Inspired by the book and movie How to Blow Up a Pipeline, I’m interested in the question: how to blow up enough pipelines? And which ones?
The book argues for the importance and strategic and moral necessity of property destruction and industrial sabotage in the fight against fossil fuel capitalism. The intended impact of these actions are to raise the costs associated with maintaining fossil fuel infrastructure in order to discourage investment in them, making the construction of new emitting energy sources financially impossible and accelerating the timelines for retiring existing infrastructure.
I’d like to dive into the details a bit and understand:
- The overall fossil supply chain: how gas, coal, and oil flow, what stockpiles exist and of how much, how specific disruptions would affect overall energy production, prices, and shortages, and how multiple disruptions could cascade through the system. I believe there is a substantial amount of open data sources related to this. At its highest goal, we could produce a model of specific subsections of the US energy system that we can “poke”.
- The financials, margins, and investment cycles of different types of fossil fuel projects: I’d like to go over financial filings and other open data and understand how much of an impact activists would need and in what areas in order to change corporate and state behavior. Which types of infrastructure would be worth continually defending and reinforcing, and which might be abandoned more quickly?
If all we did was learn a bit more about this together, I’d be happy. If we also wrote a blog post that could educate others a bit, I’d be ecstatic.
If we created an online adversarial turn-taking simulation game where one player plays as an ecoterrorist network and the other player is a cartel of oil executives and you win by convincing major industrial power consumers and private utility companies to decommission or end their relationships with the fossil fuel supply chain, I’d be through the moon!