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Review

Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a compact, intellectually fierce polemic that poses a deceptively simple question: given the scale of the climate emergency, why has the climate movement in the global North remained so scrupulously, almost religiously committed to absolute nonviolence? Written in urgent, essayistic prose that draws equally on political philosophy, movement history, and personal experience, this is less an instruction manual than a sustained argument about strategic thinking and historical honesty.

The book unfolds in three chapters. In "Learning from Past Struggles," Malm traces the climate movement through three escalating cycles of mobilisation — from the climate camps of 2006-2009, through the Keystone XL and divestment campaigns, to the Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion wave — and then methodically dismantles the historical analogies that underpin what he calls "strategic pacifism." The suffragettes, we learn, were prolific arsonists. The anti-apartheid movement formed the Spear of the Nation under Mandela's command. The civil rights movement was girded by armed self-defence and advanced through a radical flank effect where the spectre of black revolt made Martin Luther King's demands appear moderate. Gandhi recruited Indians for British imperial wars. The revolution that toppled the Shah involved mass popular violence against state buildings and armed insurrection. Malm's revisionism is not novel to historians, but his point is sharp: the climate movement has built its strategic doctrine on sanitised history, a "mixture of cant and forgery."

In "Breaking the Spell," Malm makes his affirmative case. He surveys a rich global history of fossil fuel infrastructure sabotage — from Palestinian attacks on the Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline in the 1930s to MEND's guerrilla campaign in the Niger Delta to the Houthi drone strike on Abqaiq — and argues that what has happened for every other cause has never happened for the climate: targeted destruction of CO2-emitting property. He recounts his own participation in deflating SUV tyres across Stockholm's wealthiest neighbourhoods, offers a philosophically careful discussion of property destruction as a category of violence distinct from harm to persons, and builds a moral framework around the concept of "luxury emissions" — the obscenely disproportionate carbon footprint of the rich. His argument is not that sabotage alone could solve the crisis, but that it could function as a radical flank, shifting the benchmark of moderation and forcing states into action.

"Fighting Despair," the final chapter, takes aim at climate fatalism — the Roy Scrantons and Jonathan Franzens who counsel learning to die rather than learning to fight. Malm's critique here is philosophical and biting: fatalism is a "performative contradiction," a "bourgeois luxury" that projects an individual's unwillingness to change onto the species. He also distances himself sharply from the deep ecology tradition and its misanthropic fantasies of civilisational collapse, arguing instead for a movement that fights for civilisation by targeting the specific productive forces destroying it. His careful engagement with Catriona McKinnon's work on despair yields one of the book's strongest passages: every gigaton matters, every fraction of a degree avoided is meaningful, and the science supports not resignation but escalation.

The book's strengths are its historical range, its willingness to think through uncomfortable tactical questions with philosophical precision, and its refusal to offer false comfort. Malm is a genuine scholar-activist, and the text vibrates with both erudition and lived experience — climate camps in Germany, blockades in the Netherlands, Ende Gelände actions in the Lusatian coalfields. His weaknesses are the weaknesses of the manifesto form: the argument sometimes moves too fast past counterarguments, and the question of how a radical flank would actually be organised in practice remains deliberately vague. The closing pages — Malm's account of storming the compound at Schwarze Pumpe and watching the chimney smoke thin and die — are powerful but also honest about the vast scale of what remains undone.

This is a book that anyone engaged with climate politics should read, whether or not they agree with its conclusions. It is most valuable not as a call to arms but as a call to intellectual honesty — about what historical movements actually did, about what strategic pacifism actually claims, and about what the temporal logic of the climate crisis actually demands.

Reviewed 2026-03-28

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