gandhian climate movement; perhaps there might come a time for a Fanonian one.

The book's closing provocation, invoking Frantz Fanon's writing on the 'cleansing force' of anticolonial violence against the gentleness of climate activism — Fanon, Gandhi, escalation, conclusion