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A talk with the creators of the new movie “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” about high-functioning climate coalitions.
“There is something suspicious about total tactical conformity,” writes Andreas Malm in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, his provocatively titled 2021 manifesto that, rather famously, “doesn’t actually teach readers” how to do it.
The film adaptation of the book, out Friday, bears little overtly in common with its IP: For one thing, it more or less does show you how to blow up a pipeline; for another, it’s an original fictional narrative, not an academic treatise or documentary.
But the film’s philosophical allegiance remains firmly rooted with Malm, who believes diversity of opinion and approach in the climate movement — including the evolution of a more radical splinter — are essential for progress. In the film, this materializes as the story of eight aspiring saboteurs who join together to plot an attack on a West Texas oil pipeline. The characters come from diverse cultural backgrounds (college-educated; Christian; Indigenous; vegan, etc.) and follow wide-ranging paths to radicalization (mutual aid work; a pollution-related cancer diagnosis; sticking it to a rich dad) — but for the most part, they get along with little more disparagement of each other than an occasional “weird kid!” comment.
Cynically, this can feel a bit like movie magic — a rose-tinted coalition-building fantasy. As everyone knows, leftists can only agree on one thing: that all the other leftists are wrong. It seems unlikely that the array of ideologies that come together in the film could ever be in agreement for long enough to actually carry out a pipeline-sabotage operation.
But somehow, How to Blow Up a Pipeline never feels false in this regard. Constructed like a heist film, it extends the “perfect crime” to the perfect team of criminals, and in doing so, stakes an optimistic political position that has nothing to do with crime. What if, the script seems to ask, this kind of coalition isn’t actually so far out of reach?
To many, though, leftist movements have never felt more broken. “The progressive advocacy space … has, more or less, effectively ceased to function,” Ryan Grim wrote for The Intercept last June. “The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.” Group tensions, fighting between groups, and fundamental disagreements over courses of action are what have caused the blog WagingNonviolence.org to identify “movement infighting and politics” as one of the primary “battlefields” of the climate movement. “When we are struggling to see fruits borne of many years of labor,” the publication writes, “we are more prone to point fingers.”
How to Blow Up a Pipeline’s four-person “film by” team — made up of writer-director Daniel Goldhaber, co-writer and actress Ariela Barer, co-writer Jordan Sjol, and editor Daniel Garber — weren’t ignorant of the “snake-eating-its-tail internal political struggles that ... often tear leftist movements apart,” as Goldhaber told Heatmap. Rather, it was an aspect that they were “very consciously ... trying to engage in.” One obvious example: that four-person film-by credit, a subtle but important meta-testament to successful collaboration.
The writers also spent “months trying to build a larger understanding of the kinds of cross-sections that exist in the climate movement in the U.S.,” Goldhaber said. An early approach to the script involved thinking about what a pipeline attack would look like “if it was us and our friends who did this,” Barer added. “We started talking to anyone who would talk to us and realized that, no farther than like one degree of separation, all of these characters existed in our lives already.” Just because the characters existed at one degree of separation didn’t mean they actually occupied the same orbit, though. As one activist advised the filmmakers, the characters in How to Blow Up a Pipeline shouldn’t all directly know each other before the sabotage team begins to assemble.
Once it does, the relative harmony is also well-researched. “We wanted to tell a story that was aspirational … where the group doesn’t fall apart and doesn’t fall victim to infighting,” Goldhaber said. “We’d actually been given some pointers by some people who do engage with direct action movements about what it takes to really successfully build a group like that.” Malm likewise stresses in Pipeline that heterogeneity of thought, while necessary for progress, makes movements vulnerable to “internal tensions” — a reality, however, that “no movement that has altered the course of history" has avoided.
It’s nevertheless true that in the current moment, “it sometimes seems more important to legislate those differences of values or opinions or even culture than to organize around material interest,” Sjol, the third co-writer, told Heatmap. But while Goldhaber agrees that “to some extent, yes, this is a Hollywood movie that traffics in aspirational ideas,” the team doesn’t see the coalition-building aspect as that far-fetched. In fact, the whole point of the film project was to make it identifiable — to offer a “point of entry to it if you were [in the] mainstream climate movement; if you were a climate radical; if you were a conservative land-rights person; if you were somebody who engaged in mutual aid work” — and thereby possible. You can see yourself in a character, and from there imagine working in a functional coalition of differing viewpoints.
“I think one of the reasons that climate doomism is so pervasive is because it feels impossible to actually figure out how to attack the problem,” Goldhaber said. But “show a bunch of kids building bombs that can directly attack the fossil fuel industry and all of a sudden that just that opens up a sense of empowerment.”
Empowerment … to blow up a pipeline? I’ll leave that read up to you. Certainly, though, it oils the gears of a movement that has felt stuck in its divisions: “We do hope and believe,” said Goldhaber, “that people will start thinking, What can I do?”
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Almost half of developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
The solar energy industry has a big farm problem cropping up. And if it isn’t careful, it’ll be dealing with it for years to come.
