Should the climate movement embrace property destruction? with Andreas Malm

disrupt in this bicycle right. Fights breaking out between enraged drivers and activists blocking roads scraps. They are picking up protesters one by one and dragging them. As alarm and urgency grows about the lack of action on climate change, the tactics employed by activists are escalating, with frequent examples of direct action and civil disobedience, many that annoy people

but succeed in attracting the attention they seek. My guest today is Andreas Maum, an associate professor of human ecology at Lund University who has thought long and hard about how to make the climate movement more effective. He is the author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, where he argues that if the climate movement wants to be successful, it must embrace even more radical action, including violence in

the form of property destruction, alongside peaceful protests. We have to escalate, I mean, will be completely irrelevant if we continue to march dressed in polar bear costumes in twenty thirty five, If, as seems likely to be the case, the world is on fire, it's an even greater extent then than what it is now. On this week's episode, Andreas discusses the moral case for property destruction, why he thinks the climate movement can't succeed without it, and whether

capitalism can survive the end of fossil fields. Andreas, Welcome to zero. Thank you so much. Chance. So, in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, you argue that no revolution throughout history has succeeded without accompanying violence, and that for the climate movement to succeed, it needs violent action. But violence is a very high threshold to cross. Can you first make the case why the world is in such a dire position that the violence is needed as an antidote. Yeah.

Let me just first point out that what I argue in the book is that we should use property destruction, So violence against things. I explicitly say that we should

not engage in violence against people. We shouldn't aim to extinguish lives, but we should aim to extinguish SUVs and coal mines and oil pipelines and all the machines that are killing people around the world and are affecting should real violence against people, Yeah, I mean the dire state we're in, it should be pretty obvious to anyone who's following the news who's not living under stone. I mean, a lot of Pakistan is still underwater as we speak.

A lot of Nigeria is also submerged under water after unprecedented floods. There is a very bad and protracted drought crisis on the Horn of Africa, and on and on it goes. And all of these extreme weather events that we see now are the results of the emissions that have accumulated over the past two centuries. What we're experiencing this year in twenty twenty two is but a foretaste of what is to come. It's a mistake to think that, ah, this is what global warming looks like. No, it's not.

Global warming is hardwired to deteriorate in so far as emissions continue, and they do continue. Not only do they continue, but what we're experiencing right now after the pandemic and the rebound and reinforced by the war in Ukraine, is an exceptional profit bonanza for the oil and gas companies used to reinvest in even more pipelines, gas terminals, coal mines, exactly what we cannot have anymore. So clearly, what the climate movement or anyone else for that matter, has done

so far has been insufficient. We haven't done enough because we have come nowhere close to reining in the forces that are bent on just pouring more fossil fuels on the fire. But dug me through the historical examples that you write about in your book, where you say, for any large movement there is usually a violent arm that is helping bring about change. That it's not always the peaceful, the non violent arm, which may be larger, but a small,

targeted violent arm that also does it. Yeah. So I should point out that the discussion of historical cases in this book that I wrote is brief and superficial, and it's formulated in response to a particularly kind of narrative that was developed by people in the climate movement. Notably extinction rebellion that says that we had these precedents, these examples in history where people have successfully defeated injustices through exclusively non violent means, and we're going to do the

same on the climate front. So the cases that are usually adduced here are the struggle against slavery in the Americas, suffragets on the struggle for women's right to vote, the civil rights movement in the US, anti colonial movements with a focus on India, the struggle against Apartheide, and various democratic revolutions. And if you go through each and one of these cases, you see that that isn't exactly what happened.

