Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Federalist has accused The New Yorker of amplifying calls for ecoterrorism, in the wake of the recent publication of “How to Blow Up a Pipeline“, and a New Yorker podcast titled “Should the Climate Movement Embrace Sabotage?“.
New Yorker Amplifies Calls For Pipeline Bombings To Save The Planet
SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 By Jordan Davidson
The New Yorker amplified calls for eco-terrorism in the name of sparking action on climate change last week by inviting Andreas Malm, the Swedish author of “How To Blow Up A Pipeline,” onto its podcast.
In the episode titled “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” Malm explains how it’s time for the climate change movement to “diversify its tactics and move away from an exclusive focus on polite, gentle, and perfectly peaceful civil disobedience.”
Malm stopped his recommendations short of “kidnapping oil workers” but said that “civil disobedience” ostensibly to save the planet should include mass acts of “intelligent sabotage” and property destruction, such as blowing up pipelines.
“I’m not saying we should stop strikes or square occupations or demonstrations of the usual kind. I’m all in favor of that. But I do think we need to step up because so little has changed and so many investments are still being poured into new fossil fuel projects,” Malm said. “So I am in favor of destroying machines, property — not harming people, that’s a very, very important distinction there. And I think property can be destroyed in all manner of ways, or it can be neutralized in a very gentle fashion as when we defeated the SUVs, or in a more spectacular fashion, as in potentially blowing up a pipeline that’s under construction. That’s something that people have done.”
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Read more: https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/27/new-yorker-amplifies-calls-for-pipeline-bombings-to-save-the-planet/
The New Yorker podcast by David Remnick is available here.
I tried listening to the podcast. The climate portion of the podcast, the friendly interview with the author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, starts at 17:00 minutes, with author Professor Andreas Malm boasting about how he and his friends used to roam around rich suburbs in Sweden deflating SUV tires.
Andreas credits his group’s sabotage campaign with crashing sales of SUVs in Sweden. That may be, but in my opinion he is lucky he and his friends weren’t busted causing a fatal vehicle crash. Andreas claims his technique caused a slow deflation over a few hours, like planting a small stone under the air valve cap, to gently press on the valve and cause the tyre to slowly deflate. So if the owner started driving shortly after the attack, the driver might not notice one or more of their tyres was slowly going flat.
Their technique was subtle, if there was a fatal crash, and the coroner found the small stone in the valve cap, it could have been ruled an accident. I’m sure most of us have had an unpleasant experience with a tyre suddenly failing – a very possible outcome of Andreas’ subtle SUV tyre sabotage campaign.
I mentioned the exact technique, because this is something SUV owners in climate activist areas should maybe start to watch out for. Next time you have a tyre failure, check your tyre valve.
At 22 minutes into the podcast, author Andreas Malm appears to recommend blowing up pipelines.
At 25 minutes, Andreas whines ordinary people are not engaged with the climate crisis “the people don’t rise up!”, and criticises the “dogmatic commitment to non-violence” of other climate activists.
At 27 minutes, “burning down police stations is an integral part of the uprising”.
At 30 minutes, Andreas concedes killing people, kidnapping oil CEOs and murdering them, would cause a backlash.
At 32 minutes, “A strategy which does not involve oil getting more expensive is not a strategy at all”.
At 32:48, New Yorker’s David Remnick suggests Fox News might spoil the campaign by pointing out the eco-terrorists were causing widespread fuel price misery. Andreas responds “Well, I don’t think that we should adapt our tactics after the enemy’s script”.
At 34:30, “Normal protests work best when they target fossil fuel production … peacefully breaking through police lines, shutting down gas pipelines”.
At 37 minutes, the Andreas Malm interview finally ends. The podcast then goes on to discuss sea level, but I’m afraid I stopped listening, 20 minutes of this nonsense is about as much as I can take in one sitting.
As far as I can recall, throughout the entire interview, the closest The New Yorker host David Remnick came to criticising Andreas Malm’s position, was questioning whether murder might cause a political backlash which could undermine Andreas’ climate campaign.
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Should any Monty Python come your way, do you laugh out loud or simply smile and say nothing?
IOW, Do you ‘get‘ Monty Python or do you think you get Monty Python
Such are the joys of having or not having a GSOH, if you laugh out loud, you are the butt of the joke.