Researchers at SI2, an independent research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association, released a study of farm workers and solar developers this morning that said almost half of all developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
Unveiled in conjunction with RE+, the largest renewable energy conference in the U.S., the federally-funded research includes a warning sign that permitting is far and away the single largest impediment for solar developers trying to build projects on farmland. If this trend continues or metastasizes into a national movement, it could indefinitely lock developers out from some of the nation’s best land for generating carbon-free electricity.
“If a significant minority opposes and perhaps leads to additional moratoria, [developers] will lose a foot in the door for any future projects,” Shawn Rumery, SI2’s senior program director and the survey lead, told me. “They may not have access to that community any more because that moratoria is in place.”
SI2’s research comes on the heels of similar findings from Heatmap Pro. A poll conducted for the platform last month found 70% of respondents who had more than 50 acres of property — i.e. the kinds of large landowners sought after by energy developers — are concerned that renewable energy “takes up farmland,” by far the greatest objection among that cohort.
Good farmland is theoretically perfect for building solar farms. What could be better for powering homes than the same strong sunlight that helps grow fields of yummy corn, beans and vegetables? And there’s a clear financial incentive for farmers to get in on the solar industry, not just because of the potential cash in letting developers use their acres but also the longer-term risks climate change and extreme weather can pose to agriculture writ large.
But not all farmers are warming up to solar power, leading towns and counties across the country to enact moratoria restricting or banning solar and wind development on and near “prime farmland.” Meanwhile at the federal level, Republicans and Democrats alike are voicing concern about taking farmland for crop production to generate renewable energy.
Seeking to best understand this phenomena, SI2 put out a call out for ag industry representatives and solar developers to tell them how they feel about these two industries co-mingling. They received 355 responses of varying detail over roughly three months earlier this year, including 163 responses from agriculture workers, 170 from solar developers as well as almost two dozen individuals in the utility sector.
A key hurdle to development, per the survey, is local opposition in farm communities. SI2’s publicity announcement for the research focuses on a hopeful statistic: up to 70% of farmers surveyed said they were “open to large-scale solar.” But for many, that was only under certain conditions that allow for dual usage of the land or agrivoltaics. In other words, they’d want to be able to keep raising livestock, a practice known as solar grazing, or planting crops unimpeded by the solar panels.
The remaining percentage of farmers surveyed “consistently opposed large-scale solar under any condition,” the survey found.
“Some of the messages we got were over my dead body,” Rumery said.
Meanwhile a “non-trivial” number of solar developers reported being unwilling or disinterested in adopting the solar-ag overlap that farmers want due to the increased cost, Rumery said. While some companies expect large portions of their business to be on farmland in the future, and many who responded to the survey expect to use agrivoltaic designs, Rumery voiced concern at the percentage of companies unwilling to integrate simultaneous agrarian activities into their planning.
In fact, Rumery said some developers’ reticence is part of what drove him and his colleagues to release the survey while at RE+.
As we discussed last week, failing to address the concerns of local communities can lead to unintended consequences with industry-wide ramifications. Rumery said developers trying to build on farmland should consider adopting dual-use strategies and focus on community engagement and education to avoid triggering future moratoria.
“One of the open-ended responses that best encapsulated the problem was a developer who said until the cost of permitting is so high that it forces us to do this, we’re going to continue to develop projects as they are,” he said. “That’s a cold way to look at it.”
Meanwhile, who is driving opposition to solar and other projects on farmland? Are many small farm owners in rural communities really against renewables? Is the fossil fuel lobby colluding with Big Ag? Could building these projects on fertile soil really impede future prospects at crop yields?
These are big questions we’ll be tackling in far more depth in next week’s edition of The Fight. Trust me, the answers will surprise you.
Here are the most notable renewable energy conflicts over the past week.
1. Worcester County, Maryland –Ocean City is preparing to go to court “if necessary” to undo the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval last week of U.S. Wind’s Maryland Offshore Wind Project, town mayor Rick Meehan told me in a statement this week.
2. Magic Valley, Idaho – The Lava Ridge Wind Project would be Idaho’s biggest wind farm. But it’s facing public outcry over the impacts it could have on a historic site for remembering the impact of World War II on Japanese residents in the United States.
3. Kossuth County, Iowa – Iowa’s largest county – Kossuth – is in the process of approving a nine-month moratorium on large-scale solar development.
Here’s a few more hotspots I’m watching…
The most important renewable energy policies and decisions from the last few days.
Greenlink’s good day – The Interior Department has approved NV Energy’s Greenlink West power line in Nevada, a massive step forward for the Biden administration’s pursuit of more transmission.
States’ offshore muddle – We saw a lot of state-level offshore wind movement this past week… and it wasn’t entirely positive. All of this bodes poorly for odds of a kumbaya political moment to the industry’s benefit any time soon.
Chumash loophole – Offshore wind did notch one win in northern California by securing an industry exception in a large marine sanctuary, providing for farms to be built in a corridor of the coastline.
Here’s what else I’m watching …