There's a lot of peace washing required to establish the storyline that there was no militancy, no violent confrontation, no property destruction, no riots or anything like that. It was just peaceful civil disbeinience I mean slavery to begin with, Where should you even start? The historical interpretation of these

events is biased. To put it mildly, the Suffragets used very extensive campaigns of arson and even bombing, and tremendous amount of property destruction to fight for the women's right to vote. The civil rights movement in the US had a very productive relation to a more radical flank in the form of urban riots and movements like the Nation of Islam and the Black Power movement. This is the

classical case for the theory of the radical flank. These groups made the civil rights mainstream represented by Martin Luther King, appear less dangerous in the eyes of the institutions of white supremacy, and therefore they were inclined to concede to their demands because they knew that unless we do this, we'll end up with Malcolm X and stoke the carmac on of those people who are ten times worse. The various democratic revolutions, including the toppling of the Berlin Wall,

included property destruction. I mean, people didn't go up to the Berlin Wall and caressed the cement. They broke it into pieces. So if you look into the evidence, the data, which isn't hard to come by, for all of these historical cases that the strategic pacifists point to as examples and models for how we're going to win the climate battle, the narrative falls apart because that's just not what happened.

Although in these violent cases, even in the places where property destruction was the main motive, there were related debts. So let's just understand that you are advocating for violence against property, not humans. So first, why is it okay to do that to property? And second what happens when humans are unintentionally harmed in the process. Yeah, so this is a very important and tricky question. I mean, morally, there is a significant difference between slashing tires of an

suv and stabbing piercing someone's lungs. I think that's the example I use in the book. I mean the moral difference between destroying an inanimate objects that doesn't have a life. It's something qualitatively different from going after a person with

a life and ending that life or harming that person deliberately. Now, if you want to way to campaign that exclusively targets things, not people, you have to have a collective discipline in that movement where people agree that we're going to sabotage things, We're going to destroy things, but are not harming individual human beings. We're not assassinating executives or shooting corps or something like that. This kind of collective discipline isn't easy

to establish, but I don't think it's impossible. We have quite a few examples from history and from more contemporary periods where that collective discipline has been successfully pursued. There were environmental movements that had their own disadvantages in my view in the nineteen nineties in the US and elsewhere that waged quite methodic, systematical campaigns or properly destruction without

ever harming human beings. I think the uprising after the murder of George Floyd is another example where people in the US destroyed a lot of property, including police property, and that included riots, but there was a general implicit understanding that we're not going to assassinate corps or you know, guns and shoot them or something like that. And that's not for lack of guns in the US. There's any country in the world where you can get hold of a gun and shoot a corp is probably in the US.

But I think the movement new and this collective self discipline extended to that gigantic movement that developed in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, that was a step that shouldn't be taken. And I think that now that the climate movement is beginning to experimenting with sabotage

and discussing it and reflecting on property instruction. There is a very strong consensus that it's out of the question that we would use arms to physically injure the lives of people who engage in fossil fuel extraction or whatever. It would be morally wrong and it would also harm our cause. Now we've seen a number of high profile groups that have taken direct action in the name of climate There is a group called the Tire Extinguishers, which

does not slash tires but deflates them. We have groups in the UK like Insulate Britain that stop motorway traffic, and Extinction Rebellion has been doing actions that have stopped many parts of London from completely operating, including stopping public transport. These all get attention and they are succeeding in highlighting climate change. You know, there are people who love them, they're people who hate them. But are these good examples of the kinds of action you'd like to see? Well?

I advocate a diversity of tactics, which means that I think we should try almost everything. Like I said, we shouldn't engage in assassinations or terrorism, or use arms or anything like that, but until that line or boundary, we need virtually everything, which means that we need petitions, we need court cases, we need parliamentary campaigns. We need in gels and lobbing efforts. We need actions of the time

that extinction Rebellion has undertaken. We need mass demonstrations, school strikes, trade unions, all the way up to sabotage and property destruction. That said, and with the greatest respect to everything that Extinction Rebellion or XR has accomplished over the past three years, I do think that targeting general urban life has a particular logic that makes some sense. It attracts a lot of attention, but it can also be quite imprecise in

its targeting of virtually anything and anyone. I think that it's more strategically productive to do things such as just stop oil, another of these offshoots from XR has done when they have blockaded the actual distribution and processing of oil,

