Stop Fossil Fuels: Why We Must, How We Can

Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape by Brian Hayes

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 20:08:21 -1000

Brian Hayes has written a solid field guide to the industrial systems which extract, transport, refine, and enable burning of fossil fuels. Over its 525 pages, this book gives an extensive yet impressively detailed introduction to the physical infrastructure surrounding us. This information is essential to understanding the flow and use of fossil fuels, and thus to intervening effectively to halt the combustion.

One reviewer who has reviewed many military books on amazon.com clearly had sabotage in mind when reading this one:

“This book is absolutely brilliant and has provided a valuable training resource in understanding urban physical infrastructure for targeting. […] Some of the examples of possible targets of sabotage covered in this book include:

fuel depots and manufacturing facilities
Supply depots/ warehouses
Repair facilities
Oil pipelines
Aquatic Targets of Sabotage:
- Water routes (canals, river, etc.)
- Harbors, piers, and docks (both from water and land routes)
Land Routes, Vehicles, and Weapons as Targets of Sabotage:
- Railways (track, switching units, etc.) and rail bridges and tunnels
- Trains (locomotive, freight, and passenger cars)
- Roads and road bridges and tunnels
- Air traffic control towers
- Runways/airfields
Industrial and Economic Targets of Sabotage:
- Industries
- Machinery (as opposed to an entire factory)
- Economic crops (ex: rubber tree plantations)
- Coal mines
Utilities as Targets of Sabotage:
- Communications (lines above and below ground, radar installations, radio facilities)
- Electrical facilities
- Water facilities

“Overall, I commend the author on outstanding book, and I highly recommend this book to anyone operating in the military field of explosives and/or special operations.”

The book’s information will be useful not only to that reviewer’s audience of potential military saboteurs, but to anyone trying to expel industrial infrastructure from our environment, whether they choose to resist via legal challenges, civil disobedience, or underground work.

Chapters

Out of the Earth
Waterworks
Food and Farming
Oil and Gas
Power Plants
The Power Grid
Communications
On the Road
The Railroad
Bridges and Tunnels
Aviation
Shipping
Wastes and Recycling

Note on printings

A 2005 edition was published under the titles Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape and Infrastructure: The Book of Everything for the Industrial Landscape. The revised and updated 2014 edition, with the title Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape is worth getting instead of the older version if you can. The editions don’t differ greatly though, so don’t worry that you’re missing too much if you can only find the 2005 version.

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William Shatner: A New Perspective on Earth

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 09:42:03 -1000

An excerpt from a plea by actor William Shatner to world leaders prior to the Cop15 biodiversity summit:

“Last year, I had a life-changing experience at 90 years old. I went to space, after decades of playing an iconic science-fiction character who was exploring the universe. I thought I would experience a deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration.

“I was absolutely wrong. The strongest feeling, dominating everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.

“I understood, in the clearest possible way, that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting so starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

“This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realized that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside. I did my share in popularizing the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is and will stay our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable.”

– William Shatner, actor

Read Shatner’s full statement (Also available as an onion link for use in Tor Browser)

Collapse Overview

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 14:58:01 -1000

This is a mirror of the r/Collapse wiki. The author describes it:

Collapse is a complex and controversial subject. I found a lack of organized guides for newcomers to the topic and have set out to build my own by cataloging the most relevant individuals, concepts, and resources on the subject into the most effective overview possible.

The content here has been selected through personal research and responses to a survey of those interested or knowledgeable. The trends have become more obvious and I’ve stopped seeking survey submissions, but your feedback (collapse-aware or otherwise) on the content here and how it’s structured is still extremely helpful.

I’m not a writer or researcher, just someone who’s passionate about this subject. A majority of this information was derived directly from Wikipedia or the individual’s or organization’s own websites. My intention has not been to reinvent the wheel or rely exclusively on my own words, but to share the best and most relevant information possible in a clear and concise way. This site will never have advertising or involve any form of affiliate links and is purely for educational purposes.

Learn more: Let’s Talk Collapse

Our Role in the Environmental Movement: Intelligence

Sun, 04 Apr 2021 21:46:26 -1000

Ninety percent of war is having good intelligence; if you know where the enemy is and what he has, you can figure out how to deal with him.
—General Douglas MacArthur¹

So what is intelligence? Quite simply, it is information about the enemy. Not just any old information, any scrap of gossip, or rumor, but relevant information which has been processed and made as accurate as it can be. […]

What then is the chief military function of intelligence, in peace as well as in war? […I]ts chief function is offensively to achieve and defensively to avert surprise.
—Donald McLachlan, World War II intelligence officer and journalist²

Good intelligence is the foundation of a successful guerrilla organization. The vast majority of intelligence work involves the gathering and organization of readily available pieces of information. Although this is mostly shit work, there is no way to overstate its importance.
—George Jackson Brigade, communist US urban guerrillas

The movement’s limitations

Dedicated organizers raise funds, pressure policy makers, spread educational and inspirational messages, and bring people together for stirring events. Environmental warriors risk their physical safety and freedom in front line actions—from blockade confrontations with militarized police, to night attacks on critical infrastructure. The movement is rich in passion, bravery, hard work, and sacrifice.

Yet, decades of environmental activism have failed to preserve, let alone enrich, our planet’s health. Since the inaugural 1970 Earth Day, ecological destruction has only accelerated. Appealing to individuals and corporations to limit consumption and extraction, lobbying those in power to regulate development and pollution, and pushing investors and consumers towards somewhat less devastating forms of industrial activity have proved insufficient. The movement handicaps itself with sanctioned tactics and a reactionary strategy of attrition, defending threatened ecological communities one by one, responding to ecocidal projects one after another.

Tens of millions of people want the ravaging to end, but don’t know what to do—largely because the environmental movement has not seriously grappled with the question “What will it take to win?” Stop Fossil Fuels believes the answer includes civil disobedience, ecosabotage, and militancy. Since we advocate use of such illegal tactics when necessary and appropriate, we assume we’re under some level of surveillance, so we can’t ourselves carry out underground actions. Nor do we expect to grow large enough to contribute meaningfully to aboveground civil disobedience.

So what do we actually do? Are we merely armchair activists?

Stop Fossil Fuels’s role

We do the unglamorous yet critical work of gathering, organizing, and synthesizing information for dissemination to front line activists. We explore principles of broad strategy with an emphasis on cascading failure, and analyze how different strategies and tactics have played out in specific goals such as anti-pipeline activism. We research historic and current resistance groups to identify what works and what doesn’t. We study the industrial systems and critical infrastructure on which fossil fuels depend.

Our primary work is research and dissemination of intelligence. But we also want to shift the cultural norms of activism away from dogmatism and defeatism, and instead to nimble, adaptive engagement with the question “What will it take for us to win?” We need fundamental, systemic change, but those in power outlaw anything which threatens their power. By dictating the rules of a rigged game, they’ve rendered the most effective tactics nearly unthinkable. And after years of grinding disappointment and despair-inducing losses, those long-time activists who haven’t burnt out altogether are often resigned to playing the same weak hand again and again, against a dealer shamelessly stacking the deck. The activists still fight because it’s the right thing to do, but with little expectation of winning.

Stop Fossil Fuels aims to normalize strategic resistance, commensurate with the scale of our ecological crises and rooted in a belief that we can win. Our intelligence work highlights examples of successful resistance and explores what might be possible with tactics not condoned by the system.

If our work resonates with you, please support us by spreading the strategy, volunteering, or donating.

Uncited quote in Full Spectrum Resistance, Volume Two by Aric McBay ↩︎
“Intelligence: The Common Denominator” in The Fourth Dimension of Warfare by Michael Elliott-Bateman ↩︎

The Art of Guerilla Warfare: General Principles

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 17:46:37 -1000

Read our excerpts for activists
Download full text as PDF

Object

1. The object of guerilla warfare is to harass the enemy in every way possible within all the territory he holds to such an extent that he is eventually incapable either of embarking on a war, or of continuing one that may already have commenced. The sphere of action should include his home country, and also, in certain circumstances, such neutral countries as he uses as a source of supply. This object is achieved by compelling the enemy to disperse his forces in order to guard his flanks, his communications, his detachments, supply depots, etc., against the attacks of guerillas, and thus so to weaken his main armies that the conduct of a campaign becomes impossible.

2. There are three main types of guerilla warfare:
    (a) The activities of individuals, or of small groups working by stealth on acts of sabotage.
    (b) The action of larger groups working as a band under a nominated leader, and employing military tactics, weapons, etc., to assist in the achievement of their object, which is usually of a destructive nature.
    (c) The operations of large guerilla forces, whose strength necessitates a certain degree of military organization in order to secure their cohesion and to make and carry out effectively a plan of campaign.

3. The type of guerrilla warfare that can be carried out in any particular territory is dependent on the local conditions at the time, as explained later. The greater, however, should always include the less—i.e., where circumstances are favorable to the employment of large guerilla forces, they will also permit the action of partisan bands and of saboteurs. Where conditions are unsuitable to large-scale operations, the action of partisan bands should be supported by that of saboteurs.

4. The culminating stage of guerilla warfare should always be to produce in the field large formations of guerillas, well-armed and well-trained, which are able to take a direct part in the fighting by attacks on suitable hostile formations and objects in direct conjunction with the operations of the regular troops. It may well be, however, that, in the early days of the war, guerilla activities must, owing to the enemy’s strength and to lack of support of the local population, be limited to acts of sabotage. As the war progresses, and as the enemy’s hold begins to weaken owing to successful sabotage, to war weariness of the enemy’s troops, and as the inhabitants cease to be overawed, conditions will become ripe for the formation of partisan bands.

These bands will, at the commencement, act singly or in small local concentrations. By their audacity and apparent immunity from hostile counter measures, they must then fan the flame of revolt until circumstances become favorable for the organization of the large groups of bands, working under central leadership on a semi-military basis, necessitating a considerable degree of co-ordination as regards arrangements for supplies, munitions, collection of military intelligence, etc.

5. There are two main points in this connection to bear in mind:
    (a) To obtain the maximum effect from guerilla warfare it is necessary to make use of all three types. Therefore, a careful study must be made as early as possible of the territories concerned, so as to determine for what methods of warfare each territory is suited, and to make the necessary preparations in advance. It is an extravagant waste of effort and opportunity if, for example, in an area suited for large scale guerilla operations, activities are, for want of preparation and forethought, limited to the uncoordinated actions of partisan bands and saboteurs.
          Further, it must be remembered that the enemy will institute counter-measures as soon as guerilla activities against him commence. If these activities are on a small scale, it may be relatively easy for him not only to suppress them temporarily, but also, by that action, to prevent their resuscitation on either that or a larger scale. It has been shown countless times in history that where firm enemy action has been taken in time against small beginnings, such action has always met with success. To counter this, therefore, it is again important that the commencement of guerilla operations should be on the highest and widest scale that the area concerned will permit.
          The two arguments above overwhelmingly support this policy.

    (b) The second point to be noted is that the organization of guerillas must not be of a higher degree than circumstances will, with reasonable safety, and a view to efficiency, permit.
          The factor of “safety” concerns possible enemy counter-action; the closer and higher the organization, the more easily can it be broken up and become ineffective. It is valueless and dangerous prematurely to organize partisan bands, acting independently as they normally should, into platoons, companies, squadrons, etc. and then into regiments or brigades, with nominated commanders, skeleton orders of battle, intelligence services, etc.; such organization necessitates documents, written orders, files, etc. all or any of which, falling into the enemy’s bands, may enable him to destroy the guerilla movement at a blow.
          In any case, such organization is unnecessary in the early stages. In these conditions, except for a central directing brain and a few trusted emissaries, partisan bands should be self-contained, acting under their own leader’s initiative towards the ends directed by the controlling authority, obtaining their own information by the most direct and simplest means (usually by word of mouth) and maintaining the loosest organization compatible with effective action.

6. The factor of efficiency concerns the inherent advantages that guerillas enjoy though their superior mobility and their lack of communications. A premature tightening of organization is directly inimical to these two advantages, so that an increase in the degree of organization over the bare minimum necessary must inevitably lead to decreased efficiency. It is obvious, however, that, in the culminating stages of guerilla warfare, with large masses of guerillas taking an open part, some degree of organization is necessary in order to establish a chain of command to render administrative arrangements possible, and to collect intelligence as a basis for plans, etc.

7. At any time, therefore, the correct degree of organization to be established must be a matter for the most serious consideration of the controlling authority; as conditions change, so will the degree. To meet changing circumstances, therefore, the controlling authority must plan in advance, so that closer organization can be instituted when the moment demands, or can be relaxed if enemy action temporarily necessitates.

Colin Gubbins

Objectives of guerilla warfare

8. The whole art of guerilla warfare lies in striking the enemy where he least expects it, and yet where he is most vulnerable: this will produce the greatest effect in inducing and even compelling him to use up large numbers of troops in guarding against such blows.

Modern large-sized armies, entirely dependent as they are on the regular delivery of supplies, munitions, petrol, etc., for their operations, present a particularly favorable opportunity for guerilla warfare, directed against their communications by road, rail or water, and against their system of internal postal and telegraph communications.

