When Will Climate Resistance Get Violent?

When will Greta go guerrilla?

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.

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.