because that is to go to the source of the problem. Likewise, I think the tire extinguishers when they deflate SUVs, have a high degree of precision because they go after machines that are completely pointless and that cause luxury emissions, and that's much more effective and politically fruitful than, for instance, stopping a subway train, which the x Are did infamously in late twenty nineteen in London, which had no political logic to it whatsoever. Because that's even part of the solution,

it's not part of the problem. My personal preferences are for mass actions or small group direct actions that target fossil fuel infrastructure and machines for luxury emissions with a high degree of precision, could you explain the difference between luxury and subsistence emissions and why it is okay to target one and not the other. Yeah, So the classical distinction hereness between emissions that are the outcome of subsistence like ativities as in farmers cultivating vice for instance, and

the rice paddies producing methane. You don't attack that because these emissions are byproducts of activities that reproduce these humans lives. Luxury emissions are emissions that stem from economic activities that have no such function. So people who drive SUVs or take private jets for seventeen minutes when they could just as well have taken public transportation, or who have their

super yachts or whatever. Don't do this because they wouldn't survive otherwise, you know, it's not like their bodies would dissolve if they didn't have these machines or commodities. They do it primarily to flaunt their wealth. It's part of a luxury lifestyle, which means that these emissions are completely pointless. But they're all are the most damaging ones because they

produce these excesses of CO two. So the carbon inequality in populations is increasing all the time, where it's you know, the distribution of emissions gets more and more skewed, and it's more and more concentrated at the top. And these emissions would presumably be the first that you take down because they can be easily done away with, because no one would die from not having to write a super yacht.

The problem is that governments are beholding to precisely these class interests, so they are much much more likely to do it the other way around. If they're targeting anyone, that's probably working people, because that's usually the people that they target. So the climate movement needs to target luxury emissions when no one else does. You've participated in direct action yourself. In two thousand and six and seven in Sweden.

You deflated tires of SUVs in twenty sixteen in Germany and broke through the fence of a coal power plant, which then had to be shut down. Do you think those efforts have been more successful than the other, less direct or less focused efforts. No, I can't claim that there has been any major success on the part of

these campaigns because they've been extremely limited in scale. We don't know yet if sabotage and property destruction will work because it hasn't been tried on a significant scale enough. I mean, what we do know from the campaign of defeating SUVs back in two thousand and seven was that it seems to have cost or at least contributed to a significant drop in SUV sales in Sweden that year. And you see I think similar signs now with the

tire extinguishers. That you have mainstream outlets such as telegraph advising car consumers to not purchase SUVs because then they run the risk of waking up in the morning to deflated tires. But it needs to happen on a much much greater scale for us to know its full effects. What I argue in the book is that there is a potential here that awaits expiration and activation that we should make the most of this tactic. As for the tire extinguishers, what's so great about their particular tactic is

that it's so easy for people to copy it. We just need a little bit of courage to go out in the cover of the night and deflate SUV tires. So that's a type of action that spread very easily, and I think we'll continue to do so. You say it hasn't been tested at scale, but here is an ongoing test right in turning off gas supplies to Europe. Russia has in a metaphorical way, if not a literal sense, blown up its pipelines to Europe. And what has that done.

It has brought many European economies to their knees. Sri Lanka ran out of petrol and diesel. Okay, there was some money problem, but also it was at a time when petrol and diesel prices were so high Pakistan couldn't buy natural gas that it had built infrastructure to be able to provide subsistence emissions, which is real power to people who really needed, not luxury emissions. So if we do take it to the logical extreme and blow up pipelines. If these are the impacts that we will see, how

do you think people would join such a movement. Yeah, but this isn't the first time in history that we have oiler price shocks with metaphorical suspension of pipelines. That's exactly what we had in nineteen seventy three with the first circled oil crisis, or in nineteen seventy nine eighty with the second oil crisis with the Iranian revolution, and none of these acts, just like with what's happening with Putin's pipelines of gas to Europe, had any kind of

client him, its agenda behind them. And I mean Putin isn't doing this because he wants to stop fossil fuel. To the contrary, he wants to continue as much as possible. And it's virtually a climate denialist as far as I know.

