David Remnick, of The New Yorker, put up a podcast over the weekend.  He opened by saying that, while the Biden administration and the U.N. are working hard on climate change, it's too late.  As the California wildfires show, catastrophic climate change is here.  (Never mind that California has had cyclical droughts and fires for centuries.)  That's why Remnick respectfully gave The New Yorkers' bully pulpit podcast to Andreas Malm, a lecturer at Lund University in Sweden, who thinks it's time to blow things up.

Remnick, in his anal little scholar's voice, gently introduces Malm as a professor who "studies the relationship between climate change and capitalism."  And, having studied that, Malm "advocates for far more drastic than we've seen so far."

How drastic?

Well, as Remnick explains, Malm's recent book is entitled How to Blow Up a Pipeline.  And while "it's a bit more nuanced than the title suggests," even Remnick agrees that, "at its core, he really does want environmental activists to rethink their commitment to non-violence and embrace tactics of sabotage."

Then Remnick has a polite and respectful interview with Malm, as the latter details his rage and the need to destroy property.  Malm started small, in 2007, deflating tires on thousands of SUVs, but found it an inconsequential effort, since it merely inconvenienced the SUVs' owners rather than permanently damaging the vehicles.  It did affect SUV sales, but it wasn't enough for a climate fanatic.

Remnick, again without judgment, asks how Malm went from deflating tires to writing a book about blowing up pipelines.  Malm explains that in 2018, Europe had a heat wave, and Malm felt "panic and desperation."  (These people have no sense of history.  This is what the Earth does, although it affects more people today than in the past because there are more people today than in the past.)

As far as Malm is concerned, it's time for "the movement to diversify its tactics and move away from its exclusive focus on polite, gentle, and perfectly peaceful civil disobedience."  (No more Mr. Broccoli.)

What then, asks Remnick, does Malm recommend?  It's as if Remnick were not talking to a crazed anarchist trying to pitch the world back into a pre-modern era in which 50% of all children died before the age of 5 and, for those who survived, life was, as Thomas Hobbes said, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Malm explains that he wants all the usual climate activist stuff (marches, strikes, etc.), plus some more aggressive means:

I am in favor of destroying machines, property — not harming people. That's a very important distinction.

Having made that subtle but important distinction, Malm gets down to the nitty-gritty, detailing what needs to be done:

I think property can be destroyed in all manner of ways. Or it can be neutralized in a very gentle fashion, as when we deflated [the tires on] the SUVs or in a more spectacular fashion, as in potentially blowing up a pipeline that's under construction.

Currently, Malm has a hypothetical target, which is a pipeline that the French oil company Total is helping Uganda and Tanzania build.  For Malm, it's impossible to imagine the benefits of fossil fuel.  All he sees is the chimerical horror of "climate change" — and because he sees that as an existential crisis, it makes perfect sense for him to say, "If people in that region were to attack the construction equipment, blow up the pipeline before it's completed, I would be all in favor of that."

Unsurprisingly, Malm finds inspiration in the BLM movement.  He is unaware of or unperturbed by the fact that it destroyed poor communities across America, resulted in almost two dozen deaths, caused over $1B in property damages, and left the average American with a decided distaste for BLM.

The main point here is that The New Yorker, a respected (albeit hard-left) American institution, gave a respectful interview to, and a bully pulpit for, a fanatic who is advocating violence that, no matter how he phrases it, invariably kills people.

The reason for Remnick's respect isn't hard to find: he and Malm share the same existential fear.  Because they're marinated with the lies and lunacy of the climate change movement, they fervently believe that the world is about to end.

I'm willing to bet that Remnick, at least, lives the life of a CO2 glutton, because that's what all the elites do as they preach climate fanaticism to the masses.  Still, even as he benefits from fossil fuels (which he's sure he deserves), the fears filling his lizard brain mean he wants to see our energy systems blown sky-high.  In that way, he convinces himself that he's helping save the world from the rest of us poor shlubs who dream of comfortable homes; reliable transportation; and long, healthy, well-fed lives — all the products of modern fossil fuels.

Image: Andreas Malm, climate fanatic and violence advocate by Code Rood (cropped).  CC BY-SA 2.0.

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