There seem to be two strands within the climate movement that lead to new tactics being experimented: the frustration strand and the strategic escalation strand.
On 17 February 2022, a group of twenty people entered the construction site of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in British Columbia, and destroyed machinery and equipment. The controversial pipeline is expected to carry 60 million cubic meters of natural gas daily and passes through land belonging to the Wet’suwet’sen nation. The company reported millions in damage after the action.
In March 2022, activists in the United Kingdom deflated the tyres of 40 SUVs. Connected through the Tyre Extinguishers network, the actions got stronger throughout the year: September saw 600 SUVs targeted in the UK, France and Canada in one night; and by November the group organized a day of action that disarmed 900 SUVs in eight countries. The Tyre Extinguishers underline that if all SUV drivers banded together to form their own country, it would rank as the seventh largest emitter in the world.
In December 2022, around two hundred activists occupied the Lafarge cement factory in Marseilles and “disarmed” the incinerator, electrical devices and cables, as reported by Les Soulèvements de la Terre. They underlined that it is one of the biggest emitters in France.
These are but a few examples of climate groups aiming at sustained and enhanced disruption in their actions. In comparison to the die-ins and marches of 2019, a clear shift is visible. How can we understand this change in the last years?
With the wave of mass protests and non-violent civil disobedience actions in 2019, thousands of ordinary people – many of them very young and therefore expect to live through the IPCC scenarios in their entirety – joined the movement as core organizers. These newcomers then faced two realities: climate policies and the COVID-19 policies.
Many of the climate protesters’ main concern was to be heard and seen. They understood that their future was at stake. They demanded a recognition of how dire the situation is and appropriate political action to be taken to address it. The last years did not present such adequate reaction by the status quo. Climate summits failed tremendously and national policies lagged far behind the necessary emission cuts. If any hope was built around the carbon neutrality pledges, they were proven false by the gas crisis. More and more new fossil fuel projects were approved, subsidies for fossil fuel companies are still in place, and there is not a single developed country who has a climate-realistic energy policy. All of this is happening in front of eyes of the activists. They are aware, and they are extremely frustrated.
Simultaneously, the same generation of activists passed through the COVID-19 pandemic and observed how governments act under emergency conditions. Virtually all countries in the world declared state of emergency at some point during 2020 and 2021. All governments had regular emergency meetings. The Councils of Ministers (or equivalents) would meet every other day to evaluate the situation, introduce new measures, update existing measures, and hold press conferences to explain the status to the general public. They treated COVID-19 as a crisis, which highlighted even further how they didn’t treat the climate crisis as a crisis. The climate activists watched them in horror, and perhaps also in hope that a similar approach would be taken toward climate soon. Then the pandemic was declared over (and it is factually mostly over in the Global North) once the vaccines were administered, and everything went back to “normal”. This reckless attitude by the world governments added to the frustration and anger of the climate activists.
Andreas Malm’s book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” was released in early 2021, at a time when the organizers were trying to figure out what to do in this new context. While the discussion continues, I believe there to be two distinct strands leading to sabotage within the climate movement.
One strand is the *deep frustration* which sits in the larger context of disappointment with justice-led politics. As the climate and social crises worsened and multiplied, the capitalist status quo proved itself to be less flexible than it was historically assumed to be. The financial crisis, the climate crisis, the COVID-19 health crisis, the inflationary crisis and the war in Ukraine were all addressed by outspokenly right-wing policies despite growing discontentment. In the meantime, a serious large-scale left-wing climate policy is still not on the horizon as no significant political party in any country has a climate-realistic plan. The climate crisis provides a time-frame to solve these crises and the climate activists are not willing to wait longer. Change must happen and harm must be stopped, which leads organizers to actions that effectively disrupt harmful activities (hence the “disarmament” discourse).
Another strand is one of strategic escalation. Climate organizers learned about capitalism at the same time as they learned about the climate crisis. They saw their previous actions as part of an escalation of mobilizations, without the illusion that the system would respond to the needs of the people and the planet. They see sabotage as the natural next step for the movement, while recognizing the necessity to maintain other forms of public engagement. Currently, the strategic escalation strand seems unarticulated, because such an analysis would require investment in coordination which is lacking in the movement. The Tyre Extinguishers are clearly standing out_, successfully organizing global days of action spanning tens of cities as mentioned above. The Climate Defense network, on the other hand, attempts to contribute to the strategic meaning of all kinds of actions globally. The future will show the possibilities and difficulties of this strand.
Clearly, the two strands are not mutually exclusive, and many organizers are deeply influenced by both of them simultaneously. The frustration strand will surely continue to feed new activists into the movement and will motivate them to experiment new ways of acting. The strategic strand may consolidate these people into movement organizers by providing them cognitive support about the reasons behind sustained disruption and how to move forward. The strategic escalation strand without the emotional load may face isolation and backlash, whereas the frustration strand without a strategic anchor may degenerate into inconsequential series of actions.
The year of 2023 will surely offer a curious scenery to observe, reflect on and participate in the climate movement as a whole, including emerging forms of activism.