A climate movement that would shut down fossil fuel infrastructure would do it in a completely different kind of political context than with another logic and message, and it would have to be combined, of course, with a demand to roll out solar and wind power at the highest possible speed through public investment, and that is the response that has to be provided to questions of energy poverty and energy crisis that we're seeing unfolding in the world and

hitting of course poor people primarily. The absurdity here is that solar and wind are becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper year by years, so that in most places around the world there are cheaper per unit of energy than fossil fuse. However, for big energy companies, that's not an incentive to invest in them because the profits are much

higher in oil and gas. So big big companies such as you know, Saudi aramcoor or Xon or BP, what they're doing right now is that they're using these high profits on fossil fuels that are partly caused by the war in Ukraine to invest even further in fossil fuels, despite the fact that we have a situation where the world economy as a whole would gain strictly financially from a complete shift from fossil fuels to renewabooks. And that's a perversity of the system that has to be challenged somehow.

Let's take that and split it open a little bit more. So, what's happening right now with the Russia situation is that access to fossil fuels has been suddenly cut off. What you're suggesting is you would do it in a way where you wouldn't have such sudden disruptions, even though blowing up a pipeline is a sudden action, so to speak. But you'd do it strategically such that you are not bringing entire economies to the knees. But the driving mantra for oil and gas companies, and this is the term

they themselves invented. It's called the social license to operate. They say, we need a social license to operate, and currently that license comes from providing energy that the world needs and doing it in a way that is cheap enough and reliable enough for them to be able to afford.

The thing that they are worried about is when climate change takes the social license to operate out, because people know that the products they're using and the emissions that are being caused by those products is exactly what's harming the world. This is the moment where that social license to operate swings back into their favor. You mean this

moment of the war. Yes, yeah. If they are successful in establishing the notion that the only option on the table is more fossil fuse, and governments have largely gone with that. Early in the war there was a moment a little bit similar to early in the pandemic, where people thought that, oh, now this might be the big opportunity to get rid of fossil fuse, because now it's demonstrated to everyone that the reliance on Russian fossil fuels has made us vulnerable. So let's just ditch fossil fuels

and have the transition finally to renewables. It didn't happen with the pandemic. It didn't happen with the war, and with the war instead, what you've seen is, of course countries in Europe trying to replace Russian fossil fuse with other kinds of fossil fuse. What you could do is you could massively roll out solar and wind, but that would require public investment on a large scale, and it would require a degree of coordination and a degree of coercion.

You would have to overrule local resistance against certain wind projects and stuff like that. There's no technical reason for the failure to use the war as a spur to the transition. It's a political thing. It's clear that property destruction can be viewed as a form of violence. But with climate change causing more and more destruction and death, why don't we see fossil fuel use as similarly violent.

That's coming up after the break. Let's talk through one thing that you have mentioned in the past that I'd love for you to explain in a different way. So you're talking about violence against property. Here you explain to us the moral case, Like, you know, you shouldn't be going out and killing humans, but there are studies that show clearly that every million tons of C or two that is put out into the atmosphere does kill people. So there is a moral act of violence being committed.

But that moral act of violence isn't seen today as a moral act of violence. Why is that? Exactly? This is the big problem, or one of the big problems. So I think that it's becoming clearer by the day that taking up fossil fuels out of the ground and putting them on fire is an act of violence. It's an act of sending indiscriminately projectiles into the human population,

blindly hitting primarily civilian populations in the global cut. The reason that this isn't yet seen by the broader public as the kind of violence that it is is that it's mediated through the atmosphere. You will never see a fossil fuel executive standing on the top of the Pakistani farmer and having his knee on the neck of someone in the way that Derek Chovin had his body on top of George Floyd in a kind of immediate body

to body, direct hands on violence. Violence in a warming world is filter, is mediated through the atmosphere, and it hits people at a great distance away from the sources of extraction and combustion, and therefore it's very difficult to see it for what it is. The task for the climate movement is to make clear for people that these are acts of violence. Building new pipelines today, a new gas terminals, opening new oil fields, or acts of violence

