Before the pandemic, I placed a lot of hope in Extinction Rebellion (XR). I believed in their analysis of history: past social movements have been successful with just 3% of the population participating in a mass demonstration. We could do the same! If we show up & demand climate action — preferably with art & humor & music — then the powers-that-be would get society onto a climate-friendly track. But today, the majority of Americans are in favor of climate action, yet the US is still approving new fossil fuel projects.

I still think the climate strikes & demonstrations are important. They have grown the climate movement & helped us build power; they made corporations and governments pay attention. But with the heat waves and fires this summer, it doesn’t seem like the XR/mass-movement plan is going to get us to a fossil-free future quickly enough.

So it was a relief to read Andreas Malm’s critique of XR’s analysis & strategy in the first section of How to Blow Up a Pipeline. These two arguments stood out to me in particular:

  1. 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. (Loc 698)
  2. … fossil fuels are not a political arrangement like limited franchise or pass laws: they and the technologies they power are productive forces imbricated in certain property relations. (Loc 623)

These two points seem glaringly obvious once they’re laid out. How were they overlooked for so long? I think there are a few factors:

  1. We don’t know that we’ve learned sanitized history / we need more diverse voices among climate leaders in the US. (Side note: this is why DEI programs in schools are so important. We have to update the curriculum content to reflect reality.)
  2. We’re not practiced in thinking about systems & our current system is quite complex.
  3. We really want a simple solution.

I still think that XR is important for building a mass movement and I respect many of their ideas, especially around self-organizing. But it’s time to shift. People are terrified and tired. The countermovement has gotten stronger. We need a meta-strategy, where different climate/environment/social groups are able to coordinate. Making noise is not enough. We actually have to stop burning fossil fuels.

And what if using less oil is actually easier than protesting? What if there are legal ways to discourage everyone’s use of non-essential fossil fuels?

I’m looking forward to seeing what Malm says in section 2.

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