Further, the maintenance of these large armies necessitates the establishment of dumps and stocks of supplies, munitions, etc. at focal points, which offer most suitable targets for guerilla action. The guarding of these communications and dumps against attack will, even before the threat is evident, necessitate the institution by the enemy of detachments and posts, more particularly at vital points on the communications and where dumps of importance are located. These detachments themselves are a suitable object of attack.

Thus the operations of guerillas will usually be directed against the flanks of armies, against their communications and against posts and detachments established by the enemy for the express purpose of protecting his important localities against such sporadic attempts.

Methods and Principles

9. The methods and principles of guerilla warfare must be based on proper estimation of the relative advantages and disadvantages enjoyed by the enemy on one hand, and the guerillas on the other, in armaments, mobility, numbers, information, morale, training, etc.

10. The enemy will almost invariably possess armament superior both in quantity and quality—i.e., he will have artillery, mortars, gas, armoured vehicles, etc., in addition to the automatics and rifles with which the guerillas will also be armed. In total strength, the enemy will normally have the superiority as well, but the distribution of his forces will necessitate the use of detachments against which superior guerilla forces can be brought.

11. It is in mobility, in information, and in morale that the guerillas can secure the advantage, and those factors are the means by which the enemy’s superior armament and numbers can best be combatted. The superior mobility, however, is not absolute, but relative—i.e. to the type of country in which the activities are staged, to the detailed knowledge of that country by the guerillas, etc. In absolute mobility, the enemy must always have the advantage—i.e. the use of railway systems, the possession of large numbers of motors, lorries, armoured cars, tanks, etc., of large forces of cavalry, etc. By the judicious selection of ground, however, and by moves in darkness to secure surprise, the guerillas can enjoy relatively superior mobility for the period necessary for each operation.

12. The enemy will usually be in a country where the population is largely hostile, so that the people will actively co-operate in providing information for the guerillas and withholding it from the enemy. The proper encouragement of this natural situation and the development of the system of obtaining information will ensure that the guerillas are kept au fait with the enemy’s movements and intentions, whereas their own are hidden from him.

13. Morale, training, etc., are factors of importance in which first one side and then the other may have the advantage. Where the enemy is constrained by demands on his forces to use reserve and second-line units for guarding communications etc., neither the morale nor training will be of a high standard. The morale of the guerilla should always be high; fighting in his own country, among his own people, against a foreign foe who has invaded his land, the justice of his cause will inflame his embitterment. At the same time, the narrow limits of the training he requires, his natural dash and courage, and the careful, detailed rehearsal of projected coups should enable him, with the advantage of the initiative, to match even the best trained troops.

14. Guerillas must obtain and make every effort to retain the initiative. To have the initiative confers the invaluable advantage of selecting the place of operations that most favour success as regards locality, ground, time, relative strengths, etc. The initiative can always be secured by remaining completely quiescent until the moment for the commencement of guerilla activities arrives, and then suddenly launching out against an unsuspecting enemy. To retain the initiative conferring these advantages demands a ceaseless activity, so that the enemy is prevented from getting in his blow by the constantly recurring necessity of parrying those aimed at him.

15. Until the final and culminating stages of partisan warfare where large bodies of guerillas are co-operating with the regular forces, it must be the object of partisans to avoid prolonged engagements with their opponents, unless in such overwhelming strength that success can be assured before the arrival of reinforcements. The object must be to strike hard and disappear before the enemy can recover and strike back. Therefore, the action of all partisan bands must be governed by the necessity of a secure line of retirement for use when the moment for calling off the action arrives. It must be borne in mind, too, that the immunity of partisans from enemy actions is a most valuable morale factor; to inflict damage and death on the enemy and to escape scot-free has an irritant and depressing effect on the enemy´s spirit, and a correspondingly encouraging effect on the morale, not only of the guerillas but of the local inhabitants, a matter of considerable moment; in this sphere of action nothing succeeds like success.

16. From the above review of the circumstances of guerilla warfare, the aim of the guerillas must be to develop their inherent advantages so as to nullify those of the enemy. The principles of this type of warfare are therefore:
    (a) Surprise first and foremost, by finding out the enemy’s plans and concealing your own intentions and movements.
    (b) Never undertake an operation unless certain of success owing to careful planning and good information. Break off the action when it becomes too risky to continue.
    (c) Ensure that a secure line of retreat is always available.
    (d) Choose areas and localities for action where your mobility will be superior to that of the enemy, owing to better knowledge of the country, lighter equipment, etc.
    (e) Confine all movements as much as possible to the hours of darkness.
    (f) Never engage in a pitched battle unless in overwhelming strength and thus sure of success.
    (g) Avoid being pinned down in a battle by the enemy’s superior forces or armament; break off the action before such a situation can develop.
    (h) Retain the initiative at all costs by redoubling activities when the enemy commences counter-measures.
    (i) When the time for action comes, act with the greatest boldness and audacity. The partisan’s motto is “Valiant yet vigilant”.

These are the nine points of the guerilla’s creed.

Organization

17. In guerilla warfare it is the personality of the leader that counts: he it is who has to make decisions on his own responsibility and lead his men in each enterprise. He must therefore be decisive and resourceful, bold in action and cool in council, of great mental and physical endurance, and of strong personality. These qualities alone will enable him to control his followers and win their unquestioning obedience without the close constraints of military organization and discipline which are the antithesis of guerilla action and a drag on its efficiency.

A background of military training is invaluable for a guerilla leader, tempering his judgements and strengthening his decisions. The almost universal adoption of compulsory military training throughout Europe and the levees en masse of the Great War will usually ensure that every leader will have had a military experience of some sort or other. To this should be added by study and instruction a realization of the influences of a mechanized age on the operations of large armies, both as a factor limiting and handicapping initiative and as a factor opening up new possibilities of mobility, of air action, of fire power, etc.

The selection of suitable leaders is therefore of paramount importance. The central authority must, and perforce will be, some man of prestige and weight who has been a leading personality in the territory in time of peace, as the leader either of some powerful association or league or minority. Leaders of local partisan bands will be selected from those of standing or mark in the locality who possess the necessary attributes of personality.

18. It may, however, frequently be advantageous to appoint certain serving army officers for duty with guerrillas, whether to serve directly as commanders, more particularly in the higher spheres or as specially qualified staff officers or assistants to guerrilla commanders. In such cases, it will often happen that the serving officer works hand and glove with the titular leader, the latter, owing to his local connections, etc. ensuring the cohesion of his guerillas, while the former supplies to the partnership the technical knowledge necessary for the most effective direction and co-ordination of the guerillas’ operations.

19. The wider the guerilla movement spreads, and the closer that its organization must ultimately in that case become, the greater will be the need for a leaven of regular officers to carry out the basic work of simple staff duties, and to effect liaison with the regular forces. These officers must, however, clear their minds of all preconceived ideas regarding military procedure and apply their minds entirely and objectively to the success of the matter in hand. The very fact of their being regular officers may prejudice their position in the eyes of the partisans, and such prejudice can only be overcome by the proof they can give of their value to the guerilla cause.

20. In cases where the guerrillas are a nation in arms, or part thereof, fighting for their freedom in alliance with or assisted and instigated by a third power which is willing an anxious to render all assistance to them, it will usually be advisable for that third power to be represented by a mission at the headquarters of the guerilla movement. The duties of such a mission would be to provide expert advice, to ensure liaison, to arrange the supply of arms, ammunition, money, etc., and to provide leaders and assistants to leaders if such were found to be necessary.

21. It is of great importance that the personnel of such missions should be au courant with the countries and territories where they are at work; the more detailed knowledge, personal liaison and reconnaissance that they have or can effect before operations are even envisaged, the greater is the chance of their success. They must study the languages, dialects, topography, etc., they must know the ethnological, political and religious groupings of the people, the history and aspirations of the country, its heroes of the present and martyrs of the past. They must in fact be prepared, at the risk of future regrets and disillusion, to identify themselves in every way with the people they are to serve.

22. As described in paragraph 5 (b), it is important that the degree of internal organization of the guerrillas should be suitable to the conditions in which they are operating; over-organization is more dangerous and detrimental to guerilla operations than too loose an organization. The latter can be tightened as circumstances prescribe, whereas the relaxing of control that has once been established, even though necessitated by changed conditions, must at first lend to some embarrassment, confusion and loss of direction.

23. The organization of partisans must usually commence with the formulation of local bands, numbering not more than about 30 men each. It is not only simpler and more convenient to form them on a local basis, but also quicker. The men live in the neighborhood, they know the country, they know each other and their leaders and can assemble rapidly when required, either for operations in their own area, if targets for attack exist, or for transfer to some area where conditions are more favorable. At the same time, there will be many areas where it will not be possible to form bands. Suitable and willing men in such areas must be given a rallying place to which they will move under their own arrangements and there join existing bands.

24. Modern developments, particularly in aircraft, mechanized forces and wireless, have profound influences on guerilla warfare, enabling the enemy rapidly to concentrate in opposition to any moves of guerillas that have been discovered. Concealment from aircraft, therefore, becomes one of the most important factors and inevitably curtails the possibilities of large sources of guerillas moving at will throughout the country. In effect such large forces, if they are to remain undiscovered, can only move by night and must conceal themselves by day or else move by routes—i.e. through thick forests etc.—which afford concealment form reconnoitering aircraft; such routes however themselves offer some difficulty to movement.

25. In addition, areas which offer good opportunities for concealment are usually just those areas where the maintenance and supply of large guerilla forces becomes difficult. They are usually wild, with little cultivation or pasture land for carrying stock or feeding the guerilla’s animals, and supplies would have to be brought in specially. At once, the guerrillas would begin to be dependent on communications, a situation cramping their mobility and exactly opposed to the characteristic which constitutes their chief military value.

26. It must be clearly realized therefore that in most European countries, except for large areas in the east and southeast, conditions will rarely at the commencement of a campaign be suitable for the employment of guerillas in large masses. Even in Asiatic and North African countries, the presence of hostile aircraft will make this difficult.

27. It is therefore probable that in in the early stages of a war, the scale of guerilla warfare will not exceed the activities of partisan bands; even if it should never exceed this, however, a guerilla campaign of this type directed with skill and executed with audacity and ceaseless activity will be a most potent factor in absorbing hostile forces and thus rendering a proper campaign by the enemy impossible. For this type of guerilla war a loose organization is essential, and co-ordination and direction of effort must emanate in considerable detail form the central controlling authority known as “The Chief”.

“The Chief”, or Military Mission or Guerilla Bureau

28. “The Chief” may be either an individual of the country concerned located with his small staff in the area of guerilla activities, or a section of the General Staff (Intelligence Branch) of the Army concerned, and located at its General Headquarters, or even a military mission from a third party located either at the General Headquarters of one of the armies in the field or some other more suitable place. “The Chief” may thus be established in either friendly territory, or in territory occupied nominally by the enemy. The relative advantages of either course are as follows:

29. If located in enemy territory—i.e. in the area where guerilla bands are to operate—contact and direction are easier, co-ordination of plans simplified, and “The Chief’s” presence must have a stimulating effect on the partisans. In addition, intelligence and planning, which depend so much on local conditions at the moment, can be more thorough. On the other hand, the nearness of the enemy and his activities will necessitate constant changes of location, and the possibility of enemy raids will necessitate the reduction of documents, files, etc. to a minimum, which may be incompatible with effective action.

30. Conversely, the installation of “The Chief” at the General Headquarters of an army, or even in friendly territory, brings in its trains closer relations with the regular forces, wider sources of information, the possibility of complete documentation, greater security, and facilitates the provision of such supplies as the guerrillas may receive, i.e. arms, ammunition, etc. What is lost, however, is the close touch with the active agents of the guerrilla campaign, and the inspiration which only the presence of the “The Chief” in their midst can really arouse. This can however be counteracted by the appointment of a “Deputy Chief” specially chosen for his personality and characteristics, and granted plenipotentiary powers for use in emergency.

31. “The Chief” will direct his bands by emissaries or personal visits and will appoint regional assistant-chiefs to assist him. When a large operation is planned, he will frequently direct and lead it in person. As, however, the organization is purposely loose, it is important that “The Chief” should not be exposed to unnecessary danger. Much of his plans and intentions for future action, his knowledge of the country and of his assistant-chiefs will not have been committed to paper nor can be, but are stored in his brain; his loss might irreparable.

32. Assistant-chiefs may again appoint sub-chiefs under them, according to the size of the regions for which they are responsible and the number of bands they contain.

Arms and Equipment

33. The provision and replenishment of arms and equipment for guerrillas is a problem that requires constant consideration. It is obvious that, if adequate supplies can be obtained before hostilities commence and can be suitably distributed, the problem is immensely simplified; further, guerilla operations can then be commenced without delay. The possibility of providing such peace stocks is governed almost entirely by political considerations, so that each country or district must be considered as a separate case; the attitude of the General Staff concerned is also of importance, more particularly in view of the pressure they can exert on their governments, a pressure which grows in weight on the approach of crises.

