How to Blow Up a Pipeline:
• Explores how the climate movement has successfully galvanised action towards tackling the climate crisis
• Examines how direct actions such as protests, blockades and civil disobedience can be employed to obstruct powerful structures and initiate change
• Demonstrates the importance of decentralisation, using examples of successful campaigns led by grassroots organisers
• Richly illustrated, exploring the use of visual language and symbols as powerful forms of communication
• A must-read for UX Designers who are seeking to understand the power of visuals and direct change, in order to assist in driving positive action surrounding the climate crisis.
Other books that UX Designers may be interested in reading, which intersect with the theme of climate activism include:
• We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation, by Matthew Riemer and Leightonbrush
• This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century, by Mark and Paul Engler
• Deep Shift: Game-Changing Strategies for Social Change, by Tom Sine
• Protest Nation: Words that Inspired a Century of American Radicalism, by Timothy McGrath.
✏️ Highlights
communal kitchen served vegan food. Assemblies were open to anyone with something to say.
We had been camping out in a shabby gymnasium in the eastern part of the city for a week.
One day we poured out of subway stations and onto a busy junction in the middle of the city and blocked the traffic with banners calling for emissions to be slashed. Activists played guitars and violins while others danced; some juggled; some handed out sunflower seeds to irate motorists. We had no intention of confronting the police or anyone else; we’d rather get arrested than throw a bottle or stone.
we laid down on the tarmac to be run over by a vehicle built of cardboard and wood to symbolise business-as-usual.
Since COP1, my home country, Sweden, has initiated one of the largest infrastructure projects in its history: a massive ‘ring road’ highway. Nothing extraordinary, just another highway. Coiling around Stockholm, it is meant to carry more cars spewing out ever more
Since COP1, my home country, Sweden, has initiated one of the largest infrastructure projects in its history: a massive ‘ring road’ highway. Nothing extraordinary, just another highway. Coiling around Stockholm, it is meant to carry more cars spewing out ever more millions of tons of the noxious element.
we talk of extinction and no future. And still business continues very much as usual.
When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?
summer of 2017, the Gulf of Mexico stored a record amount of heat. Its surface waters had never been as warm before.
On 18 September, the eighth hurricane of the season, christened Maria, suddenly and explosively intensified from a category 1 to a category 5 system and took on the shape, as satellites recorded, of a monstrous saw blade.
The rainforests covering the hills were clear-cut, the trees chopped and thrown into the sea, the island sheared of its emblematic greenery in the course of a few hours; buildings were
The rainforests covering the hills were clear-cut, the trees chopped and thrown into the sea, the island sheared of its emblematic greenery in the course of a few hours; buildings were blown away as if they had been straw huts.
Estimates of the share of houses either vanished or badly damaged ranged from 60 to 97 per cent.
Skerrit spoke of himself as coming straight from the front line of a war. ‘We dug graves today in Dominica!’ he exclaimed. ‘We buried loved ones yesterday and I am sure that as I return home tomorrow, we shall discover additional fatalities. Our homes are flattened!
Skerrit spoke of himself as coming straight from the front line of a war. ‘We dug graves today in Dominica!’ he exclaimed. ‘We buried loved ones yesterday and I am sure that as I return home tomorrow, we shall discover additional fatalities. Our homes are flattened! Our buildings are roofless! Our crops are uprooted! Where there was green there is now only dust and dirt.’
The heat was not generated by Caribbean peoples. An island almost exclusively inhabited by the descendants of slaves and a sliver of an indigenous population, Dominica remains impoverished, a world away from New York City or London, responsible for a level of fossil fuel combustion so miniscule that it alone would have left no trace on the planet. ‘The war has come to us!’ Skerrit cried out, struggling to contain the pain. ‘We are shouldering the consequences of the actions of others. Actions that endanger our very existence … and all for the enrichment of a few elsewhere.’
It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism.
This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising
This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising SUVs. In cities, SUVs are loathed by everyone except the people who drive them; and in a city the size of London, a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible, just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time.
So why don’t these things happen? Is it because the people who feel strongly about climate change are simply too nice, too educated, to do anything of the sort? (But terrorists are often highly educated.) Or is it that even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it?
Say fifty people vandalising four cars each every night for a month: six thousand trashed SUVs in a month and the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets.
