Our demands are – and have to be – more complex than any that have gone before. We are fighting against all capital and, perhaps, most of the people it employs.Īnti-apartheid demonstrators run away from a police charge in Cape Town, South Africa, during clashes in 1976. In other words, in this struggle we are contesting not only fossil capital and the governments that support it. Only one Earth system may need to go down to take others with it, causing cascading collapse. Soil degradation, freshwater depletion, ocean dysbiosis, habitat destruction, pesticides and other synthetic chemicals might each be comparable in scale and impact to climate breakdown. For example, even if greenhouse gases from every other sector were eliminated today, by 2100 current models of food production alone would bust the entire carbon budget two or three times over, if we want to avoid more than 1.5C of global heating. You could take out all the obvious targets –pipelines, refineries, coalmines, planes, SUVs – and discover that we are still committed to extinction. But fossil fuels are just one of the drivers of climate breakdown, albeit the largest, and climate breakdown is just one aspect of Earth systems breakdown. Malm reduces our task to “the struggle against fossil fuels”. To prevent the destruction of the habitable planet, every aspect of our economic lives has to change. Either there was a poll tax or there wasn’t.īut the revolt against environmental collapse is a revolt against the entire system.

Either women would get the vote or they wouldn’t. Either the British Raj persisted or it didn’t. Their outcomes were, in most cases, binary. These movements directly confronted massive powers. Malm’s strongest comparisons are with the heroic struggles of women’s rights and civil rights activists, anti-slavery, independence, anti-apartheid and economic justice campaigners. Should we, as he urges, begin a campaign of violent attacks on the industrial economy? While his case is compelling, I feel something is missing.

Nor can we deny that, as he says, we have been too “placid and composed” or that the climate crisis is insufficiently politicised. No one can deny that current campaigns have failed: capital’s assaults on the living planet have only accelerated. Malm forces us to confront questions of strategy and to justify or reject those we have chosen. It’s essential that we know these histories.

Just Stop Oil protesters in London in October.

Fossil capital by andreas malm