34. The arms most suitable for guerillas are those which do not hamper their mobility, but which are effective at close quarters. Guerilla actions will usually take place at point blank range as the result of an ambush or raid, with the object of inflicting the maximum amount of damage in a short time and then getting away. What is important therefore is a heavy volume of fire developed immediately, with the object of causing as many causalities and consequent confusion as possible at the outset of the action. Undoubtedly, therefore, the most effective weapon for the guerilla is the sub-machine gun which can be fired either from arrest or from the shoulder—i.e. a tommy-gun or gangster gun; in addition, this gun has the qualities of being short and comparatively light. Special efforts must therefore be made to equip each band with a percentage of these guns. Carbines are suitable, being shorter and lighter than rifles, and the long range of the rifle is not necessary. After carbines come revolvers and pistols for night work and for very close quarters, and then rifles. The more silencers that can be obtained for these weapons the better; a “silenced” rifle or revolver not only impedes detection, but has a considerable moral effect on the sniping of sentries, etc. Telescopic sights are invaluable for snipers.

Bayonets are quite unsuitable for guerillas; these are only for use in shock action which should be eschewed; a dagger is much more effective, and more easily concealed.

Bombs and devices of various kinds are of great use; when possible they should be specially made for the peculiar requirements of guerilla warfare, but standard army equipment must frequently be made to serve.

35. Replenishment of stocks during a campaign, particularly of ammunition, must be a constant concern to all partisans. When operating behind the enemy’s lines, the maintenance of supplies form outside will be a matter of the very greatest difficulty, frequently impossible; it is most important therefore that every opportunity to seize arms and ammunition from the enemy should be grasped. This is the only sure way of obtaining requirements. It will sometimes be necessary to organize raids whose primary object is the seizure of arms; every partisan must always have this matter uppermost in his mind and be prepared to grasp any opportunity that offers.

Information and Intelligence Service

36. In their normally superior facilities for obtaining information, guerillas have a factor in their favor of which the fullest advantage must be taken in order to counteract the enemy’s superior armament and equipment. Operating as they usually will be among a friendly populace, a system of obtaining information must be so built up that, from the offensive aspect, the fullest information required can be obtained prior to any contemplated operation; and, from the defensive aspect, no action which the enemy intends against the guerillas will escape prior detection. Further, information must always be sought giving details of the enemy’s moves, detachments, convoys, etc., which may lead to the initiation of a successful operation.

37. An enemy in occupation of territory is compelled to mix in varying degrees with the inhabitants. Troops must be billeted in houses; cafés and beerhouses will be used for their recreation; working parties will be employed for unloading trains, repairing roads, etc. These circumstances are extremely favorable for the collection of information by the local populace acting as agents. In fact, every reliable man, woman and child of common sense and reliability should be encouraged and trained to keep his ears open for items of information, and where conditions are suitable, to seek for it by questions, by purloining letters, etc. Among the most suitably placed to act as agents are barbers, waitresses, domestic servants, priests, doctors, telephone and telegraph operators, postmen and camp followers generally.

38. The collection and collation of this information requires some consideration. As pointed out earlier, the seizure of documents by the enemy from guerillas as the result of raids, interception of letters, etc., is of the greatest value to him in his efforts to crush the guerrilla warfare. Messages passed by agents therefore should be verbal as far as possible and the degree of documentation by local partisan leaders must not exceed that which allows reasonable security. As and when the guerrilla organization grows tighter and closer, collation and recording of intelligence will increase until the stage is reached that at the headquarters of the guerrilla forces in the field there is a proper intelligence staff with files, maps, enemy order of battle, etc. To err on the side of over-organization, however, is to court disaster; hence the over-riding importance of the personality of the leaders. The leader alone it is who by his activity, his drive, his flair for guerilla warfare, his intelligence and wit, directs his men to successful action without the close organization necessary for regular forces.

39. When guerilla operations commence, on whatever scale, the enemy will institute counter-measures, of which one important aspect will be intelligence. But he will be working usually amidst a hostile populace; without their co-operation his task will be more difficult and will require a larger number of his own men to carry it out.

40. The guerillas must therefore impress on the people the vital necessity of withholding form the enemy all information about them however harmless it may seem; the people must be convinced that their refusal to co-operate with the enemy in this respect is of the greatest importance for the redemption of their country from the enemy’s grasp, and for the safety of their friends and relatives. They must be warned never to discuss the activities of the guerrillas in any circumstances whatever.

In every community will be found certain individuals so debased that for greed of gain they will sell even their own countrymen. Against this contingency close watch must be set, and wherever proof is obtained of such perfidy, the traitor must be killed without hesitation or delay. By such justifiably ruthless action others who might be tempted to follow suit will be finally deterred.

41. It will be necessary, in addition, to harass the enemy’s intelligence service in every possible way. Agents that he may have imported must be tracked down and shot, his intelligence officers and staffs sought out and neutralized, and captured documents and plans destroyed after perusal.

42. Guerillas themselves must be trained to give away no information if captured. The enemy intelligence officers will be adepts in leading prisoners into indiscretions, in installing listening sets and “pigeons” in prisons, concentration camps, reading prisoners’ ingoing and outgoing mails, etc.

43. The advantage of superior information is the guerillas’ greatest asset; it must be used to the fullest extent possible.

Intercommunication.

44. All means of communication that are open to interception by the enemy must be used with the greatest discretion—i.e. civil postal service, telephone, telegraphs, etc., as any code and ciphers used by guerillas must of necessity be simple or only infrequently changed, and their solution by the enemy will not be a difficult task. Such devices therefore only give a very relative security.

45. The passing of information verbally and direct is clearly the safest and in many ways the most reliable means. At the same time, however, opportunities for this will not always occur, and frequently messages must be written and conveyed by several hands before reaching their destination. For this purpose it is often better to use women and children who are are less suspect and probably enjoy greater immunity from search.

46. It will be incumbent on leaders within their own arenas to arrange adequate means for the collection of information and their own ingenuity will produce many devices, such as messages left in clefts of trees, in stone walls, in culverts, etc. Pigeons are occasionally useful, but their limitations are obvious—i.e. ease of detection, uncertainty, etc., and the greatest care must be observed in their use.

47. For messages of operational importance between partisan bands and the scouts, and within groups of partisan bands, etc., wireless offers great possibilities. It can be used by scouts to inform their band that an enemy convoy is leaving by a certain route, offering a chance of ambush; it can be used within groups to co-ordinate attacks, to pass on information, etc. The smaller the transmitting set and the wider its range the more useful it becomes; ease of concealment is a very important factor.

Wireless should not be used except for matters of importance; sets are not easily replaced if discovered and should be guarded preciously. It may be advisable to fix certain hours only daring which wireless may be used. All messages in wireless must be in code or cipher.

Training

48. Training in the full military sense is not applicable to guerillas, but on the other hand any guerilla who has a background of military training is ipso facto a better partisan. The object of military training is to make any recruit of whatever caliber into a reasonably good soldier, so that it is based on the lowest common denominator. Guerillas on the contrary will usually be recruited from men who have a natural aptitude or a fondness for fighting, who are accustomed to the use of weapons, to hard sleep, to movement in the dark, etc.

Their training, therefore, should first be directed to the use of their basic weapons, i.e., automatic rifles, carbines, pistols, etc., and to the use of the various destructive devices such as bombs, road and rail mines, etc., which are such a special and useful feature of guerilla warfare.

49. For these devices knowledge of electrical equipment is of great value; leaders must therefore endeavor to include in their bands a few men with this experience; if they do not exist, suitable men must be trained. The actual placing of these devices, and even their firing can often be carried out in emergency by entrained personnel, but the risks of inefficacy and failure are great and should not be run for want of a little time spent in training.

50. Localities for training must be carefully selected so that surprise is impossible; it is essential to post sentries far out where enemy movement can be seen in time.

51. Weapon training of guerillas must be efficient, not only so that the men may have confidence in their weapons and shoot to kill, but also in order to save ammunition, which is frequently an important factor in guerilla warfare. A few rounds spent on perfecting shooting, and testing of rifles will be amply repaid.

52. Training in defensive action against modern weapons is of importance, more particularly in the following aspects:
    (a) Aircraft: Partisan leaders must impress on all their men that the surest way of attaining success in their operations is by remaining undetected, and that detection will always be followed by enemy action against them.
          Concealment from aircraft is of the greatest importance, and men must be trained to take cover quickly, to lie face downwards, and to remain absolutely still until the aeroplane has passed.
    (a) Tanks, Armoured Cars, etc.: These are very blind when forced by fire to close down their screens; both are very susceptible to ground.
    (a) Machine Guns, etc.: Smoke screens formed by smoke bombs are the best antidote.
    For further details, see the Partisan Leader’s Handbook.

Enemy Counter Action

53. The first effect on the enemy of the institution of guerilla warfare will be to compel him to strengthen all posts, guards, detachments, etc., and to carry out all movements in convoy, even if only of a routine nature. By this, the guerillas will have achieved a part of their object, i.e. more enemy troops will be absorbed in purely protective duties, and his forces for offensive action correspondingly reduced.

This reaction of the enemy is however purely defensive. As the scale of guerilla warfare increases, and as successful attacks are carried out against those strengthened posts, convoys, etc., the enemy will undertake active offensive measures against the partisans with the object of finally crushing them.

54. Until the first stage has been reached, and this will not be long, i.e., moving in convoy, etc., members of partisan bands may well be able to remain living undetected in their own homes, and collecting by summons for particular operations. This however will soon be rendered impossible by the searches, raids, etc., and issue of curfew, passport and other regulations that the enemy will introduce. When that moment comes it will be necessary for the partisans to “go on the run”, i.e., to live as a band in some suitable area where the nature of the country enables them to be relatively secure.

55. The commencement of offensive action by the enemy will be marked by the institution of “flying columns”—detachments of from fifty to two or three hundred strong, mobile by means of horses, lorries, etc., and quipped with several days of supplies—which will be sent out to search the country, moving by circuitous and haphazard routes, employing scouts and advance guards, and probably assisted by aircraft. The final stage, when this action is insufficient, will be the organization of “drives”, in which large forces of troops consisting of all arms will be used to sweep through successive selected areas, and the accompanying intelligence officers, their staffs, informers, agents, etc., will interrogate every man falling into the net and arrest any to whom suspicion attaches. Aeroplanes are certain to co-operate.

56. Against flying columns, the guerillas’ superior sources of information, knowledge of the country and individual mobility should be adequate protection; the object of the guerillas in these circumstances is to avoid discovery, and not take military action against the flying columns unless overwhelming strength against any particular column can be combined with favorable circumstances in which to destroy it.

57. Against large-scale drives the guerrillas must give way and move off to some locality where the enemy is relatively inactive. It must be remembered that in countries of any large extent the number of troops required to carry out comprehensive drives simultaneously through every area subject to guerrilla warfare will usually be prohibitive. Should the enemy attempt such a policy, the object of this warfare will be even nearer of achievement, i.e., rendering the enemy incapable of carrying on an effective campaign.

58. The counters to such a policy are clear. If the enemy’s drives throughout the whole area affected give no chance of eventual escape, the partisans must harry the advance as it proceeds, seek the weak spots in it, and break through back into their own country, either by infiltration, or by massing against a weak spot and bursting through by sheer strength and force of arms. To men who know the country and can move freely in the dark there is little risk of failure.

59. Against the various weapons that the enemy may employ, endowed as he will be with superior equipment of war, i.e. aeroplanes, tanks, armoured cars, etc., instructions are contained in the Partisan Leader’s Handbook.

Of all these means, the most dangerous to the partisans is the aeroplane; they must be taught always to move and take up their positions by night, to take immediate cover from aircraft of all descriptions, and never to open fire on them unless the aeroplanes themselves attack.

60. Against action by the enemy, other than a military nature, every step must be taken to render it inoperative. Such action will include the institution of curfew hours, of a system of visas and cartes dídentité, of traffic regulations, of restriction on the use of motor transport, etc. In this field, it is the civilian population which can most assist the guerilla; a policy of absolute non-co-operation leavened with enlightened stupidity will do much to render the enemy’s control ineffective.

Planning and Action

61. Just as in time of peace the study of the employment of its regular forces in the event of possible wars is one of the main problems of a country’s General Staff, so must the employment of guerilla forces and tactics in aid of the regular army be the object of equally close examination. Probable theatres of war and possible allies in various contingencies will lead this examination over a very wide field. Cases requiring particular study will be those in which either the home country or an ally must envisage in view of the enemy’s greater strength, more complete preparation or more rapid mobilization, a successful invasion of its territory in the early stages of the campaign, even if only to a limited depth.

62. The object of such study is to determine the possibilities of guerilla warfare on the flanks of, but more particularly behind, the advancing hostile armies, and to make the necessary arrangements in peace before the emergency arises. To delay study and preparation until a war has broken out will make the institution of a proper guerilla campaign infinitely more difficult, and in face of a strong and ruthless enemy, in all probability impossible. The arrangements to be made must include:
    (a) The nomination of local partisan leaders.
    (b) The provision of arms, ammunition, destructive devices, wireless sets, etc., and their concealment.
    (c) Selection of “The Chief” and of the personnel of his staff.
    (d) Provision of ensuring liaison between General Headquarters in the field and “The Chief” with his guerillas.
          N.B. If “The Chief” is at General Headquarters, liaison is required between him and the deputy chief.
    (e) The formulation of a plan of campaign.
    (f) The selection of vital points for destruction after hostile occupation, and their preparation to that end. ETC. ETC.