These words were penned ten years before the hurricane season of 2017. They were written before floods inundated a fifth of Pakistan and ruined the lives of some 20 million people, before Cyclone Nargis killed a couple of hundred thousand in Myanmar, before Typhoon Haiyan killed more than six thousand in the Philippines, before Cyclone Idai devastated central Mozambique, before Matthew, Isaac, Irma, Dorian, before the droughts settled on Central America and took hold of Iran and Afghanistan, before mudslides killed more than a thousand in the capital of Sierra Leone and monsoon-like rains washed away hundreds of villages in Peru and the thermometer regularly reached levels barely endurable by the human body in the Persian Gulf, before uncountable other disasters – some reaching deep into the global North: heatwaves roasting Europe for two consecutive summers, the worst wildfires in the history of California – all formed in the cauldron of an overheated
heatwaves roasting Europe for two consecutive summers, the worst wildfires in the history of California – all formed in the cauldron of an overheated world.
And still the same conditions prevail. They are puzzling. At least five factors make them so.
the awareness of the structure and dimensions of the crisis (considerably more widespread now than when Lanchester’s essay was published), weighing rather heavier on people’s minds than an issue like animal rights.
the efficacy of a campaign to take out the most emissions-intensive devices. We do not know if the results are guaranteed, because no such campaigns
the efficacy of a campaign to take out the most emissions-intensive devices. We do not know if the results are guaranteed, because no such campaigns have yet, as of this writing, been undertaken.
the crisis itself never relented. In the summer of 2018, a dome of heat lodged over the European continent, withheld the clouds for months on end and ignited firestorms of unseen intensity; in Sweden, military jets were called in to bomb the conflagrations (dropping not water bombs but actual explosives). The whole country seemed to shrivel. Towards the end of the summer, a fifteen-year-old girl, Greta Thunberg, took her bike to the Swedish parliament. She sat down on the pavement and declared a school strike for the climate.
The scales varied from one young woman in Minsk, Belarus, striking on her own to 50,000 children in school uniforms marching through Luanda, Angola. Students in the low-lying island nation of Kiribati chanted, ‘We are not sinking, we are fighting.’
But the epicentre of the mobilisation was Germany, home to more than one-third of all strikers in the world on 20 September, a fair share of them adults, some with the blessing of their unions.
The movement must learn to disrupt business-as-usual. To this end, it has developed an impressive repertoire: blockades, occupations, sit-ins, divestment, school strikes, the shutdown of city centres, the signal tactic of the climate camp.
One example: in late August 2018, some 700 activists assembled outside a compound of seven grey gas cisterns in the Dutch province of Groningen. Home to the largest onshore field of fossil gas in Europe, the area has long been racked by serial earthquakes,
the extraction has made the land suddenly compact and subside, damaging homes and buildings and racking the nerves of the local population.
Germany initiates immediate phase-out of coal production, the Netherlands likewise for gas, Norway for oil, the US for all of the above; legislation and planning are put in place for cutting emissions by at least 10 per cent per year; renewable energy and public transport are scaled up, plant-based diets promoted, blanket bans on fossil fuels prepared.
But imagine a different scenario: a few years down the road, the kids of the Thunberg generation and the rest of us wake up one morning and realise that business-as-usual is still on, regardless of all the strikes, the science, the pleas, the millions with colourful outfits and banners – not beyond the realm of the thinkable.
Imagine the greasy wheels roll as fast as ever. What do we do then? Do we say that we’ve done what we could, tried the means at our disposal and failed? Do we conclude that the only thing left is learning to die – a position already propounded by some – and slide down the side of the crater into three, four, eight degrees of warming?
morrow of completion would mean pecuniary
Once an investor has constructed a coal-fired power plant or a pipeline or any other such unit, he will not want to dismantle it. Demolition on the morrow of completion would mean pecuniary disaster. It takes a lot of capital to get something like a deep-water field to pump up the black gold, and some time must pass before the initial investment pays off, and once profits have come gushing in, the owner will have an abiding interest in keeping the unit at work for as long as possible.
Yet another found that incumbent and planned coal infrastructure alone would crash the 2°C budget. Something along these lines is, as the saying goes, in the pipeline.
Many in the climate movement and most of its intellectuals would shudder at the thought of another stage beyond absolute non-violence, for a particular doctrine has taken hold: that of pacifism. It comes in two main forms. Moral pacifism says that it is always wrong to commit acts of violence. This has peculiar consequences.