Lighten up boys and girls – I’d put down a few bob to say that this guy is actually ‘On Our Side’
If you blew up a pipeline in Russia, and you would get caught, highly likely, you would not see the light of day for a very long time, if ever.
The US should do the same, and with the southern border
If you blew up a pipeline in Russia, there would be no long time.
idk, isn’t infinity a long time?
I thought New Yorkers would learn something from the earlier book on learning to fly planes without landing them.
Is there a DOE or DARPA grant for that?
Looks like a clear case of mental illness to me. Andreas Malm should be getting professional mental health services.
How would it be if we wrote a book “How to draw and quarter a climate fanatic”?
Should victims of sabotage embrace lethal force?
Whether they should or shouldn’t, at some point, they will.
New York or any large city had better be careful about talk like that. It might happen to them no power during the depths of winter to something happening to large transformers that would take months to replace
The consequences of blowing up a pipeline could lead to a complete and extended shutdown of transport and food supplies or complete power blackouts, leading to the deaths of many thousands of innocent people, including children. These eco terrorists are aware of the dangers they represent to society but don’t care about the lives of their fellow citizens. The best fix here is to implement mandatory prison sentencing of 25+ years for any eco terror related crime and after a few prosecutions it would all stop.
In 2016 we moved to Florida in order to get away from that “terrible global warming” up north. Since we moved, I have been tracking our monthly utility bill in our small central Florida residence. Earlier this year we installed an electric clothes dryer so that we no longer have to hang our undies on the back porch every week for the neighbors to admire. This past month, September, our electric usage was 552 kwh. Our previous high for the same month was 687 and the previous low was 592 kwh. How do you explain this decrease?
It is really very simple. In addition to the bill, we can access an Orlando Utilities Commission chart of the daily temperature for the period. In spite of adding and using a weekly power-hungry device, the temperature record for the month was >lower< than for any previous month of September. With that in mind, explain to me this terrible global warming we have been told of all year. I am afraid I just don’t understand!
Well, it’s not the wicked solution a.k.a. planned parent/hood a.k.a. selective/one-child. But, undoubtedly, there will be casualties and collateral damage. It’s a Pro-Choice, Pro-Choice, Pro-Choice, Pro-Choice world.
I suggest this Swede stay out of Texas. Its one of the few states (perhaps the only state) that allows its citizens to use deadly force to protect private property. He starts sabotaging some welders duel-ly in Odessa, Texas he may end up on the wrong end of a semi-automatic weapon.
There’s three words that come to mind and many of my fellow oilfield workers know them.
The New Yorker will become liable if someone follows up on the “advice.” With economic damage in the billions, they will just disappear under the weight of legal liabilities. As for Malm, it is incitement of property destruction and insurrection. This is sedition, which can be tried in Military Court, with the death penalty available.
And yet to blame an unprecedented number of wildfires on activists is diverting attention from climate change according to the NYT.
How Rupert Murdoch Is Influencing Australia’s Bushfire DebateCritics see a concerted effort to shift blame, protect conservative leaders and divert attention from climate change.
There were always conditions for many intense fires. There have been many large grass fires lit by lightning in Australia, grass fires inland. There have always been large fires started by accident or deliberately by humans in the densely wooded forests on the east coast. What was unique in Australia that summer wasn’t the acerage of grass fires burnt further west, that summer was 1974-75, or the acerage burnt per fire in forests in the east, but the number of fires lit in forests of the east. So the authorities released a report saying that most acerage burnt was started by lightning, neglecting to mention that acerage burnt by grass fires started by lightning is has been much larger than these forest fires, every year for many decades.
These leftwing publications downplay the role of arson and promote it at the same time. Why would you trust them on climate change?
Car sales in Sweden dropped by 23% from 2017, because of new taxes on high emission cars then the pandemic. Sales of diesel cars spiked in June of 2018, just before the new taxes came in.
The XC60 seems to have outsold the highest selling model s/v60 in May. I can’t find any data about crashing SUV sales, except more premium SUVs as rich people opt for electric as a social status thing?
XC90, the biggest Volvo SUV had a big drop from Feb to May in 2020 because of the pandemic, in Europe. Sales were barely less than in 2017.
Looks like his claim was BS.
I can’t figure if the guest is taking the mickey out of the idiot interviewing him or is deadly serious.
Either way he displays all the charm and empathy of Gang Green beautifully.