63. It may well be that among a group of two or more allied powers, one power by its wealth, its strategic position, its military experience or its initiative is in a position to encourage and assist the others in these preparations. Such assistance may take the following forms:
    (a) The provision of special weapons and destructive devices for use by guerillas.
    (b) The provision of technical experts in destructive devices specially trained to assist the leaders of partisan bands.
    (c) The establishment of a mission or bureau either at the allied General Headquarters, or in the field with the guerillas, to direct operations in co-ordination with that General Headquarters, and to arrange for the further supply and distribution of money, arms, etc.
    (d) The provision of military experts in the field to assist and co-ordinate the activities of assistant leaders.

Preparatory Planning

64. A complete survey of likely territories must be made with a view to determining for what types of guerilla activities they will initially be suitable.

Politically, the field of action for guerilla warfare may be broadly divided into three distinct spheres:
    (a) Where the population, except for numerically insignificant minorities, supports the hostile power. This territory usually comprises the enemy’s home country and that of his allied and associate powers.
    (b) Where the population is, in varying degrees, hostile to the power in occupation.
    (c) Neutral countries.

Friendly Population

65. Unless a war has been begun in opposition to the general weight of public opinion, the enemy’s home country will at the outset have been brought to a high pitch of patriotism and jingoism. Such conditions offer no scope for the organization of armed intervention by guerillas and this type of warfare must therefore be limited to subterranean attacks by disaffected individuals or small groups against targets that will interrupt communications, interferes with or damage supplies of food, munitions, etc., assist in diverting the enemy’s armed forces and generally lower the morale of the people.

66. At the same time the people’s will to war must be sapped and undermined in every other way, so as to induce a craving for peace and for a change in the regime of the country which will lend to it. The object must be to prepare a situation in which an increasing and focal part of the population will be opposed to the government and its policy, and any alternative will seem to offer fairer prospects. At the right moment it will be desirable to focus public opinion on to an alternative leader or party.

67. Such a campaign is best carried on by “whispering”, by skillful propaganda through the press and wireless, by magnification of hardships such as food restrictions, by the sabotaging of food supplies, communications, by publishing exaggerated casualty lists, etc., and many other means. Even in the final stages of such a campaign, however, there is no field for the employment of partisan bands; there representatives either of a foreign power or a disaffected minority would only serve to exacerbate the patriotism of the general population. What is required is to divide the population of the enemy against itself; the means are endless—knowledge of the country and a fertile imagination will devise the methods.

Hostile Population

68. A population hostile to the enemy’s occupation offers immediately a sphere for the fullest development of guerilla warfare in all its aspects, culminating in a general rising of the people against the enemy. The types of warfare to be employed at the outset must depend on the nature of the country; it is clear that in highly cultivated districts with few physical features the concentration of partisan bands into large formations is out of the question until such times as the enemy’s hold begins through weakness to relax. Then is the moment for a general levee en masse of the population with such arms as they have concealed or seized; the enemy’s defeat will not long be delayed.

69. In cases of this nature the provision of arms and ammunition and arrangements for replenishing stocks are of primary importance. Where the possibility of aggression by a hostile power and the occupation by it of foreign territory can be foreseen, such provision should invariably be made before the commencement of hostilities. Not only can adequate stocks be more easily obtained and planted, but also more thorough precautions can be made for secrecy in delivery and in distribution and storage.

Where such provision cannot be made beforehand, an organization must be immediately created for the running of weapons and explosives from neutral or friendly countries, and plans must be worked out and put in hand for the seizure of hostile stocks by local guerillas.

70. In general, the action to be undertaken in areas where the people are hostile to the occupying power is to stimulate the morale of the inhabitants, to create a policy of complete non-co-operation, both active among those best fitted for it and passive by the whole of the reminder. It is necessary to convince the people that the hostile power is not de facto in control, that its writ does not run and that it will eventually be compelled to evacuate the territory, when those who have tacitly accepted its control will be punished, and those who have opposed it will be rewarded.

Neutral Countries

71. The institution of guerilla activities in neutral territories from which the enemy draws supplies must depend to some extent on the political and other relations between the powers concerned. In certain cases, it may be politic to ignore the assistance given to the enemy by a particular neutral country in view of the even greater aid that is being received. When however, the supplies which the enemy is obtaining are vital to his conduct of the war it may be necessary actively to hinder this provision in spite of otherwise friendly relations with the country concerned and to risk the rupture of such relations.

72. This risk, however, must be reduced to a minimum and postponed as long as possible. Its elimination depends primarily on the skill with which the campaign is carried out. The methods to be employed to hinder supply range from the purchase of supplies over the head of the enemy, the organization of labor strikes at the vital points—i.e., factories, mines, docks, etc., to the sabotaging of ships, trains and machinery. The engagement of local firms of solicitors, not too scrupulous and at the same time experienced in neutrality and labor legislation, and in the procrastination of judicial procedure will be of the greatest assistance.

73. As in the case of guerilla warfare proper, this is a subject which requires study and preparation before hostilities commence, and the selection of suitable personnel, experienced in shipping and commerce generally, and maritime and neutrality laws of the countries concerned.

Geographical

74. The geographical study of a territory is concerned with two factors:
(a) Its suitability as an area for guerilla warfare. The more broken and forested it is, the more suitable will it be.
(b) The potential targets for guerilla action which it offers. These will usually be in the shape of road, rail and river communications which the enemy would have to employ for the maintenance of his armies in the field. Vulnerable points within the enemy’s own territory must also be marked. The reconnaissance of territories should, whenever possible, be carried out in time of peace by selected officers who have been grounded in the principles of guerilla warfare. Their reports will be of great assistance in formulating a plan.

Organization of Bands

75. One of the principle reasons for insisting on the advantages of peacetime preparation is that, failing such arrangements, the institution of guerilla warfare behind the enemy’s lines will be a matter of the utmost difficulty. The ideal at which to aim is that when the enemy invasion takes place the men who are to become the partisans should remain in their homes with their arms conveniently concealed, and allow themselves to be over-run. They will then hold themselves in readiness to commence action under their leader the moment the order is given. Where the fronts covered by the main opposing armies are wide and broken, there will be opportunity for the partisan bands to penetrate the hostile lines for operations in the enemy’s rear, but when the fronts are continuous, as may frequently happen, there will be no such opportunity; without previous provision, therefore, guerilla warfare on the enemy’s lines of communication, his most vulnerable and tender spot, could only be sporadic and half-hearted.

76. Most of the great powers include in their forces formations of a para-military character such as Frontier Guards, Customs Guards, Frontier Gendarmerie, and Forest Guards, etc. These organizations, dealing as they do with the prevention of smuggling, illicit crossing of frontiers, poaching, etc., contain men with an intimate knowledge of frontier districts, trained to act by night, and to be self-dependent. As frontiers frequently rest on natural boundaries such as mountains, large rivers, etc., which form good area for guerilla activities, such men will be of immense value as the nuclei of partisan bands.

77. From a consideration of the above factors, it is apparent that the institution of guerilla warfare to assist the regular armies in the defeat of the enemy is a subject which must in all its aspects be considered and prepared in peace to the furthest extent possible. Such planning and action should include the following:
    (a) A careful study of the territories concerned from the point of view of geography, communications, ethnology, racial and religious habits, historical associations, etc., and a decision as to possibilities.
    (b) The supply and distribution of arms, ammunition, devices, pamphlets, etc., and the instruction of potential partisans in their use.
    (c) The selection and training of regular army officers in the art of guerilla warfare; these would be sent to organize and take charge of guerilla operations in their respective areas, or to act as advisers to the local leaders. Such training should include a period of residence in the territory concerned.

Conclusion

78. The more the subject is considered the more apparent it becomes that in guerilla warfare it is the personality of the leader which counts above everything. It is he who by this personality and steadfastness must hold the loosely organized partisans together, and by his courage, audacity and high intelligence successfully direct and lead their operations.

79. These operations range over an unlimited field according to local circumstances. Large forces of guerillas can harry the flanks of an advancing or retreating army, can raid his communications in force, destroying railways, burning supply dumps and capturing convoys, and then withdraw again to the security of their own lines. Small bands of partisans can live behind the enemy’s lines, or filter through gaps in his fronts, and carry on similar activities on a smaller scale. Individual guerillas can be permanently located in the enemy’s rear, when by the sniping of guards, the destruction of military vehicles, buildings, etc., they can be a running sore in his flesh, draining his vitality and hampering this action.

80. Guerillas obtain their advantage over the enemy by their greater knowledge of the country, their relatively greater mobility, and their vastly superior sources of information. Those are the factors which, when properly exploited, enable them to engage with success an enemy who is better equipped, more closely disciplined, and usually in greater strength.

81. The main objects of guerilla warfare are to inflict direct damage and loss on the enemy, to hamper his operations and movements by attacks on his communications and to compel him to withdraw the maximum number of troops from the main front of battle so as to weaken his offensive power. Direct action of the types envisaged will bring the desired result about. It must always be remembered that guerilla warfare is what regular armies have most to fear. When directed with skill and carried out with courage and whole-hearted endeavor, an effective campaign by the enemy becomes almost impossible.

82. Guerilla warfare is much facilitated by the co-operation of the local inhabitants, but in the face of an uncompromising hostile occupation this will only become active as the result of successful action by the guerillas. It is this alone that will awaken in the people the spirit of revolt, of audacity and of endurance, and make them foresee and assist towards the victory that will be theirs.

83. In the modern world the time has now come when aggressor nations, to gain their ends, use every device and ingenuity that their perverted wits can devise to break down the resistance of their intended victims both before and after the occupation of their territory. Given the leadership, the courage, the arms and the preparation, however, there is one thing remaining that they cannot break, and that is the spirit of the people whose territory has been over-run, a spirit expressing itself in uncompromising and steadfast resistance to defeat and in a ruthless and uncompromising warfare of partisans until the enemy is forced to cry “Halt!” and depart. In the long history of the world such deeds have been done, such causes won and they can be won again, given opportunity.

F I N I S

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Book Review: Apocalyptic Planet by Craig Childs

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 18:57:18 -1000

I’m a fan of adventure science writer Craig Childs. Each of his books—Secret Knowledge of Water, Soul of Nowhere —I’ve carried in a backpack and read mostly by headlamp light, in many of the desert southwest wildernesses he writes about. But Apocalyptic Planet sat on my shelf for years, because I didn’t care for the subtitle. Field Guide to the Future of the Earth sounded resigned to an apocalypse, so I stubbornly left it there to languish, Orion Book Award Winner or not. I finally got around to it one chilly afternoon in a soggy tent in Arizona, a few miles from the Mexican border, as gentle winter rain pattered and surged outside. The first chapter, “Deserts Consume,” is set in the enormous sand dune expanse of the Gran Desierto of Sonora, Mexico, southwest of our camp just beyond a jagged range of dark granite mountains.

This part of the Sonoran Desert is particularly arid, with two to three inches of annual rainfall. The Sierra El Rosario mountain range of the Gran Desierto is the driest mountain range in North America. Childs and his travelling companion crossed the dunes, still sweltering even in autumn, from one of their water caches to another. It’s not a trip I would have enjoyed; sand everywhere, in ears, eyes, noses, grinding between teeth, but this is part of what makes Childs’ work so interesting—a willingness to personally endure hardships that most people wouldn’t, for the sake of exploring deep and distant outbacks. To cope with midday heat, for example, they buried themselves in sand and suffered the hours out, shaded only by their sarongs. Not the sort of ordeal many would choose.

El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve, Sonora, Mexico

By choice or not, we are experiencing steady desertification of the world by agriculture and a warming, carbon-laden atmosphere, and it will get worse without significant intervention. Childs quotes paleoclimatologist Peter Fawcett and colleagues, “Models of climate response to anthropogenic warming predict future dust-bowl-like conditions that will last much longer than historical droughts and have a different underlying cause, a poleward expansion of the subtropical dry zones.” Childs adds, “Dear Arizona: Mexico is coming.”

Climate models also predict that oceans will continue to rise as the major remaining ice sheets melt. Childs explores the rising seas on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, where mammoths and Ice Age humans once wandered the Bering Land Bridge and the Bering Sea continues to creep upward, flooding out the Yup’ik indigenous people.

Some of the changes Apocalyptic Planet chronicles are ordinary fluctuations of climate and geology that have been a part of Earth’s history since its beginning, and some are wholly the product of industrialization, the process of rendering life into commodities. Childs visits fresh lava fields in Hawai’i, but also takes a hellish summer backpacking trip in an Iowa cornfield devoid of virtually all life but corn, topsoil long since spent, nothing but chemical enslavement of genetically modified crops.

He observes dramatic ice erosion at the Northern Patagonian Ice Field of Chile, which has lost 30 cubic kilometers of ice every year since 2002 to enormous avalanches of ice and sudden violent floods of meltwater. Camped near an eroding ice field one night, he’s startled awake by “what sounded like a volley of artillery fire” but is actually a falling serac, a block of glacial ice. While seracs routinely cleave from glaciers, the present scale of loss is far from routine, as the book emphasizes throughout. “Nearly all equatorial glaciers that were numerous a century ago are now missing. You can clearly say something big is happening, a warming, an acceleration, an ending of a time.”