Among ethical standpoints, there is no such thing as ‘contingent’ or ‘relative pacifism’. A pacifist who makes exceptions is a just war theorist.
Inspired by recent massacres at a mosque in Christchurch (fifty-one killed) and a shopping mall in El Paso (twenty-two killed), his intention was to kill the maximum number of worshippers – embodiments of the supposed threat to the white race – but barely had he fired his first bullets before a sixty-five-year-old man, Mohammed Rafiq, dressed in a shalwar kameez and sporting a big white beard, threw himself over the assailant.
August 2019, a young man appeared in a courtroom in the Norwegian capital of Oslo
Moral pacifism claims to hold life in the highest regard and detest its violent termination, but a defensive act that saves lives and reduces violence is unacceptable to it insofar as it involves active physical force. This seems flawed.
fascist mass murderers, for instance – will be the least receptive to meek non-violent opposition. Indeed, the precepts of pacifism have often come across as exhortations to surrender to suffering and atrocity.
Slipping out of the antinomies of moral pacifism, however, is the second version: the strategic one.
It says that violence committed by social movements always takes them further from their goal.
Turning to violent methods is not so much wrong as impolitic, ineffective, counterproductive – poor strategy, in short; non-violence is hallowed less as a virtue than as a superior means.
There are two types of disruption: violent and nonviolent. Violence is a traditional method. It is brilliant at getting attention and creating chaos and disruption, but it is often disastrous when it comes to creating progressive change.
Analogism has become a prime mode of argumentation and the main source of strategic thinking, most visibly in XR, the rare organisation that defines itself as a result of historical study. Note that the argument is not that violence would be bad at this particular moment – say, because the level of class struggle is so low in the global North that adventurist actions would only rebound and suppress it further: words that would never pass XR lips – nor that it might be expedient only under conditions of severe repression.
‘The anti-slavery movement only took off once white people in Europe and America began to see people of African descent not as property but as people.’
Gandhi was the Einstein of nonviolence, ‘our scientist of the human spirit, our engineer of political courage’;
Would slavery have ended without the slaves and their allies fighting back? The scholar who has most ambitiously sought to downplay the causal impact of slave revolts, Portuguese historian João Pedro Marques, has met with a barrage of criticisms from other specialists in the field. One of the most prominent, Robin Blackburn, has retorted that the very notion of slavery as unethical – harmful to the slaves, whom the masters wished to portray as happy and docile – originated in the acts of explosive refusal.
Even the most pacifist Quakers pointed to the revolts as proof of the horrors of the peculiar institution.
communal kitchen served vegan food. Assemblies were open to anyone with something to say.
We had been camping out in a shabby gymnasium in the eastern part of the city for a week.
One day we poured out of subway stations and onto a busy junction in the middle of the city and blocked the traffic with banners calling for emissions to be slashed. Activists played guitars and violins while others danced; some juggled; some handed out sunflower seeds to irate motorists. We had no intention of confronting the police or anyone else; we’d rather get arrested than throw a bottle or stone.
we laid down on the tarmac to be run over by a vehicle built of cardboard and wood to symbolise business-as-usual.
Since COP1, my home country, Sweden, has initiated one of the largest infrastructure projects in its history: a massive ‘ring road’ highway. Nothing extraordinary, just another highway. Coiling around Stockholm, it is meant to carry more cars spewing out ever more
Since COP1, my home country, Sweden, has initiated one of the largest infrastructure projects in its history: a massive ‘ring road’ highway. Nothing extraordinary, just another highway. Coiling around Stockholm, it is meant to carry more cars spewing out ever more millions of tons of the noxious element.
we talk of extinction and no future. And still business continues very much as usual.
When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?
summer of 2017, the Gulf of Mexico stored a record amount of heat. Its surface waters had never been as warm before.
On 18 September, the eighth hurricane of the season, christened Maria, suddenly and explosively intensified from a category 1 to a category 5 system and took on the shape, as satellites recorded, of a monstrous saw blade.
The rainforests covering the hills were clear-cut, the trees chopped and thrown into the sea, the island sheared of its emblematic greenery in the course of a few hours; buildings were
The rainforests covering the hills were clear-cut, the trees chopped and thrown into the sea, the island sheared of its emblematic greenery in the course of a few hours; buildings were blown away as if they had been straw huts.
