When Will Climate Resistance Get Violent?

When will Greta go guerrilla?

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI—September 12, 1857

Climate talks are lies. Protests are ignored. At some point people are going to get fed up. At some point people are going to get violent. People are going to blow up pipelines, assassinate corrupt leaders, and bring out the guillotines. And it won’t be undeserved.

The challenge of climate change is not that we don’t know what to do. The challenge is that some people are stopping it. Under capitalism, elites will keep making money from climate change all the way down. They’ll never stop. Global capitalism has to be overthrown and replaced with global socialism, and at no time in history has this level of change been completely non-violent.

Chandra Shekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh, Indian Revolutionaries

Name one major historical change that was completely non-violent. It wasn’t all Gandhi in India, there was blood. The French Revolution, the Communist Revolutions, they were all violent AF. We still live in the shrapnel of World War II. Any time large amounts of people have to change their mind, people die. That’s just the way it goes. Climate adaptation is an epochal shift. Why do we think it’ll go another way?

The question is not of violence or non-violence. Violence is already being done. Climate change is violence, inflicted by the rich upon the poor. The US military is the single largest emitter in the world. The richest 1% will emit enough to raise temperatures violently all on their own. These actions pillage villages and kill people as sure as torches and guns. People aren’t just dying of climate change, they’re being killed by fossilized elites. Rich, mostly white men are doing plenty of violence right now.

The question is how long the global majority takes it. People have tried voting, protesting, petitioning, but all they get is more hot air. Take this COP bullshit. Since COP1 emission have grown by 60%. At COP15, the US killed the idea of mandatory cuts. COP26 was just another cop-out. ACAB.

As Greta Thunberg said:

“Build back better. Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah blah blah. Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah,” she said in a speech to the Youth4Climate summit in Milan, Italy, on Tuesday. “This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. Words that sound great but so far have not led to action. Our hopes and ambitions drown in their empty promises.”

The question then is when is Greta going to go guerilla? When are people going to stop lobbying and start lobbing grenades? And when are we going to talk about this is legitimate violence? That the monopoly of violence does not belong to the state; that people have to fight to change their fate.

I used to wonder about people that dug their own graves, but that’s us. Hundreds of millions will die from pandemics, floods, famines, and disasters we could have avoided. This is violence. This is violence by those with power against those without. There is no ahimsa here. People are being executed, as sure as putting a gun to their heads.

Our children are being walked along this path as well. They’re reading storybooks about animals that will be extinct. They’re swimming in oceans that will rise up and take the land. We are walking future generations to their own execution. How much will they stand?

Hence the question is not non-violence or violence. Violence is already being done. The question is how long people keep placidly protesting, buying pledges, and ‘speaking truth to power’. How long till they shake power and take power, in the only language power understands?