Conversely, in the chapter “Cold Returns,” Childs argues that “In the future, there will be ice. Lots of ice….Whether this happens in thousands of years or millions, it will happen.” He joins an expedition to the west coast of Greenland with a team of ice-climate scientists to see what life was like on the planet during a phase of long brutal winters, very short summers, and ice everywhere, thick, massive, and advancing. Anthropogenic warming is reversing the nearly 50-million year planetary cooling trend, but may paradoxically disrupt regional climates.

The melting Greenland ice sheet could dilute the northern Atlantic Ocean enough to change the trajectory of the Gulf Stream. If so, Europe will be in for some long winters. Other effects of resource extraction and consumption that once seemed far-fetched are emerging as well: earthquakes caused by fracking and waste injection wells, hurricanes driven by a warming atmosphere and ocean, the ocean itself acidifying from the absorption of carbon dioxide. No one can possibly predict the outcome of tampering with such a complex system, other than that there will surely be consequences.

How to avoid them? Apocalyptic Planet doesn’t get into this much, and when it does, the remedies are hopelessly inadequate. Childs quotes a geophysics and climatology professor, “I guarantee you there are millions of solutions. Here is a simple one: increase the efficiency of automobiles.” While this might be technically possible (though unlikely), it’s still far from a real fix. If we allow oil companies to extract the approximately 1.5 trillion barrels of oil still in the ground, it won’t matter much if we burn it in the projected 47 years, or 100 years. The effect on climate will be nearly the same. Postponing a problem is no solution. Like almost everyone else, most scientists take industrialization as the given, as synonymous with humanity, and not the recent experiment that it is—the very problem itself. Industrialization is rendering the planet uninhabitable; it’s the constant in the equation that makes every environmental win temporary. Save a forest with a lawsuit, lose it to drought. Save the whales from commercial hunting, lose them to plastic garbage.

Of the dissolving of the ice fields Childs writes, “I’d stop it here if I could. I have a particular fondness for this kind of earth…the Holocene where we are somewhere between ice and not.” Childs doesn’t ask, but how to stop the loss? is the question, the only one that really matters. Is reversing global warming within our ability? I think it is—and it would be fairly simple. We probably can’t stop a meteor from striking the earth, but a few thousand well-trained, well-organized people could stop the flow of oil, thus stopping a great majority of the destruction of the planet. Humans could rebuild topsoil with grazing herbivores, and restore forests on a scale that could meaningfully reduce atmospheric carbon. They could also insist on absolute political and social emancipation of women and girls, ensure their literacy, and promote free family planning—a proven way to quickly and humanely reduce the human population, as Iran did from the late 1980s up to 2014, when the policy was tragically reversed.

Most of these are politically difficult objectives, to say the least. Those who wield the actual power in our time, the financial and political elites, will never agree to them because the business of consuming the earth—oil, coal, topsoil, human labor—is simply too profitable. The consumer class is completely reliant on industry for every aspect of their working and leisure lives. Agriculture has made us a race of toiling dependents, and corporate capitalism has welded us to the ever-declining trajectory of the industrial age. Virtually no one questions this foundation of our lives.

Yet it all will end eventually. Fertilizers synthesized from natural gas and mined minerals are, like oil and coal, a finite resource. It doesn’t take much imagination to foresee what will happen when—not if—these indispensable feedstocks for industrial humans and their way of life run out. Will our time here end with every drop of oil burned, every acre covered with cornfields and wind farms? Will humanity’s conclusion be biodiversity’s ruin? 10 billion humans driven to extinction on a planet unable to support complex life? Or will the flow of oil be stopped preemptively, against the will of eight billion humans, but leaving them a chance to transition to localized, lasting cultures based on the gifts and needs of their land?

Back to my Arizona winter camp. The storm finally cleared so I set Apocalyptic Planet aside and my companion and I took a long walk. The damp Sonoran Desert smelled sweetly of Larrea tridentata, the abundant green creosote bush. Saguaro cacti, tall and spiny with comically waving arms, a southwest icon, were plump and happy, each filled with tons of rainwater. Along the eroding foothills birdsong rang out; rolling valleys of decomposed granite alive with everything that three inches of rain a year will allow. All seemed content and engorged. Everywhere we looked, in secret grottoes, distant canyons, and under the sprawling limbs of exotic elephant and ironwood trees, life flourished. Wood rat nests mounded under cholla cactus thickets, and wolf spider dens and rodent holes punctuated coarse granulated soil. Tracks of scampering small mammals, lizards, and desert bighorn sheep unspooled like arcane petroglyphs.

In the hypnotic heat of summer, rattlesnakes coil in the shade of gray-leafed brittlebush, male tarantulas prowl the moonlight for suitable mates, and red cardinals perch in palo verde trees, startling red like Christmas tree ornaments. All relatively safe, for this World War II-era bombing range is now marginally protected by its National Wildlife Refuge status, its 110 degree plus days, and by its remoteness and lack of appeal to most everyone but the occasional sheep hunter, and desert disciples like us.

Yet as we walked along the Mexico border, looking with rapt interest into the secret peaks and valleys of the Sierra El Choclo Duro—Mountains of Hard Corn—we could not help but remember that the small border fence was to be replaced by Donald Trump’s towering steel wall. Even the most distant and inhospitable places, which we’d forlornly hoped were of no interest to anyone, are not safe from violation. The border wall recently advanced across supposedly protected land and places sacred to the indigenous Tohono O’odham people. It doesn’t matter if the wall, or anything else, is illegal—so long as those in power have the ability to do what they want, they will do it, and the only way to stop them is to permanently disable them. So again, the critical question: how?

Sierra El Choclo Duro and Mexico/US border. Steel posts block vehicles, but not animals or humans on foot.

Apocalypse is not an inevitable outcome. If we are to save the Goldilocks climate of the Holocene, and if we are to preserve any chance of a decent and dignified future for humanity, the answer to that critical question—how to stop the forces of destruction? —must begin with stopping fossil fuels. We’re researching and sharing effective strategies and tactics to shut down the flows. Learn more in our how to stop fossil fuels overview, and by subscribing to our mailing list below.

George Jackson Brigade Tactical Principles

Thu, 15 Aug 2019 17:53:25 -1000

What Is the George Jackson Brigade?

Description from the George Jackson Brigade Information Project (thanks to archive.org):

The George Jackson Brigade formed in the crucible of prisoners’ rights organizing which came out of the civil rights movement and mass anti-war protests of the ‘60s. In its three-year existence, it claimed 11 bombings, as many bank robberies, and one prisoner liberation. Targets included the Department of Corrections, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as well as different corporate offices. The chemistry present in the group was the same that had been combusting across the country: society’s most oppressed members allied with college educated youth who refused to continue their class and white skin privilege. In the case of the Brigade, women took center stage, queers challenged straights, convicts communicated with college students, and a black man enthusiastically aided whites.

The story of the Brigade takes place against a backdrop of the domestic activism of Black, Chicano, Native American, gay and white prisoners, and armed struggle in the U.S., Canada, Central and South America, Africa, Asia and Europe.

Tactical Lessons

Modern aspiring underground activists can and should learn from those who came before. This is an excerpt from “The Power of the People Is the Force of Life: Political Statement of the George Jackson Brigade”

The main tactical principles we follow are:

#1. We see propaganda and counter-propaganda (important as they are) as secondary aspects of our work. Primarily we strive for our actions to have a material effect on the world.

#2. We concentrate our forces on the enemy’s weaknesses. We choose when, where, and how we will attack; this is our main tactical advantage. Where necessary, we divert the police away from the target.

#3. Overall, we are in a period of defense and consolidation, and we avoid actual confrontation and battle if at all possible. By choosing areas of low police concentration, we try to insure that if we are taken by surprise and have to fight, the outcome will not be in question.

#4. We develop our tactics so as to keep the initiative. That is, to keep the enemy reacting and guessing, never quite sure where we are, who we are, or where we will strike next. In this way we deny them the space to develop an effective plan against us.

#5. The Compton Massacre of the SLA [Symbionese Liberation Army] clearly shows that the police are more than willing to use terror and murder when it suits them. If taken by surprise by a superior force, we will make a positive effort to surrender—we see no advantage to more freedom fighters being fried on the six o’clock news.

#6. On the question of security, consciousness is primary and determines whether or not security will be upheld; specific security measures are secondary. Consciousness, however, develops and comes from the practice of specific measures and techniques. Security is a state of mind. Being security conscious requires that we integrate security into our whole lives; into everything we do. It doesn’t apply just during certain meetings, or with particular people or when the heat is around.

Overall, security practice is common sense. Concrete methods must be different for different circumstances. We think people should develop and apply concrete security practices based on the following principles. We have developed and confirmed these principles in our practice and they have served us well:

    (a) Security is very important to our work; it provides the context in which we survive and act. Action, however, is primary. In the end, any contradiction between security and action must be resolved in favor of acting.
    (b) No matter who or what the circumstances, don’t tell anyone anything they don’t need to know.
    (c) Who to trust: “Trust” no one. “Trust” as a subjective judgment should not enter into security decisions. Assume anyone could be a potential informant unless you’ve had long (years) experience with them, or have thoroughly checked them out. This way no one questionable will see or hear anything they shouldn’t.
    (d) When doing secure work with other people, form an organization so you’ll have a vehicle for excluding people and/or thoroughly checking backgrounds when necessary.
    (e) Do background checks if you have a reason to question anyone. Be thorough and positive before trusting anyone you don’t have common experience with.
    (f) Struggle against paranoia. Paranoia is unreasoning and counterproductive to security. It’s a tool the enemy uses to keep us inactive. Adopt good security practices and develop an all-sided, realistic view of the world.
    (g) Assume the enemy knows nothing and that he knows everything he could possibly know. Operating on both these assumptions means that, on the one hand, we will be as careful as possible to deny him access to all sensitive information. We will avoid the laxness that comes from thinking that he must already know such and such so it isn’t worth the trouble to keep it secret. If at the same time we assume he already knows everything he could know, we will avoid being lulled into a false sense of security and will be constantly vigilant.

#7. Good intelligence is the foundation of a successful guerrilla organization. The vast majority of intelligence work involves the gathering and organization of readily available pieces of information. Although this is mostly shit work, there is no way to overstate its importance.

(An important task for people who want to remain aboveground while participating in and supporting armed struggle would be to develop these skills. Start files on developing mass struggle[s]; pay particular attention to the organization of the ruling class as it opposes them; investigate the police and strive to understand their strengths and weaknesses [start by getting a police scanner]; develop target information: suggestions, terrain, weak spots, etc.; talk to the masses about armed struggle; publish the results of these investigations so that underground fighters and everybody else can see them.)

#8. Seattle is our main area of work. There are two reasons for this: First, Seattle is where we have all worked, lived and fought before. It is where we understand best. It is where our roots and our base and our debts are. Second, for as long as we can remain free and fighting where we choose, we attack for all to see the myth of police invincibility.

At the same time, we have to stay vigilant and alert to the progress the police are making in tracking us down, and be prepared to retreat at a moment’s notice to a safer rear area where we can recuperate, lick our wounds, build back our strength and wait for the heat to die down so that we can return again. Our year and a half in Oregon is an example of this. The entire rest of the country is a potential rear area for us. We are trying to develop the ability to make these retreats in a planned way, and on our own initiative.

Learn more about the George Jackson Brigade

Daniel Burton-Rose created a website, and published two books in 2010, available as physical and ebooks:

George Jackson Brigade Information Project (archive.org)
Guerrilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade and the Anticapitalist Underground of the 1970s (exploration of the GJB drawing on extensive research and interviews with surviving members)
Creating a Movement With Teeth: A Documentary History Of The George Jackson Brigade (compilation of contemporaneous documents, including the full text from which we republished the excerpt above)

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Existential Climate Risk & Neoliberalism

Tue, 23 Jul 2019 12:16:08 -1000

David Spratt / Climate Code Red
First published March 10, 2019. Republished here with permission

International climate policymaking has failed to avoid a path of catastrophic global warming. Two often-overlooked causes of this failure are how climate-science knowledge has been produced and utilised by the United Nation’s twin climate bodies—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—and how those organisations function.

It is now widely understood that human-induced climate change this century is an existential risk to human civilisation. Unless carbon emissions are rapidly reduced to zero, it is likely that global warming will either annihilate intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.

While policymakers talk about holding warming to 1.5°C to 2°C above the pre-industrial level—a very unsafe goal given that dangerous climate-system tipping points are being activated now at just 1°C of warming—by their lack of action they are in fact setting Earth on a much higher warming path that will destroy many cities, nations and peoples, and many, if not most, species.

This cognitive dissonance was on full display at the UNFCCC’s twenty-fourth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP24) in Katowice, Poland, last December [2018]. Speaking at COP24 to great fanfare and a standing ovation, Greta Thunberg, the 16-year old Swedish climate activist who has inspired a global movement for ‘climate strikes’ by school students, called out the leadership failure of the COP adults who ‘are not mature enough to tell it like is’:

We have to speak clearly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be. You only speak of green eternal economic growth (and) about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake. You are not mature enough to tell it like is. Even that burden you leave to us children.

And then the adults got down to business, which was to write a rulebook for the Paris Agreement. The result does little to push nations to improve on the low ambition of the 2015 COP, and instead simply restates a request for nations to update their commitments by 2020.