Estimates of the share of houses either vanished or badly damaged ranged from 60 to 97 per cent.
Skerrit spoke of himself as coming straight from the front line of a war. ‘We dug graves today in Dominica!’ he exclaimed. ‘We buried loved ones yesterday and I am sure that as I return home tomorrow, we shall discover additional fatalities. Our homes are flattened!
Skerrit spoke of himself as coming straight from the front line of a war. ‘We dug graves today in Dominica!’ he exclaimed. ‘We buried loved ones yesterday and I am sure that as I return home tomorrow, we shall discover additional fatalities. Our homes are flattened! Our buildings are roofless! Our crops are uprooted! Where there was green there is now only dust and dirt.’
The heat was not generated by Caribbean peoples. An island almost exclusively inhabited by the descendants of slaves and a sliver of an indigenous population, Dominica remains impoverished, a world away from New York City or London, responsible for a level of fossil fuel combustion so miniscule that it alone would have left no trace on the planet. ‘The war has come to us!’ Skerrit cried out, struggling to contain the pain. ‘We are shouldering the consequences of the actions of others. Actions that endanger our very existence … and all for the enrichment of a few elsewhere.’
It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism.
This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising
This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising SUVs. In cities, SUVs are loathed by everyone except the people who drive them; and in a city the size of London, a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible, just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time.
So why don’t these things happen? Is it because the people who feel strongly about climate change are simply too nice, too educated, to do anything of the sort? (But terrorists are often highly educated.) Or is it that even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it?
Say fifty people vandalising four cars each every night for a month: six thousand trashed SUVs in a month and the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets.
These words were penned ten years before the hurricane season of 2017. They were written before floods inundated a fifth of Pakistan and ruined the lives of some 20 million people, before Cyclone Nargis killed a couple of hundred thousand in Myanmar, before Typhoon Haiyan killed more than six thousand in the Philippines, before Cyclone Idai devastated central Mozambique, before Matthew, Isaac, Irma, Dorian, before the droughts settled on Central America and took hold of Iran and Afghanistan, before mudslides killed more than a thousand in the capital of Sierra Leone and monsoon-like rains washed away hundreds of villages in Peru and the thermometer regularly reached levels barely endurable by the human body in the Persian Gulf, before uncountable other disasters – some reaching deep into the global North: heatwaves roasting Europe for two consecutive summers, the worst wildfires in the history of California – all formed in the cauldron of an overheated
heatwaves roasting Europe for two consecutive summers, the worst wildfires in the history of California – all formed in the cauldron of an overheated world.
And still the same conditions prevail. They are puzzling. At least five factors make them so.
the awareness of the structure and dimensions of the crisis (considerably more widespread now than when Lanchester’s essay was published), weighing rather heavier on people’s minds than an issue like animal rights.
the efficacy of a campaign to take out the most emissions-intensive devices. We do not know if the results are guaranteed, because no such campaigns
the efficacy of a campaign to take out the most emissions-intensive devices. We do not know if the results are guaranteed, because no such campaigns have yet, as of this writing, been undertaken.
the crisis itself never relented. In the summer of 2018, a dome of heat lodged over the European continent, withheld the clouds for months on end and ignited firestorms of unseen intensity; in Sweden, military jets were called in to bomb the conflagrations (dropping not water bombs but actual explosives). The whole country seemed to shrivel. Towards the end of the summer, a fifteen-year-old girl, Greta Thunberg, took her bike to the Swedish parliament. She sat down on the pavement and declared a school strike for the climate.
The scales varied from one young woman in Minsk, Belarus, striking on her own to 50,000 children in school uniforms marching through Luanda, Angola. Students in the low-lying island nation of Kiribati chanted, ‘We are not sinking, we are fighting.’
But the epicentre of the mobilisation was Germany, home to more than one-third of all strikers in the world on 20 September, a fair share of them adults, some with the blessing of their unions.
The movement must learn to disrupt business-as-usual. To this end, it has developed an impressive repertoire: blockades, occupations, sit-ins, divestment, school strikes, the shutdown of city centres, the signal tactic of the climate camp.
One example: in late August 2018, some 700 activists assembled outside a compound of seven grey gas cisterns in the Dutch province of Groningen. Home to the largest onshore field of fossil gas in Europe, the area has long been racked by serial earthquakes,
the extraction has made the land suddenly compact and subside, damaging homes and buildings and racking the nerves of the local population.
