By Andreas Malm
Mr. Malm is the author of “How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire.”
Vincent van Gogh is not responsible for our climate breakdown. He was not the C.E.O. of an oil and gas company or a coal merchant. In fact, van Gogh started drawing and painting while living amid the smoke and cinder in a Belgian coal district. Besides “Sunflowers,” one of his most famous paintings is “Miners’ Wives Carrying Sacks of Coal,” their bodies bent under the weight of the bags; art history knows few works that so powerfully capture the fossil economy’s intolerable burden on the living.
So my initial reaction to the news that two activists from the group Just Stop Oil had tossed tomato soup on “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery in London was: Oh, no, not another attack on some object with no causal relation to the climate emergency, something innocent and beautiful.
As a rule, I tend to think sabotage is most effective when it is precise and gritty. When activists from the same group smashed gas stations in April this year, they hit the nail on the head. Gasoline, unlike a van Gogh painting, is a fuel of global warming. There is a whole planetary layer of stations, pipelines, platforms, derricks, terminals, mines and shafts that must be shut down to save humanity and other life-forms. When governments refuse to undertake this work, it is up to the rest of us to initiate it. That is the rationale for sabotage: to aim straight for the bags of coal.
But as the scattershot from the National Gallery ricocheted across social media, eliciting everything from mockery to admiration, I had second thoughts. There might be room for this kind of action, too. As one of the young activists cried out before gluing herself to the wall beneath the painting, “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?” Just Stop Oil’s actions seem to have offended establishment sensibilities at a time when a third of Pakistan has been underwater.
One American art critic, Jerry Saltz, even went so far as to equate the activists with the Taliban — clearly an over-the-top analogy, given that the activists purposefully did not damage the painting, which was under a protective glaze. Their target selection was purely instrumental: By doing something so scandalous, Just Stop Oil forced media and the wider public to pay attention to the fact that the British government is about to hand out 100 licenses for new oil and gas projects when there cannot be a single one more.
“We need to break the mirage that everything is fine and shatter the illusion of normal life,” explained Indigo Rumbelow, an organizer with Just Stop Oil, when I spoke with her. A trip to the museums, a football match, a journey to work — anything is up for disruption in this view. The goal is to jump onto every stage and create enough disorder to make it impossible to ignore the ongoing climate breakdown.
The actions of the rightly lionized suffragists were similar and even included attacking paintings in the National Gallery. In 1914, Mary Richardson slashed Diego Velázquez’s “Toilet of Venus,” stating that “justice is an element of beauty as much as color and outline on canvas.” Her insouciance did not charm the press, but four years later, Parliament granted British women who owned property and were over the age of 30 the right to vote, and militant organizations like one Richardson supported, the Women’s Social and Political Union, received significant credit for their willingness to challenge social norms.
The climate movement in the Global North seems to be reading its history. In the past year, activists have been taking up the tactic of sabotage and property destruction along a spectrum from symbolic to serious. The Tyre Extinguishers have deflated the tires of nearly 10,000 S.U.V.s in some of the most affluent enclaves of the world. In February, activists stormed a construction site of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in British Columbia and utterly wrecked machinery and other equipment, causing, the company said, millions of dollars in damage.
Meanwhile, in the research community, leading energy scholars such as Benjamin K. Sovacool at Boston University are discussing the pros and cons of climate militancy and coming down, remarkably, in favor of considering a full range of options, including civil disobedience and guerrilla warfare.
For the planet to retain a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, all oil and gas production in rich countries — including the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and Qatar — must be terminated within 12 years. Not only can there be no new fossil fuel installations; 40 percent of reserves already developed must be left in the ground.
And yet, even as the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act in the United States promises to reduce overall emissions by incentivizing clean energy, on the one hand, it does with the other the very thing we cannot afford: offer new oil and gas leases to companies already awash in record profits. What do they do with all that money? They reinvest it, of course, in fresh oil and gas, a fount of profits these companies cannot bring themselves to abandon.
Little wonder people feel a degree of despair and, more to the point, rage. Young Europeans pulled into climate activism in 2018 and 2019, when Greta Thunberg set their generation in motion, now tend to be frustrated by the persistence of business as usual. And indeed, a logically unavoidable conclusion seems to be that the climate movement hasn’t yet done enough. It must try something more.
As for the ethics of property destruction, it is not, in this case, very complicated. Fossil fuels kill people. If you disrupt the flow of such fuels and damage the machinery they impel, you prevent deaths. You stop the perpetration of harm. You may destroy an inanimate object — and no one in the climate movement is suggesting anything other than targeting dead things — so as to protect living beings. Or, put differently, if you are locked in a house on fire, you have a right to break some windows to get out.
If the logic and ethics here seem straightforward, the tactical terrain is not. How do we make sure that no one is physically harmed in the process? Just what windows will be most effective to break? What openings will attract larger numbers of people to make the leap? We don’t know what, if anything, will work, which is why, perhaps, the movement needs both: flippant attention grabbing as well as surgical shutdowns, in a diversity of disruptions. We cannot afford to forgo creative methods that might further the cause.