The Paris deal established ‘bottom up’, voluntary, unenforceable, national emission-reduction commitments that would result in a warming path of 3.5°C, and closer to 5°C when the full range of climate-system feedbacks is taken into account. Such an outcome, say scientists, is inconsistent with the maintenance of human civilisation, and may reduce the human population to one billion people. Even the World Bank says it may be beyond adaptation.

In a foreword to the recent report What Lies Beneath: The Underestimation of Existential Climate Risk, eminent scientist and emeritus director of the Potsdam Institute John Schellnhuber warned that ‘climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences’.

In a recent interview, Schellnhuber said that if we continue down the present path ‘there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation. The human species will survive somehow but we will destroy almost everything we have built up over the last two thousand years’.

UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

Carbon emissions & atmospheric concentrations

Since the UNFCCC was established at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, annual human carbon-dioxide (CO₂) emissions have increased more than 50 per cent, and there is no sign of their growth slowing. Since 1992, warming has risen from 0.6°C to 1.1°C, and the rate of warming is now accelerating, with Earth likely to hit the lower range of the Paris goal of 1.5°C within a decade or so. Evidence from Earth’s climate history suggests that the present CO₂ level would raise sea levels by many tens of metres and the temperature by around a civilisation-ending 3.5°C in the longer term.

The UNFCCC strives ‘to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner’, but every year humanity’s ecological footprint becomes larger and less sustainable. Humanity now requires the biophysical capacity of 1.7 Earths annually as it rapidly chews up natural capital.

A fast, emergency-scale transition to a post-fossil fuel world is absolutely necessary to address climate change. But policymakers exclude emergency action from consideration because it is seen as too economically disruptive.

Two good examples of this mindset are found in the initial reports to their governments by Nicholas Stern (UK in 2006) and Ross Garnaut (Australia in 2008), in which they canvassed the 450 parts per million (ppm) and the 550 ppm CO₂ targets. The figure of 550 ppm represents around 3°C of warming before carbon-cycle feedbacks are considered, and would be truly devastating for people and nature. While both Stern and Garnaut concluded that 450 ppm—around 2°C of warming without longer-term system feedbacks—would inflict significantly less damage, they nevertheless advocated that government start with the 550 ppm figure because they considered that the lower goal would be too economically disruptive. They have since acknowledged that evidence of accelerating climate impacts has rendered this approach dangerously complacent.

The UNFCCC orthodoxy is that there is time for an orderly economic transition within the current neoliberal paradigm, and so emphasis is placed on cost-optimal paths, which are narrowly defined. Policymakers increasingly rely on integrated assessment models (IAMs) that claim to provide economically efficient policy options, but their modelling of the physical science excludes materially relevant processes such as permafrost melting, and they systematically underestimate the cost and scope of future climate impacts.

Policymakers also favour commodifying carbon pollution and creating a vast market for the capture and underground storage of CO₂, an unproven technology at scale but one that would create a boom for oil and gas producers. Unrealistic assumptions about untested solutions become an excuse for delaying strong action.

Policymakers, in their magical thinking, imagine a mitigation path of gradual change to be constructed over many decades in a growing, prosperous world. The world not imagined is the one that now exists: of looming financial instability; of a global crisis of political legitimacy; of climate-system non-linearities; and of a sustainability crisis that extends far beyond climate change to include all the fundamentals of human existence and most significant planetary boundaries (soils, potable water, oceans, the atmosphere, biodiversity, and so on).

The Paris Agreement is almost devoid of substantive language on the cause of human-induced climate change and contains no reference to ‘coal’, ‘oil’, ‘fracking’, ‘shale oil’, ‘fossil fuel’ or ‘carbon dioxide’, nor to the words ‘zero’, ‘ban’, ‘prohibit’ or ‘stop’. By way of comparison, the term ‘adaptation’ occurs more than eighty times in thirty-one pages, though responsibility for forcing others to adapt is not mentioned, and both liability and compensation are explicitly excluded. The agreement has a goal but no firm action plan, and bureaucratic jargon abounds; the terms ‘enhance’ and ‘capacity’ appear more than fifty times each.

UNFCCC

In a way, none of this should be surprising given the UNFCCC’s structure. The COPs are political fora, populated by professional diplomatic representatives of national governments, and subject to the diplomatic processes of negotiation, trade-offs and deals. The decision-making is inclusive (by consensus), making outcomes hostage to national interests and lowest-common-denominator politics. This was again evident in Poland, where, in a deadly diplomatic strike, four big oil and gas producers—Saudi Arabia, the United States, Kuwait and Russia—blocked wording to welcome a scientific report on the 1.5°C target, which the COP had commissioned three years earlier in Paris. Such behaviour is a hallmark of COP meetings.

Discussion of what would be safe—less warming than we presently experience—is non-existent. If climate change is already dangerous, then by setting the 1.5°C to 2°C target, the UNFCCC process has abandoned its key goal of preventing ‘dangerous anthropogenic influence with the climate system’.

Moral hazard permeates official thinking, in that there is an incentive to ignore risk in the interests of political expediency. And so we have a policy failure of epic proportions.

Scientific reticence

The failure to appreciate and act to avoid the existential risk is in part due to the way climate-science knowledge is produced. The bulk of climate research has tended to underplay the existential risks, and has exhibited a preference for conservative projections and scholarly reticence, although increasing numbers of scientists—including Kevin Anderson, James Hansen, Michael E. Mann, Michael Oppenheimer, Naomi Oreskes, Stefan Rahmstorf, Eric Rignot and Will Steffen—have spoken out in recent years on the dangers of such an approach.

One study examined a number of past predictions made by climate scientists and found them to have been ‘conservative in their projections of the impacts of climate change’ and that ‘at least some of the key attributes of global warming from increased atmospheric greenhouse gases have been under-predicted, particularly in IPCC assessments of the physical science’. The authors concluded that climate scientists are not biased toward alarmism but rather the reverse of ‘erring on the side of least drama, whose causes may include adherence to the scientific norms of restraint, objectivity, skepticism, rationality, dispassion, and moderation’. This may cause scientists ‘to underpredict or downplay future climate changes’.

This tallies with Garnaut’s reflections on his experience in presenting two climate reports to the Australian government. Garnaut questioned whether climate research had a conservative ‘systematic bias’ due to ‘scholarly reticence’, and observed that in the climate field this has been associated with ‘understatement of the risks’.

When dealing with existential climate risks, Schellnhuber has pointed to the limitations of methods that focus on risk and probability analyses that often exclude the outlier (lower-probability, high-impact) events and possibilities:

Experts tend to establish a peer world-view which becomes ever more rigid and focussed. Yet the crucial insights regarding the issue in question may lurk at the fringes. This is particularly true when the issue is the very survival of our civilisation, where conventional means of analysis may become useless.

He has pointed to a ‘probability obsession’ in which scientists have tried to capture the complex, stochastic behaviour of an object by repeating the same experiment on that object many, many times:

We must never forget that we are in a unique situation with no precise historic analogue. The level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is now greater, and the Earth warmer, than human beings have ever experienced. And there are almost eight billion of us now living on this planet. So calculating probabilities makes little sense in the most critical instances, such as the methane-release dynamics in thawing permafrost areas or the potential failing of entire states in the climate crisis. Rather, we should identify possibilities, that is, potential developments in the planetary make-up that are consistent with the…conditions, the processes and the drivers we know.

Kevin Anderson of the University of Manchester says there is ‘an endemic bias prevalent amongst many of those building emission scenarios to underplay the scale of the 2°C challenge. In several respects, the modelling community is actually self-censoring its research to conform to the dominant political and economic paradigm’.

A good example is the 1.5°C goal agreed to at the Paris December 2015 climate-policy conference. IPCC assessment reports until that time (and in conformity with the dominant policy paradigm) had not devoted any significant attention to 1.5°C emission-reduction scenarios or 1.5°C impacts, and the Paris delegates had to request the IPCC to do so as a matter of urgency. This is a clear case of the policy tail wagging the science-research dog.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The IPCC produces science synthesis reports for the primary purpose of informing policymaking, specifically that of the UNFCCC. This may be termed ‘regulatory science’ (as opposed to ‘research science’), which Sheila Jasanoff describes as one that ‘straddles the dividing line between science and policy’ as scientists and regulators try to provide answers to policy-relevant questions. In this engagement between science and politics, say Kate Dooley and co-authors, ‘science is seen neither as an objective truth, nor as only driven by social interests, but as being co-produced through the interaction of natural and social orders’.

Stephanie McMillan

This coproduction has resulted in a number of characteristic features in the work of the IPCC, and is exhibited in the way the organisation was formed in 1988. There was tension between the desire of UN member states for political control of the panel’s outcomes, and the need to have credible scientists in charge of an expert process of synthesising and reporting on climate science. Some countries, including the United States, were concerned that ‘the ozone negotiations had allowed experts to get too far ahead of political realities; they wanted to retain closer control over the production of scientific knowledge by appointing the Panel’s members’.

The compromise was that scientists would write the long synthesis reports, but that the shorter Summary for Policymakers would be subject to line-by-line veto by diplomats at plenary sessions. Historically, this method has worked to substantially water down the scientific findings. As well, government representatives have final authority over all actions, including the publication of all reports, and the appointment of the lead scientific authors for all reports. The latter has contributed to the reticent nature of much of the IPCC’s key work.

As early as the IPCC’s first report, in 1990, the US, Saudi and Russian delegations acted in ‘watering down the sense of the alarm in the wording, beefing up the aura of uncertainty’, according to Jeremy Leggett. Martin Parry of the UK Met Office, co-chair of an IPCC working group at the time, exposed the arguments between scientists and political officials over the 2007 Summary for Policymakers: ‘Governments don’t like numbers, so some numbers were brushed out of it’.

Like the UNFCCC, the IPCC process suffers from all the dangers of consensus building in a complex arena. IPCC reports, of necessity, do not always contain the latest available information, and consensus building can lead to ‘least drama’, lowest-common-denominator outcomes, which overlook critical issues. This is particularly the case with the ‘fat-tails’ of probability distributions—that is, the high-impact but lower-probability events for which scientific knowledge is more limited.

Climate-model limitations

From the beginning the IPCC derived its understanding of climate from general climate models (GCMs) to the exclusion of other sources of knowledge. This had far-reaching consequences, including the IPCC’s reticence on key issues and incapacity to handle risk issues. Dooley has noted that for more than two decades researchers:

questioned the policy-usefulness of GCMs because of their limitations in dealing with uncertainty. They argued that the dominance of models—widely perceived as the “best science” available for climate policy input—leads to a technocratic policy orientation, which tends to obscure political choices that deserve wider debate. There is now an established body of literature critiquing the implications of this expert-led modelling approach to climate policy.

Dooley and co-authors say that research has now unmasked how this expert-led modelling approach to climate-policy politics gets built into science, enabling a technocratic and global framing of climate change, devoid of people and impacts.

There is a consistent pattern in the IPCC of presenting detailed, quantified (numerical) complex-modelling results, but then briefly noting more severe possibilities—such as feedbacks that the models do not account for—in a descriptive, non-quantified form. Sea levels, polar ice sheets and some carbon-cycle feedbacks are three examples. Because policymakers and the media are often drawn to headline numbers, this approach results in less attention being given to the most devastating, high-end, non-linear and difficult-to-quantify outcomes.

Twelve years ago, Oppenheimer and co-authors pointed out that consensus around numerical results can result in an understatement of the risks:

The emphasis on consensus in IPCC reports has put the spotlight on expected outcomes, which then become anchored via numerical estimates in the minds of policymakers…it is now equally important that policymakers understand the more extreme possibilities that consensus may exclude or downplay…given the anchoring that inevitably occurs around numerical values, the basis for quantitative uncertainty estimates provided must be broadened.

Oppenheimer and co-authors said that comparable weight should be given to evidence from Earth’s climate history, to more observationally based, less complex semi-empirical models and theoretical evidence of poorly understood phenomena. And they urged the IPCC to fully include “judgments from expert elicitations”—that is, what leading scientific figures think is going on when there is not yet sufficient, or sufficiently consistent, evidence to pass the peer-review process. This has not been done.

Getting risk wrong

We have already seen the consequences of scientific reticence and consensus policy-making in the underestimation of risk. IPCC reports have underplayed high-end possibilities and failed to assess risks in a balanced manner. Stern said of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report: “Essentially it reported on a body of literature that had systematically and grossly underestimated the risks [and costs] of unmanaged climate change”.

This is a particular concern with climate-system tipping points—passing critical thresholds that result in step changes in the climate system—such as the polar ice sheets (and hence sea levels), and permafrost and other carbon stores, where the impacts of global warming are non-linear and difficult to model with current scientific knowledge.

Integral to this approach is the issue of the lower-probability, high-impact fat-tail risks, in which the likelihood of very large impacts is actually greater than would be expected under typical statistical assumptions. The fat-tail risks to humanity, which the tipping points represent, justify strong precautionary management. If climate policymaking is to be soundly based, a reframing of scientific research within an existential risk-management framework is now urgently required.

But this is not even on the radar of the UN’s climate bodies, which have given no attention to fat-tail risk analysis, and whose method of synthesising a wide range of research with divergent results emphasises the more frequent findings that tend to be towards the middle of the range of results.

