We Can’t Have Our Climate Cake And Eat It Too
In his book How To Blow Up A Pipeline, Andreas Malm asks “when do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there good reason we have waited this long?”
Well, there is a good reason. We don’t fucking wanna. We wanna have our climate cake and eat it too. It’s not just elites, ordinary people will not give up power. Just cut people’s fossil fuel supply and see.
Last week we had a 6-hour power cut in Sri Lanka and journalists were crying to bring the military out. It was nuts. People were saying that armed men should go round up the trade unionists. As Martin Niemöller said of the Nazis,
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out —
—Because I was not a trade unionist.
You could overthrow any government in the world with a one-week powercut, and the masses would protest for fossil fuels. In France, Myanmar, and Iran masses of people have turned out in the streets when gas prices went up. Any state that loses electrical power is perilously close to losing actual power. People don’t actually care that much where the power comes from as long as it comes.