that need to be stopped. They kill people. We know that, and it's it's again. You have to be aware that it's we are at a different point in history. So doing these things one hundred years ago might not have caused a lot of harm because the atmosphere wasn't yet filled with seal two. Now that it's filled, it's over filled with seal two. Adding more C two to the atmosphere means you're doing direct harm to people and other

forms of life. Now, the other thing that has made a big difference is that the climate movement has been growing in number, and that's for many reasons. There's better organizing, there's better connection of science to an extreme weather event, there's obviously more awareness of the impact. But also when somebody goes out and does an action, it emboldens other people to join that movement. Most of that, however, just because of the nature of movements as they have existed

so far, has been through non violence. But what you are suggesting is property damage, and that is a violent activity. Now, I struggle with the idea of joining a protest at all, and I definitely will struggle with one where I knew that there's going to be some sort of property damage involved. And so, how do you think this movement will grow if violence or property damage is supposed to be one

central tenet? Yeah, So, first of all, I emphasize in the book, and I hope I've made a clear elsewhere too, that the bulk of all activities to the climate movement undertakes will continue to be non violent in nature. That has to be the case. Question is should we add something more to our arsenal, And I think there's a case to be made for that, including that some people would be more maybe not you, maybe not me, but some people would be more inclined to join if there

was a greater moment of antagonism and militancy. And I do think that the climate movement needs to be better at articulating anger as a key emotion in climate politics. I think obviously there's a great risk that sabotage, property destruction in any form will deter people, and that's one reason why we need to be careful and intelligent about

what kind of sabotage we're undertaking. So we're not going to blow up a pipeline in the middle of a I don't know, Latino community in Houston that accidentally sets on fire houses and people have to flee or something like that. That would be very bad thing to do.

But there might be other kinds of fossil fuel installations, including you know, just the other week and now, speaking about what happened in August in Germany, you had in the Gillende going into a site where a gas pipeline was under construction, and conducting quite extensive sabotage against that site. And I think that is something that can be explained to people and people can make sense of it, because it's clear that this is precisely the kind of installations

that we can't have any more of. So it depends on how you do it. Right now, you can imagine that one act of property destruction can lead to another act of violence, so and aggravated ASUV driver whose tires have been deflated might end up being more aggressive to cyclists on their road, or if you're in the US, there's a very real danger of getting shot because guns are so easy to come by, And of course there is the sort of reaction that state power brings in

where harsh sentences are given to protesters and activists. Do you think these are just inadvitable consequences of what you're proposing and that we should just be ready for them, well to an extent in the sense that I don't know that history can generate a single example of the movement that has challenged deeply entrenched interests without having to grapple with the problem of repression from state apparatusis and various kinds of backlash from people who are deeply invested

in the status quo. That's part of the game that we're playing here, and we can't really run away from it. However, that doesn't mean that we should be sanguine or cynical about this and say that inevitably people will be shot by infuriated suv owners, so let's just go with it, or sooner or later we'll all end up in jail. We should try to minimize this kind of reaction and minimize the harm that it can do to the movement

that begins. I think with the break with the idea that part of climate activism is to get arrested and stand trial and subject yourself to repression, and that's part of the classical civil disobedience protocol. You know that once you've done your action, you also allow yourself to be arrested, and you make your case in the court, and you assume responsibility for what you've done by doing your prison

and sentence or something like that. I really think that we've had enough of that and that we should from the climate movement instead think of it this way. We want to accomplish as much as possible ball with as little repression as possible. So it's a much better gain or a much better win for us if we managed to shut down a coal fired power plant or something like that with zero activists being arrested. That's not going to guarantee, of course, that we will always out with

the courts. No, we won't. If we're in a running battle with an existing, deeply entrenched social order. Yes, people will suffer costs. That's what social struggle means virtually by definition, if it's a real confrontation that shakes things up properly. So we are seeing a significant backlash to the existing

non violent protests in the UK. The Police and Crime Bill, which was strendened in twenty twenty two, provide specific provisions that tackle protests like extinction rebellion to block traffic and can put people into jail for ten years if laws are broken. If we go down the property instruction route, I'd real likely to see more politicians and more of the status quo campaigning on law and order to bring