A prudent risk-management approach means a tough and objective look at the real risks to which we are exposed, especially those high-end events whose consequences may be damaging beyond quantification, and which human civilisation as we know it would be lucky to survive. It is important to understand the potential of, and to plan for, the worst that can happen (and, hopefully, be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t). Focusing on the most likely outcomes, and ignoring the more extreme possibilities, may result in an unexpected catastrophic event that we could, and should, have seen coming.

An upside to non-linearity?

The problem with non-linear changes in the climate system is that, almost by definition and given the current state of development of climate models, they are difficult to forecast. While Earth’s climate history can give valuable insights into our near future, the IPCC has downplayed, often to the point of ignoring, these important research findings on the range of possible climate futures.

Hurricane Harvey — Houston, TX, US — August 2017

This field of paleoclimatology has revealed that in the longer run each 1°C of warming will result in 10 to 20 metres of sea-level rise and that the current level of greenhouse gases is sufficient to produce warming that would likely end human civilisation as we know it by the destruction of coastal cities and settlements, the inundation of the world’s food-growing river deltas, warming sufficient to make most of the world’s tropical zone uninhabitable (including most of South, Southeast and East Asia), and the breakdown of order within and between nations.

We have physical, non-linear climate-system disruptions coming very soon. But there are also social, economic and psychological tipping points that could trigger a much more rapid response to climate change. The rapid rise in popular support in the United States for the Green New Deal championed by the newly elected congresswoman from the Bronx, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, may be one such moment. (Stop Fossil Fuels comment: but green tech is not enough)

Big changes, says Schellnhuber, will require us to “identify a portfolio of options…disruptive innovations, self-amplifying innovations”. He says that these cannot be predicted precisely, so we need to look into whether there are high nonlinear potentials in a whole range of emerging technologies.

Such innovation is an important element for any whole-of-society, government-driven approach, such as the Green New Deal and its proposal for a wartime-level effort to build a zero-emissions economy, with an emphasis on jobs and justice.

Schellnhuber says the problem is the conventional economist who “will want to be efficient, but efficiency is the enemy of innovation”. Rapid innovation at a time of crisis, when time is short, means parallel innovation as you look for many answers at the same time, and some will fail, and capital will be wasted, but the successes are the “change we need”.

He says we must now muster climate-change venture capital at a global scale because “we cannot efficiently get ourselves out of this predicament”. This means:

We have to save the world but we have to save it in a muddled way, in a chaotic way, and also in a costly way. That is the bottom line, if you want to do it in an [economically] optimal way, you will fail.

Such thinking would require a revolution in the neoliberal norms of the UNFCCC. Perhaps that is not possible and the body can no longer serve a useful role. Developing mechanisms that are more fit for purpose is now an urgent task.

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Help Wanted

Mon, 22 Jul 2019 16:57:17 -1000

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Improve Energy Security: Make Infrastructure Less Reliable

Sat, 20 Jul 2019 10:12:49 -1000

Paulisson Miura

To improve energy security, we need to make infrastructures less reliable. Civil disobedience and ecosabotage to disrupt energy infrastructure promise a gentler transition.

Counterintuitive, but that’s the well-reasoned conclusion of this article asking us to redefine energy security. Rather than assuming 24 / 7 access to unlimited supplies of electricity and fuels, we must ask what it takes to meet actual human needs:

…storing food, washing clothes, opening and closing doors, communicating with each other, moving from one place to another, seeing in the dark, and so on. All these things can be achieved either with or without electricity, and in the first case, with more or less electricity.

Defined in this way, energy security is not just about securing the supply of electricity, but also about improving the resilience of the society, so that it becomes less dependent on a continuous supply of power. This includes the resilience of people (do they have the skills to do things without electricity?), the resilience of devices and technological systems (can they handle an intermittent power supply?), and the resilience of institutions (is it legal to operate a power grid that is not always on?). Depending on the resilience of the society, a disruption of the power supply may or may not lead to a disruption of energy services or social practices.

Direct action to stop fossil fuels thus offers benefits beyond environmental. Since fossil-fueled always-on infrastructure is inherently unsustainable, society will have to adapt sooner or later to intermittent provision of services. Activists disrupting the energy system encourage experimenting with and changing life habits sooner rather than later, before climate chaos and ecological collapse make adaptation significantly more difficult.

Derailment: WW2 Train Sabotage Video

Sat, 13 Jul 2019 07:45:05 -1000

In March 1944 the United States National Defense Resources Committee & Office of Strategic Services performed a number of experiments on the Claiborne-Polk military railroad to help determine the best way to derail trains. The results were presented in the film “Derailment”.

The Hackaday page on “The Science of Derailing Trains no longer embeds a working video, but has a good summary and a fun comment section.

The actual video is archived in the Wayback Machine.

Indigenous Amazonians Stopping Oil

Sat, 06 Jul 2019 10:10:10 -1000

Civil disobedience, under the right circumstances, can play an important role in the struggle to stop fossil fuels.

In Ecuador’s Amazon, more than 1500 indigenous people shut down 36 oil wells for five days and blocked a major highway. They forced the government to make concessions on plans to expand oil extraction in the region.

Critically, their direct actions weren’t merely symbolic. The material impact of prolonged, organized disruption of oil extraction and of travel and commerce forced the government to listen, after it had for years ignored pleas for ecological justice. Frederick Douglass was correct when he observed “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

Activists must organize campaigns to leverage the resources of the people to strengthen their demands and force concessions from the powerful. Organizers must deliberately decide whether each action in a campaign will work to those ends via material or symbolic impact. Every action must have a purpose; every action must build the people’s force.

All of these victories underscore the power of direct action—blocking highways, shutting off production at the wellhead, packing the court rooms—to keeping fossil fuels in the ground.

Without Rubber, the Machines Stop

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 22:10:31 -1000

No rubber, no tires

A deliberate act of biological terrorism so simple it could be perpetrated by your grandmother could precipitate an economic crisis of unprecedented dimensions. — Preface to One River by Wade Davis¹

A single errant spore of South American Leaf Blight reaching Southeast Asia could bring the automobile age to a screeching halt. — “Why We (Still) Can’t Live Without Rubber” by Charles Mann²

Planes will continue to land for a while, until their tires wear. Airlines will have to make a choice between using unsafe old rubber and grounding planes. New cars will be built, but eventually the natural rubber necessary for sidewalls will be too expensive. Roads will eventually go quiet. — Never Out of Season by Rob Dunn³

Dunn, in chapter 12 of his condemnation of undiversified crops, labels this scenario dystopian, but to many it sounds wonderful. This outcome is inevitable so long as globalized air travel and freight continues, and it could come sooner than later if someone purposely transports the wrong leaves. (Or the right leaves, if you find his scenario not dystopian, but desirable.) Dunn explains:

Leaf blight will arrive in Asia at some point. How will it come? The spores of the fungus are thin and so don’t do well on extended travel, such as on boats, but they’d do fine on a plane. […] As a 2012 study⁴ notes, “The pathogen can be easily isolated from infected rubber trees…and transported undetected across borders,” which is to say that the intentional destruction of the majority of the world’s rubber supply would be easy […] It would be easy because the trees are planted densely; because most of the plantations are relatively close together; because the trees are genetically very similar to each other. It would be easy because the trees in Malaysia have not been selected for resistance; they have been selected for productivity. Planters chose trees with lots of latex, favoring short-term benefit over long-term security.

Scholars express concern about whether terrorists might have the technology necessary to spread leaf blight to Asia. Do they have the specialized knowledge necessary to transport and propagate fungal spores, the specialized knowledge necessary to destroy the world’s supply of rubber? Of course they do, because all it would really take is a pocket full of infected leaves.⁵

Natural rubber sources

Rubber monocrop: efficient but vulnerable

Natural rubber is processed from latex extracted from the tree Hevea brasiliensis. Native to Brazil, the tree is highly susceptible to the co-evolved South American Leaf Blight⁶, which wiped out every attempt to establish rubber plantations in the region.² Dense plantations became possible only after humans ferried the seeds to Asia on boat rides too long for blight fungal spores to survive. This release from predation allowed breeding of cultivars for maximum latex production. 90% of natural rubber now comes from huge monocrops of identical clones in Asian plantations, predominantly from Thailand, Indonesia, Viet Nam, India, China, and Malaysia.⁷ ⁸

To this day a single act of biological terrorism, the systematic introduction of fungal spores so small as to be readily concealed in a shoe, could wipe out the plantations, shutting down production of natural rubber for at least a decade. It is difficult to think of any other raw material that is as vital and vulnerable.¹

Even without deliberate infection of vulnerable young leaves, arrival of the leaf blight is inevitable in time. Meanwhile, rubber leaf diseases such as Fusicoccum leaf fall, already present in Asia, threaten productivity if their ranges expand within the region—and with similar symptoms, their presence complicates early detection of leaf blight. Some Asian countries do take precautions against leaf blight introduction by air cargo and passengers from infested South American countries. But many have no screening at all; those which do don’t screen traffic which hopped through non-blight countries⁷; and no screening systems are foolproof—especially against antagonists seeking to subvert them.

Once the blight hits, a mitigation program of breeding, propagating and planting resistant varieties will take at least a decade before new Asian plantations mature to the point of harvest. Even then, yields will remain lower than they are now, since the new cultivars will trade some of their copious latex flow for blight resistance.

Natural rubber and fossil fuels

Though petroleum-derived synthetics can be mixed with or substitute for natural rubber in many applications, more than 40% of global rubber used is still natural.² Despite 80 years of research and development, synthetic rubber remains inferior to natural rubber in resilience and tensile strength, resistance to abrasion and impact, and capacity to absorb impact without generating heat. To the extent that a natural rubber shortage forces further substitution with synthetics, the increased cost or decreased quality of rubber-dependent products will constrain global industrial activity and thus decrease fossil fuel use.

No rubber, no mining

Most significantly, tires require natural rubber, consuming 70% of annual production. Aircraft tires and huge off-the-road tires (OTRs) used for construction and mining vehicles require nearly 100% natural rubber. Tires for cars, pickups, and trucks can make more use of synthetics, but still require the stronger natural rubber for 40-75% of their rubber content.

When Japan cut the United States off from Asian rubber supplies during World War II, the US promptly imposed a 35 mph speed limit to reduce wear and tear on tires (reducing gasoline consumption as a side effect) and halted manufacture of domestic cars and trucks.¹ If latex flows dry up today, so too will the global streams of cars, trucks, planes, mining equipment, and the fossil fuels with which they’re codependent. That’s a future to hope for.

Coal railway signal arson

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 22:10:31 -1000

Translation of a German communique

In the early hours of Thursday, July 6th, 2017, we set the signal cables of the coal railway in the Rheinische Revier [the area around Hambach] on fire. While the cops mow down all resistance in Hamburg with pepper spray and water cannons, we used the still of the night and the absence of cops to pay [power company] RWE a hostile visit. We see our action as part of the fight for a world worth living in and against all this general shittiness.

The Potential of the South American Leaf Blight as a Biological Agent

Wed, 05 Jun 2019 22:10:31 -1000

Paper by Oghenekome Onokpise and Clifford Louime, originally published 15 November 2012 in Sustainability as an open access article
Republished in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Minor edits for readability by Stop Fossil Fuels

Abstract: When asked by the Department of Homeland Security to create potential terrorism scenarios, even “Out of the Box Thinkers” initially failed to come up with the following scenario. Oil tankers, refineries, nuclear plants, etc., are obvious potential terrorists’ targets, and adequate measures are being taken to protect them. However, what if the target were a non-food commodity product, such as natural rubber tree plantations located in places as remote as southeast Asian countries like Thailand or Indonesia? Would it be of concern? At first thought maybe not, but think again. What could the release of a deadly microorganism (fungus/virus/bacteria) in a rubber tree plantation in Indonesia, Malaysia or Thailand possibly mean to you or the world economy?

