The moral case for destroying fossil fuel infrastructure | Andreas Malm

If someone has planted a time bomb in your home, you are entitled to dismantle it. The same applies to our planet

The climate struggle has entered a new phase. It is marked by a search for different tactics: something that cannot be so easily ignored, a mode of action that disrupts business-as-usual for real, some way to pull the emergency brake. This search has only just begun, but the signs are there.

In Berlin, half a dozen young climate activists calling themselves The Last Generation' recently went on a hunger strike, eventually refusing liquids and becoming quite frail before calling the action off. But there are other things than our own bodies that can be shut down. In conjunction with this summer's Ende Gelande camp against fossil gas, a group calling itself Fridays for sabotage' claimed responsibility for rupturing a piece of gas infrastructure and urged the movement to embrace this tactic: There are many places of destruction, but just as many places of possible resistance.' This followed the development of a veritable archipelago of forest occupations in Germany, some of which have damaged equipment for coal extraction.

Andreas Malm is a scholar of human ecology at Lund University