in even stricter punishment. That's what always happened when you escalate. Yes, so if you go from just nice demonstrations to civil disobedience of the XR kind, you will have these more punitive laws that you see if you take the next step and go into sambotage and property destruction, yes there will also be tougher sanctions. But this is how the vested interests of business as usual or the prevailing order

always react to challenges. We cannot from that draw the conclusion that we have to opt for tactic that doesn't incure the wrath of the existing structure, because that means basically staying at home or not posing any danger to the system. As soon as you do pose a danger to the system, this is what you'll get in return, and that's a sign that you're doing something good, that

you're actually challenging some interests. Now, I do think that when we're looking at the climate crisis, we need to take into account that this crisis will only get worse and we have to escalate. I mean, will be completely irrelevant if we continue to march dressed in polarbial costumes in twenty thirty five, like within the nineteen ninety five, If, as seems likely to be the case, the world is on fire, it's an even greater extent then than what

it is now. Also, I think that the social license for repression against climate activists, if you see what I mean, will inevitably undergo some kind of change the worst this crisis becomes. At least, that's what you have to hope, if there's any rationality left in the species and in our societies, that people will have a greater degree of understanding and sympathy with climate activists who are fighting against

spiraling death. In the book, you tell the story of two climate workers, Jessica Rasnichick and Ruby Montoya, who sabotaged the Dakota Access Pipeline in twenty sixteen. Now, Resnichick has been sentenced to eight years in jail with a terrorism enhancement. Do you think it was worth it? Yeah, obviously. I think she's a heroine and I have the greatest respect for her. Now, it's a very complicated legal case, with a lot of back and forth and the infiltration and

FBI and collaboration of things like that. I'm not fully up to date with the latest twists in the story, but anyway, what we know is that these two activists ran up and down the Dakota Access Pipeline and destroyed as much of it as they could. Then they ended their campaign, and after a while they decided to give themselves in and went public with their act to inspire others and let themselves be arrested. That's one way of

doing it. Another way of doing it is what people did in British Columbia in late February twenty twenty two, when you had twenty activists storming a site where the coastal gas link pipeline was being constructed in the wet Suit and First Nation territory, and they chased the way guards and took over the site and used trucks and

bulldozers to smash every equipment that they could. When the police came to the site, they kept the police away until they were all gone, these activists, and they had also destroyed methodically all video surveillance cameras, so there was no evidence of who had done this, and as far as I know, not a single of these twenty activists

has been arrested. That's another way of approaching this problem of having a very high profile action of property destruction and then making sure that no one is arrested, and to me, that's more productive. I talked to the novelist Amitav Koch, who you probably know, who's written nonfiction books about climate change, and we were talking about your book and he said this which has stayed with me. He said, if you and I, as brown people were to get

involved in property damage, imagine what would happen. And honestly, it was a scary thought. And the more I've thought about it, the more I've been scared. Because I came to the UK as an immigrant. I was on a visa working in organizations where my visa was tied to my work. And you know, even if I was not brown, I would still be very careful, and I was, and I've always been very careful about making sure everything is done right because I never want to be caught out

as doing something wrong. You know, I'm a journalist. Another reason why you have to do it so to do anything of this level of disruption in a public setting is it's so hard for me to appreciate how much courage it takes that I fear it's not enough. I don't know if people understand why they should even be taking this step. So you're talking about brown or non

white people in the global North. Yes, so, yes, I mean I get your point, but I think this situation here is very complicated and it has a lot of different answers to First of all, if we're looking at Europe, it's not exactly the case that racialized communities are the most adverse to various kinds of political violence. If you look at France, for instance, or my own country, Sweden, when riots happen, if they happen at all, I mean, in Sweden, rioting is an extremely rare phenomenon. But if

