Andreas Malm thinks through how to break the spell of climate change defeatism & fossil fascism

Andreas Malm works in The Department of Human Geography at Lund University. He’s a scholar of human ecology and environmental history and the author of The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, How to Blow Up A Pipeline (www.versobooks.com/books/3665-how-…w-up-a-pipeline) and most recently White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism (www.versobooks.com/books/3812-whit…skin-black-fuel), which he co-authored with the Zetkin Collective. In our interview, Malm addresses some of his claims about the use of political counterviolence and the ability of social movements to regulate it. Malm is making the case for thinking more deeply about the almost inevitable radicalization of generations of young people that are waking up in a world that has been more or less abandoned to the interests of fossil capital. Given that the globe’s richest 1% bears the greatest responsibility for the climate crisis--because elites invest too much in fossil fuels and burn way too much of them--it makes sense, Malm suggests, to guide anger in the political direction of undoing the extraction and extortion, the violence created through fossil capitalism.