Germany initiates immediate phase-out of coal production, the Netherlands likewise for gas, Norway for oil, the US for all of the above; legislation and planning are put in place for cutting emissions by at least 10 per cent per year; renewable energy and public transport are scaled up, plant-based diets promoted, blanket bans on fossil fuels prepared.
But imagine a different scenario: a few years down the road, the kids of the Thunberg generation and the rest of us wake up one morning and realise that business-as-usual is still on, regardless of all the strikes, the science, the pleas, the millions with colourful outfits and banners – not beyond the realm of the thinkable.
Imagine the greasy wheels roll as fast as ever. What do we do then? Do we say that we’ve done what we could, tried the means at our disposal and failed? Do we conclude that the only thing left is learning to die – a position already propounded by some – and slide down the side of the crater into three, four, eight degrees of warming?
morrow of completion would mean pecuniary
Once an investor has constructed a coal-fired power plant or a pipeline or any other such unit, he will not want to dismantle it. Demolition on the morrow of completion would mean pecuniary disaster. It takes a lot of capital to get something like a deep-water field to pump up the black gold, and some time must pass before the initial investment pays off, and once profits have come gushing in, the owner will have an abiding interest in keeping the unit at work for as long as possible.
Yet another found that incumbent and planned coal infrastructure alone would crash the 2°C budget. Something along these lines is, as the saying goes, in the pipeline.
Many in the climate movement and most of its intellectuals would shudder at the thought of another stage beyond absolute non-violence, for a particular doctrine has taken hold: that of pacifism. It comes in two main forms. Moral pacifism says that it is always wrong to commit acts of violence. This has peculiar consequences.
Among ethical standpoints, there is no such thing as ‘contingent’ or ‘relative pacifism’. A pacifist who makes exceptions is a just war theorist.
Inspired by recent massacres at a mosque in Christchurch (fifty-one killed) and a shopping mall in El Paso (twenty-two killed), his intention was to kill the maximum number of worshippers – embodiments of the supposed threat to the white race – but barely had he fired his first bullets before a sixty-five-year-old man, Mohammed Rafiq, dressed in a shalwar kameez and sporting a big white beard, threw himself over the assailant.
August 2019, a young man appeared in a courtroom in the Norwegian capital of Oslo
Moral pacifism claims to hold life in the highest regard and detest its violent termination, but a defensive act that saves lives and reduces violence is unacceptable to it insofar as it involves active physical force. This seems flawed.
fascist mass murderers, for instance – will be the least receptive to meek non-violent opposition. Indeed, the precepts of pacifism have often come across as exhortations to surrender to suffering and atrocity.
Slipping out of the antinomies of moral pacifism, however, is the second version: the strategic one.
It says that violence committed by social movements always takes them further from their goal.
Turning to violent methods is not so much wrong as impolitic, ineffective, counterproductive – poor strategy, in short; non-violence is hallowed less as a virtue than as a superior means.
There are two types of disruption: violent and nonviolent. Violence is a traditional method. It is brilliant at getting attention and creating chaos and disruption, but it is often disastrous when it comes to creating progressive change.
Analogism has become a prime mode of argumentation and the main source of strategic thinking, most visibly in XR, the rare organisation that defines itself as a result of historical study. Note that the argument is not that violence would be bad at this particular moment – say, because the level of class struggle is so low in the global North that adventurist actions would only rebound and suppress it further: words that would never pass XR lips – nor that it might be expedient only under conditions of severe repression.
‘The anti-slavery movement only took off once white people in Europe and America began to see people of African descent not as property but as people.’
Gandhi was the Einstein of nonviolence, ‘our scientist of the human spirit, our engineer of political courage’;
Would slavery have ended without the slaves and their allies fighting back? The scholar who has most ambitiously sought to downplay the causal impact of slave revolts, Portuguese historian João Pedro Marques, has met with a barrage of criticisms from other specialists in the field. One of the most prominent, Robin Blackburn, has retorted that the very notion of slavery as unethical – harmful to the slaves, whom the masters wished to portray as happy and docile – originated in the acts of explosive refusal.
Even the most pacifist Quakers pointed to the revolts as proof of the horrors of the peculiar institution.
