x-post from !climate@slrpnk.net
I’m constantly surprised that the endless unmonitored miles of oil pipelines don’t ever bombed.
“In an opinion article in The New York Times, columnist Ezra Klein wrote that “[a] truer title would be ‘Why to Blow Up a Pipeline’”, characterizing Malm’s answer as “[because] nothing else has worked”. Stating that Malm was “less convincing” about “whether blowing up pipelines would work here, and now”, Klein argued that there would likely be political consequences to sabotage, including imprisonment of climate activists as well as political repression.[13]”
Whelp, Erza Klein can eat the whole of my ass.
Seems like a reasonable position to me. He’s saying that the argument amounts to “may as well try” and that it doesn’t get into specifics of what the actual material consequences of the action would be, which is a fair critique. He doesn’t say that the argument is wrong, just that it’s not fully explored.
And he is right that retaliation by the state is the only truly foreseeable consequence, and that is a big deal. It’s the main reason to avoid picking fights with the state unless you’re in a position to win those fights. What “winning” looks like is up for debate and depends on your goals, but you have to consider the response.
It sounds like this is a question that can only be answered with empirical testing.
That actively works against the cause because it would do so much harm to the local ecosystems
That is a short term problem for trying to fight a long term catastrophe.
I would prefer to not cause a mess, and further harm natural spaces, but as you can see. Not only are passive demonstrations not effective, they have severe jail time. So at this point, i see it as the most logical step
And as these sentences get handed down and there are more political prisoners and martyrs, more people will start to think that way.
Current eco activists tend to be very conscientious and considered about what they’re doing. As it gets more popular, you’ll get people joining who are considerably less measured in their actions, and the likelihood of drastic actions increases.
Well a lot of them run through more or less suburban areas. So doing it there would have lower environmental impact while greatly raising awareness of how many pipelines run through populated places.
That would almost certainly only hurt poor neighbourhoods, and that’s easy for the media to sweep under the rug. They’ve perfected the art of dehumanising the poor.
I think the reality is that we don’t know the consequences. I mean, I’m not saying it shouldn’t happen, but the effects are impossible to predict.
That’s probably why environmentalist movements that tend to be full of only the most conscientious people have shied away from it. They would want to know what they were getting into first.
If things get bad enough that ecoterrorism becomes popular and a wider array of people take up the cause, we’ll probably find out the answer to these questions.
