Quotes from Andreas Malm

It should now be abundantly clear that the comparison between the climate crisis and Covid-19 rests on a category mistake. It's a bit like comparing a war with a bullet. Covid-19 is one manifestation of a secular trend running parallel to the climate crises, a global sickening to match the global heating.

To be 'radical', after all, means aiming at the roots of troubles; to be radical in the chronic emergency is to aim at the ecological roots of perpetual disasters.

Or is there another phase, beyond peaceful protest?

At what point do we escalate? When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different? When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?

non-violence is not to be treated as a holy covenant or rite, then one must adopt the explicitly anti-Gandhian position of Mandela: 'I called for non-violent protest for as long as it was effective', as 'a tactic that should be abandoned when it no longer worked.

the emergency is already here, the cup of endurance fast running over – but the onrush of catastrophe does have a temporality of its own. It imposes tight constraints on those who want to fight.

So here is what this movement of millions should do, for a start: announce and enforce the prohibition. Damage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.

If a pandemic can induce governments to take emergency actions, why can't a climate breakdown that threatens to kill off the very life-support systems of the planet do the same? After this, there can be no more excuses for passivity.

Protest is when I say I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too', as one West German columnist wrote in 1968, relaying the words of a visiting Black Power activist.

No road map, no manifesto, no vision from the climate movement - and it has its fair share of radicals - ever sketched anything like the meteor storm of state interventions that hit the planet in March 2020, and yet we were always told that we were being unrealistic, unpragmatic, dreamers or alarmists. Never again should such lies be given a hearing.

If it weren't for the economy operated by humans constantly assailing the wild, encroaching upon it, tearing into it, chopping it up, destroying it with a zeal bordering on lust for extermination, these things wouldn't happen. The pathogens would not come leaping towards us. They would be secure among their natural hosts. But when those hosts are cornered, stressed, expelled and killed, they have two options: go extinct or jump.

It has taken the science some time to catch up and connect the dots, but, in 2012, one pathbreaking study derived one third of all existential threats to animal species straight from the sale of goods like coffee, beef, tea, sugar and palm oil to countries of the North.

Self-isolation in a slum is a contradiction in terms.

Even the reverend did: visiting Martin Luther King in his parsonage, soon after his home had been bombed, a journalist was about to sink into an armchair when he was alerted to a couple of loaded guns on it. 'Just for self-defence,' King explained.

The civil rights movement won the Act of 1964 because it had a radical flank that made it appear as a lesser evil in the eyes of state power.

The epoch of the Capitalocene is characterized by uncontrolled speed-up in the production of hazardous nature.

If there is something the corona crisis has taught, it should be that nudging consumers to voluntarily mend their ways is a thing of the past.

If SUV drivers were a nation, in 2018 they would have ranked seventh for CO2 emissions.

People wielding that axe have always been told that we're fucked, we're doomed, we should just try to scrape by, nothing will ever change for the better; from the slave barracks to the Judenräte and onwards, every revolt has been discouraged by the elders of defeatism.

The oil being taken out of the ground and the machinery that does it and the infrastructure which supports it – this is violent',

Gandhi's strategy for national liberation never – this is true – condoned violence against the British, but it did include violence with them.

The commitment to the endless accumulation of capital wins out every time. After the past three decades, there can be no doubt that the ruling classes are constitutionally incapable of responding to the catastrophe in any other way than by expediting it; of their own accord, under their inner compulsion, they can do nothing but burn their way to the end.

In 2014, Google left the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in a public show of disgust: for many years, the Council, a business body specialising in drafting laws favourable to the free market, had given voice to denial. With its water-powered data centres and wind turbines flying on kites, Google wanted to be seen as part of the solution, 'so we should not be aligned with such people. They're just literally lying', an executive explained.

Texas and the prolific Permian Basin is the epicentre of the development of new pipelines',