Liberalism,the progressive kind is a mental disorder.
A progressive diesease.
Gang Green is as toxic to civil society as gaseous gangrene is to an individual.
Banish them.
Let us allow these malcontents and destroyers the pleasure to doing their way..
Like I keep saying..I would pay good money to see these characters live as they preach we must.
I envisage a nice piece of High Arctic real estate,say Coats Island in Hudson Bay,warming like never before,or so they keep telling us.
Perfect for the ideal society to thrive,fossil fuel free,carbon free(except for those pesky carbon based lifeforms).
There these righteous twits can show us all the way..
All I want for my investment,is the rights to the camera drone footage…
Just keep the drones circling above,entertainment will ensue..
if you are as sick of these people as I am,I guess I could call it entertainment..
And a new meme will be born,well the modern Vultures of the Arctic,the drones,might be another..
But the footage will be vital,compulsory viewing in all schools,demonstrating our respect for freedom of choice…
As an experiment,are we ethically bound to rescue them as they fail?
or is the lesson for our children more important?
I’m right there with you John, except I think you should send them to Ellesmere Island . They seem to be terrified of a little heat, so they need to be dropped off somewhere nice and cool. Give them an axe, a saw, and a knife.
Oh, what the hey. Let’s not be heartless bastards. Throw in a frying pan, a hoodie, and one Bic lighter.
Ixnay on the the tropical island.
I speak Latin (Pig). *Said in the voice of Barbra Billingsley*
They’re morons – after starting a civil war.
When will Twitter, Facebook and Google ban The New Yorker from their platforms for advocating violence?
I remember years ago when a Hummer dealership was attacked by an ecoterrorism group called E.L.F. They set fire to the dealership and several Humvees. Someone calculated that the fires sent far more pollution and CO2 into the atmosphere in one day than those vehicles would have produced over their entire lifetimes. Other groups have attacked animal research facilities and released all of the animals, only to have them die in the wild which they were not prepared for. Enviroidiots can’t help making things far worse,(but with the best of intentions of course!)
animal ‘activists’ in the UK ‘liberated thousands of Mink from a UK fur farm.
Now in the UK the Mink is an invasive species which decimates declining mammal, bird and fish species.
Massive impact on UK wildlife…
Any activism needs to have clear targets for what it impacts and for what public opinion it is aimed at changing.
I wouldn’t support burning/destroying anything, or impeding the public not directly involved in any issue.
Hmmm…
Sounds about right. He is the sort of person who concluded that since he and his friends can live without a SUV in their driveway then so can everybody else.
People like this honestly see no issue with this, however rarely seem to see things the other way around.
I for example can live without solar on my roof, yet are pretty sure that if I went around at night throwing rocks onto people’s panel cover dwellings they would not see the funny side, even if they did at some level agree with my claims that solar is child labour in the third world.
Addressing him directly I feel he is at best incredibly irresponsible for even discussing his ideas in a positive manner. He shows little evidence for actually understanding the full implications and seems to see the entire thing as a mostly harmless statement.
Craig from Oz: “He shows little evidence for actually understanding the full implications […]”
Absolutely true. Hasn’t thought it all through like every other misanthropic utopian.
.
.
“[…} and seems to see the entire thing as a mostly harmless statement.”
No, no… he’s completely justified since he is pure and righteous and morally superior. After all, he’s “Saving The Planet” and not just planning the company picnic or some other insignificant thing like eliminating world hunger, poverty, and early death due to disease and contaminated water.
Interesting. In the UK we have laws against terrorisn which include ‘glorifying’ such activity, and preparing for acts of terrorism. You could be done for having a copy of a railway timetable if there was an assertion that it was to be used to plot an attack on the railway. And yet plotting Green attacks, and carrying them out, gets you let off…
It appears to me that Andreas is inviting potshots.
Leftists have always embraced sabotage, except when they are in charge, then they execute saboteurs and their families, whole villages and towns, hell, in several countries they have exterminated entire segments of the population for “sabotaging” their ideology by refusing to accept it.
What if these same tactics were visited upon the The New Yorker and their ilk? Seems possible.
Monty Python’s how to blow up Andreas Malm. Dong!!!!! tune of Monty Python’s show starting…..
Of course blow up pipelines, why should not people freeze in the winter. And if they could kill some Trump supporters in the process so much the better.