Book Review: How to Blow up a Pipeline
Book Review: How to Blow up a Pipeline, By Andreas Malm (Verso Books, 2021)
Review By Ninetails
Have you ever sat down to read a book that you swear you read decades ago, only to sit down to reread it and discover it was just published a few weeks ago? I had that experience with this book — I swear I read a book by the same name, with the same author, in the late 1980s, however, it seems I have fallen into an alternate reality in which this book didn’t get published until 2021, and in which emissions have continued to accelerate — with over 60% of all CO2 emissions occurring after 1995! Compared to the version of this book I clearly remember reading in the late 1980s (which doesn’t exist in this reality, apparently), How to Blow Up a Pipeline(2021) goes well beyond being a mere instruction manual interlaced with cheesy melodrama, and rather offers a new philosophy for living. Malm rejects the lie that has been peddled by our oppressors that nonviolence is the only path forward, and he lays out a pretty compelling argument that the time for pacifism is over; the oil companies are committing mass murder every day they continue to enforce a supply chain that accelerates the burning of carbon. There is no safe level of emissions. A very tough choice is upon us. I mean, back in my universe, we nipped this all in the bud back in the early 1990s, when a radical flank at the Battle of Rio put pressure on the UN to enforce a global ban on investor-ownership in the energy sector — which worked surprisingly well — with the whole sector being rapidly converted to small, locally-owned co-ops, allowing us to easily achieve net-zero emissions by Year 2000 (it’s wild how easy the transition to renewables is when you don’t have corporate profit imperatives enforcing accelerated fuel burning… It is so messed up that you all still allow fossil fuel investments…). You should probably try to find a copy of this book before it gets banned by the authorities.