anyone is ever rioting, it's non white people. And why is that because at the bottom of the pile, and they are angry about being systematically discriminated against. So it's not like political violence in Sweden or in France or anywhere else in Europe is some kind of a white privilege or a white monopoly. And I also think that the relation to the cops here is it's more like the other way around. In Extinction rebellion in twenty nineteen,

in its first iteration was extremely cop positive. If you if you know what I mean. You know, they would send flowers to the police and say we're doing this for the you two and stuff like that. And if anyone got upset about that, it was non white people who would argue that no people from racialized communities would would you know, love bomb the police the way you do, you're really telling us that this is not a movement

for people who are systematically harassed by the police. On the other hand, of course, there is something to it that certain people can engage in more high profile, provocative political actions than others and risk less consequence. I mean, I think me, being a white man, even just saying and writing those things, is a way for me to

use a privilege. I also happened to be an academic with a tenure position, so I have a relatively secure employment situation, and I'm more or less intentionally use this privilege to say and write things that would have been much more difficult for a non white woman in a precarious working situation. Is that me exercising my privilege? Yes, it is. But sometimes this is the way that you

should exercise your privilege. I think. So if some of us can say or do things and get away with it, I don't see why that is necessarily wrong in and of itself. So it's a it's a complicated picture, but I don't I don't think it's the case that this is only for white people. No, I don't think you were once asked about the fact that is it only possible to win in the climate freight by overthrowing capitalism,

and you said, no, do you still think that. I think that what we know is that it's by definition impossible to get the climate classes under any kind of control and limit its damage without abolishing, forever for good, the part of the capitalist class that profits from the production of fosil fuse. So we can't have that. We cannot have private property and fossil fuse. We cannot have

capital accumulation based on the extraction of fosiph fuse. Does that mean that when we accomplish that, capitalism as an entire mode of production also goes out of existence. That I don't think we can know for sure. I think it's logically conceivable to have capitalism without fossil use. However, if we're actually abolishing this core of fossil capital that profits from fossil fuse, we are setting in motion social processes that might there will take us beyond the existing

economic system or political order. We talked a little bit about anger, and you said the climate movement needs to get better at understanding it, at exploring it, at expressing it. But anger in society manifests in terrible ways because simmering anger has health consequences, has physical health consequences, has mental health consequences. But as a tool it can be used

for good. So what has been through your exploration of these topics of of anger, which I feel like is one thing that you have been trying to articulate for the climate movement that you think is the right way to understand anger and use anger. Well, I think the deleterious effect of anger come primarily when anger is you know, bolted up and kept on the inside and not given any kind of vent to. That's when people suffer from it, really.

But when you have some kind of an outlet for anger, and an outlet that is legitimate and justified, then that's I think beneficial way of dealing with that emotion. It's helpful for the people who have that emotion. And I also think that in the case of climate, a lot of people feel despair, hopelessness, paralysis, fear, and other kinds of emotions that are demobili thing and that tend to produce anguish and exciting and the alternative often is anger.

Because we know from psychological research that if there's any emotion that fuels social mobilization. It's anger, be it the uprising after the murder of George Floyd, or the Me Too movement, or the Yellow Vests, or the struggle against slavery or whatever. Anger is normally the psychic fuel of the movements of that sort. So this is the emotion that the climate movement also needs to learn to give voice too, and we haven't seen that at scale yet. It's still in the future. Thank you. There was a

wonderful conversation. Thank you. I appreciate. One thing is clear, rewiring the world to run on clean energy will need creativity. A political movement, whether it is based on an ideology you agree with or not, is the perfect poopore for shaking things up. Thanks so much for listening to Zero. If you like the show, please rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, Tell a friend, or

paint it on your nearest pipeline. If you've got a suggestion for a guest or topic or something you just want us to look into, get in touch at Zero pod at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine riscoll Our. Theme music is composed by Wonderlely. Many people help make Zero a success. This week a special thanks to podcast producer Magnus Hendrickson,

who helps us rest easy by canceling unnecessary meetings. We're going to be off for the next couple of weeks for the New Year's happy holidays, and thanks for listening to Zero in twenty twenty two. I'm Akshatrati. See you in the new year. The Ett