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Should the Climate Movement Embrace Property Destruction?

Climate activists have done nowhere near enough to reign in the fossil fuel industry and must escalate their tactics, professor Andreas Malm says on the Zero podcast. 

In a handout photo from Just Stop Oil, two protesters glue themselves to the wall at the National Gallery in London after throwing tinned soup at Vincent Van Gogh's famous 1888 work Sunflowers in October. 

In a handout photo from Just Stop Oil, two protesters glue themselves to the wall at the National Gallery in London after throwing tinned soup at Vincent Van Gogh's famous 1888 work Sunflowers in October. 

Source: Just Stop Oil/PA Media

The past few months have seen a flurry of climate protests. In Marseilles, a cement factory was sabotaged by activists for its high emissions. In London, tomato soup was thrown at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers by members of the group Just Stop Oil. Other activists have taken to deflating SUV tires in cities across Europe and the US to discourage use of the gas-guzzling vehicles. 

This is only the beginning of what climate activists need to do in order to be effective, says Andreas Malm, associate professor of human ecology at Lund University and author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline. “The task for the climate movement is to make clear for people that building new pipelines, new gas terminals, opening new oil fields are acts of violence that need to be stopped — they kill people,” Malm says on Bloomberg Green’s Zero podcast.