Blowing up pipelines won't save the planet

http://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/08/24/blowing-up-pipelines-wont-save-the-planet/
Date Written:  2023-08-24
Publisher:  Climate and Capitalism
Year Published:  2023
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX24945

A review of the film "How to Blow up a Pipeline" that is critical of the film's message: The review argues that sabotage may be exciting and personally satisfying … but it can’t defeat capital’s colossal power.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

How to Blow Up a Pipeline diminishes the strengths of Andreas Malm’s book of the same name and accentuates its weaknesses. The film portrays a group of eight disparate individuals who come together – ultimately in an implausibly seamless manner – to blow up an oil pipeline in a West Texas desert. Set over the span of several months, along with flashbacks narrating the experiences that led each of them to the present, they do what the book famously doesn’t do, which is show us how to blow up a pipeline.

But that is all the film essentially does, with the most exciting scene being the one in which the homemade bombs are detonated.The film shows the surprising ease with which bombing can be executed – the message being, based on the film's uncritical sympathy for the book, why isn't more of this happening given the scale of the crisis?