South American leaf blight
Dominique Garcia

Keywords: rubber; Hevea brasiliensis; South American Leaf Blight; national security

Introduction

Natural Rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) is native to the Amazon Rainforest. Initially, the Northeast of Brazil was the only habitat in the world where H. brasiliensis could be found. Efforts to propagate H. brasiliensis outside of its natural environment remained unsuccessful for centuries. It was not until the late 1890s that breeders in Malaysia managed to establish the first rubber tree plantation outside of Brazil.¹ Around that time, in an attempt to keep up with the Asian competition, rubber tree growers in Brazil decided to set up experiments to cultivate rubber in plantations in the Amazon.¹ This technique considerably increased the trees’ vulnerability to pest and diseases, such as the South American leaf blight fungus.² In addition, latex extraction from natural rubber groves stayed low due partly to the high diversity of the natural forest. Consequently, rubber plantations in Asia outproduced Brazil and the production center was shifted from South America to Southeast Asia.¹ The blight managed to take over the entire South American continent and decimated most rubber tree plantations in the region.³ Subsequent efforts to cultivate the tree in South America remained forever unsatisfactory. Nowadays, H. brasiliensis grows mainly as a plantation tree crop in Southeast Asia, which provides over 90% of the world’s natural rubber supply.² ⁴

Although decades of breeding have resulted in highly selective rubber tree cultivars, most commercial plantations around the world are descended from seeds originated from Brazil.⁵ This narrow genetic background or variability makes rubber tree plantations particularly vulnerable to pest and diseases.⁶ ⁷ Over the years, rubber tree improvement has resulted in select varieties with traits that give the highest return, such as the quantity and quality of sap harvested.⁸ However, selection processes have disturbed natural rubber balance and created a so-called genetic homogeneity. Crop genetic uniformities are usually welcomed, as most of them expand superior resistance to pest and diseases.⁶ ⁷ ⁹ Nonetheless, over the centuries, pests have developed the capacity to overcome host resistance by genetically evolving and gaining access to larger uniform crop base plantations where damages could be severe.¹⁰ The concerns of genetic uniformity became apparent in 1970, when the spread of the Southern Corn Leaf Blight (Helminthosporium maydis) led to a 15% reduction in the U.S. corn crop.⁸ This issue of genetic vulnerability is a broadly recognized problem affecting genetic resources globally. Consequently, significant efforts to collect and preserve genetic resources have been made by national and international institutions as an insurance policy against future disasters.⁶ ⁹ ¹⁰ The recognition however, that H. brasiliensis plantations around the world originally stem from a single source raises new concerns that are global in scope.⁵

Hevea brasiliensis is presently the only commercial source of natural rubber, making it a very important strategic commodity not only for the United States, but for countries around the world.¹¹ H. brasiliensis’ major economic importance lies in its sap-like extract, also known as latex, the primary source of natural rubber. Rubber has a widespread use, spanning from the manufacture of household to medical to industrial goods.⁴ ¹¹ ¹² Rubber has been used as an intermediate or final component in the production stream of most rubber products (Figure 1), such as gloves, balloons, adhesives, hoses, etc. Tires and tubes make up rubber’s largest market share. Other significant uses of rubber include the paper, carpet and textile industry, where rubber’s low tenacity and oxidizing resistance limits its use in, for example, lightweight garments, substituting it thereby with Neoprene or synthetic rubber.¹¹ ¹² Natural rubber, however, due to its unusually high molecular weight, is far superior to synthetic rubber, and cannot be substituted for the manufacturing of many products, such as aircraft, space shuttle and heavy construction equipment tires like those of Caterpillar and Halliburton, which require 100% natural rubber.¹¹

Figure 1. Natural rubber consumption by industry.

Last year, worldwide production of natural rubber topped 10 million tons, of which more than 10% with a worth of almost $3.0 billion were exported to the U.S.⁴ ¹¹ ¹³ China and the U.S.A. are the two leading importers of rubber, followed by EU and Japan. Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and India are the leading exporters of natural rubber in the world.⁴ With the center of production located in Southeast Asia, natural rubber supply to the U.S. is constantly being threatened not only by social instability in the producing region, but also by environmentally related crop failures.¹¹ ¹² ¹³ This vulnerability of the rubber market has prompted congress to mandate the development of new commercial sources of natural rubber.¹⁴ ¹⁵ ¹⁶ However, to date, no new replacement sources or adequate substitution have been found, making natural rubber supply an international security issue, with the potential for destabilizing the world economy.¹⁵ ¹⁶

For example, a natural rubber shortage could easily result in a complete halt in the manufacturing of airplane tires. And with the aviation industry being a key driver of the world economy, such a situation could prove disastrous. This scenario is not far-fetched, considering the damaging potential of biological agents such as the South American Leaf Blight.¹⁷ This fungal disease caused by the ascomycete Microcyclus ulei single handedly prevented natural rubber production on a commercial scale in South and Central America.¹⁷ Although the spread of this pest is still limited to South America for now, the potential of an economic disaster increases with every transcontinental flight landing in Southeast Asia.

Imagine for a moment, a terrorist act involving the release of Microcyclus spores in a H. brasiliensis plantation in Thailand or Indonesia where 80% of world rubber is produced! The pathogen can be easily isolated from infected rubber trees in Brazil and transported undetected across borders. Transfer can also occur through host (budwood, foliage, flowers, fruit and seeds, in vitro plants) and non-host materials (contaminated goods).¹⁸ Depending on the material, the viability of conidia or spores could be compromised during transport.¹⁸ However, considering the similarities in climatic and environmental conditions between Southeast Asia and the pathogen endemic region in Brazil, the likelihood of an invasion increases tremendously. There are also numerous published reports on non-technical fungus isolation and storage, where terrorists can take notes. While Goh¹⁹ detailed the procedure for using glass needles in the manipulation of single fungal spores, Ho²⁰ was able to isolate and propagate fungal spores within 24 hours. Holliday and Junqueira also reported a special technique of isolating M. ulei.²¹ ²² Hyacinthe explores the potential misuse of print cartridges to diffuse lethal airborne substances to a massive population of computer users around the world, where common substances are mutated into very lethal weapons.²³ Quantanilla also demonstrated that fungal spores when stored dry in glass vials have the capacity to survive and germinate up to one month, while they will propagate after a year when stored on wet agar plates.²⁴

The need to develop control measures against the pest is an urgent task and must be carried out on an international scale. Although the South American Leaf Blight has been listed as a biological weapon by the United Nations, all control efforts since 1910 have been miserable failures.²⁵ Over the years, pest control mechanisms, such as chemical (pesticides) or biological, including breeding and selection, which work well on providing disease resistance to most crops, have not proven successful on leaf blight of H. brasiliensis.²⁵ These failures were partly related to a lack of a cost-effective management tools; e.g. it is impractical and expensive to apply fungicides to trees of great height. In addition, pathogens with novel physiological potential will emerge capable of breaking down the resistance of new breeding lines. No rubber clones can therefore escape infection over the long term. Luckily, the pathogen did not establish during the introduction period, and nowadays there are almost no direct flight connections between Brazil and Southeast Asia and freight shipments from South America usually undergo a stringent control. However, this could change any day.

Travel methods (sea or air) usually determine the entry potential of a pest. Although fungal spores will have a high level of survival if air-transported through fresh host materials such as leaves, the duration and environmental conditions of sea cargo would not promote survival and viability of the pathogen. At the port of entry, the probability of not being properly identified is enormously high, as pathogen detection through visual inspection alone is almost impossible. For example, if properly concealed, budwood has the potential to act as both a vector and a host. Once established, the pathogen can cause severe economic damages, as seen in Brazil, where affected plantations were completely abandoned in the past. Because of M. ulei invasion, rubber cultivation in Brazil was forced to move from its traditional state of Bahia to Sao Paulo and Mato Grosso where defoliation occurs during the dry season escaping M. ulei infection.¹⁸ Apart from the direct impacts of the pathogen infection (yield reduction and shortage of material), this has resulted in 30% loss of income in the state of Bahia and an increase in land prices in the already over populated state of Sao Paulo.¹⁸

The very narrow genetic base of H. brasiliensis has made all clones in Southeast Asia extremely susceptible to Leaf Blight infection. Within a few years following invasion, all standing stock in the region will most likely be infected and destroyed, resulting in unforeseen direct and indirect economic and environmental consequences. A relatively widely spread infestation would require costly control measures, which in the long run would not be economically sustainable. An uncontrolled infestation would result in tree dieback and concomitant loss of vast plantations, which will directly affect the livelihood of hundreds of smallholders and indirectly decimate the natural rubber industry. Economically, this could be translated as a loss of revenue in the amount of over $100 billion annually, significantly impacting producing and importing countries alike and crippling the overall world economy!

Rubber plantation infected by leaf blight

Conclusion

Fortunately, in the history of humankind, there are only a few reports of a global intentional biological invasion. The deliberate use of anthrax in 2001 was limited to the United States. Subsequently however, this incident resulted in a substantial increase in funding to counter the threat of bioterrorism the world over. Global initiatives to detect and respond to biological threats were suddenly becoming increasingly vital to most nations. Worldwide models and scenarios were constructed and consequently attacks potentially disruptive to global supply chains and human welfare remain exceedingly low. In recent years, the dynamics have shifted between Indonesia (where “wildtype” rubber grown in mixed agroforests is the dominant production system) and Malaysia/Thailand where monocultural plantations still dominate. More importantly, new advances in science and technology have helped us gain ground against these threats. The challenges represented by H. brasiliensis however remain. Today, there is an immediate need to speed up the development and production of alternatives to H. brasiliensis through transnational research. Although guayule (Parthenium argentatum) and gutta-percha (Palaquium gutta) have been attracting attention as sources of hypoallergenic rubber for more than 50 years, their limited geographic range appears to restrict their expansion.²⁶ More research investments could target these two crops and Taraxacum kok-saghyz and T. megalorrhizon as possible alternatives to H. brasiliensis, as many sectors recognize that when it comes to upstream planning and prevention efforts against bioterrorism, the benefits outweigh the costs.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to B. Hyacinthe for fruitful discussions and inputs regarding the manuscript. We also would like to thank K. Simmonds, Director of the Center for Global Security and International Affairs at Florida A&M University for his insightful comments and suggestions.

References

Schultes, R.E. The history of taxonomic studies Hevea. Bot. Rev. 1970, 36, 197-276. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
National Research Council. Managing Global Genetic Resources: Agricultural Crop Issues and Policies; The National Academies Press: Washington, DC, USA, 1993. ↩︎ ↩︎
Lieberei, R. South American Leaf Blight of the rubber tree (Hevea spp.): New steps in plant domestication using physiological features and molecular markers. Ann. Bot. 2007, 100, 1125-1142. ↩︎
U.S. Code. 7 USC Chapter 8A. Rubber and Other Critical Agricultural Materials. Available online: http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/07C8A.txt (accessed on 10 February 2012). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Warren, D. Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 1987; p. 14. ↩︎ ↩︎
Wilkes, G. Germplasm Conservation Towards the year 2000. Potential for New Crops and Enhancement of Present Crops. In Plant Genetic Resources: A Conservation Imperative; Yeatman, C., Kefton, D., Wilkes, G., Eds.; American Assoc. for the Advancement of Sciences: Washington, DC, USA, 1984. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Priyadarshan, P.M.; Jain, S.M. Breeding Hevea Rubber. In Breeding Plantation Tree Crops: Tropical Species, Part III; Springer: New York, NY, USA, 2009; pp. 469-522. ↩︎ ↩︎
Invasive Alien Species: A Toolkit of Best Prevention and Management Practices. Global Invasive Species Programme; Wittenberg, R., Cock, M.J.W., Eds.; CAB International: Wallingford, UK, 2001; p. 228. ↩︎ ↩︎
Rantala, L. Rubber Plantation Performance in the Northeast and East of Thailand in Relation to Environmental Conditions. M.Sc. Thesis, University of Helsinki, Finland, 2006. ↩︎ ↩︎
Montoro, P.; Carron, M.P.; Lardet, L.; Clément-Demange, A.; Leclercq, J. Biotechnologies in rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis). AsPac. J. Mol. Biol. Biotechnol. 2010, 18, 81-83. ↩︎ ↩︎
Cecil, J.; Mitchell, P. Processing of Natural Rubber; FAO, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: Rome, Italy, 2003. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Killmann, W. Non-Forest Tree Plantations; Forest Plantations Thematic Papers; Forest Products Division, FAO: Rome, Italy, 2001. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Goh, T.K. Single-spore isolation using a handmade glass needle. Fungal Divers. 1999, 2, 47-63. ↩︎
Ho, W.C.; Ko, W.H. A simple method for obtaining single-spore isolates of fungi. Bot. Bull. Acad. Sin. 1996, 38, 41. ↩︎
Holliday, P. South American Leaf Blight (Microcyclus ulei) of Hevea Brasiliensis. In Phytopathological Papers; Commonwealth Mycological Institute: Kew, UK, 1970; p. 31. ↩︎
Junqueira, N.T.V.; Lieberei, R.; Kalil Filho, A.N.; Lima, M.I.P.M. Components of partial resistance in Hevea clones to rubber tree leaf blight, caused by Microcyclus ulei. Fitopatologia Brasileira 1990, 15, 211-214. ↩︎
Hyacinthe, B.; Anglade, Y. Conceptual Design of a Microfluidics Suppressor to Protect against Potentially Lethal Printing Devices: A Scenario-Based Physical Cyber Security Measure. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Information Warfare and Security, Naval Post Graduate School, Monterey, CA, USA, 22 November 2007. ↩︎
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The Future Will Be What We Make Of It

Wed, 05 Jun 2019 18:59:13 -1000

Jason Godesky / Tribe of Anthropik. Minor edits for readability by Stop Fossil Fuels.
#30 of Thirty Theses
Republished in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

In his Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, while arguing for the re-introduction of slavery, Thomas Carlyle played on Nietzsche’s term, “the gay science,” and gave us the derogatory title of economics: “the dismal science.” Carlyle used that same term when writing about Malthus’ theories, calling them, “Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next, is all that of the preventative check and the denial of the preventative check.” In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Tainter worried that his idea of complexity subject to diminishing marginal returns would make archaeology economics’ heir to the title. The idea that we are not in control of our own destiny is depressing to us. We rebel against determinism not because we can prove it is untrue, but because it frightens us to think of ourselves as mere cogs in a machine beyond our power. These theses may seem dismal in their predictions of inevitable collapse and a future created by deterministic, materialistic forces beyond our control. They should not be. This is, as another translation of Nietzsche’s original phrase would read, a “life-enhancing knowledge.” The greater moral of this story is not that our lives are bound by diminishing returns, but that the future will be what we make of it.

For millennia, civilizations have struggled to explain the misery their “superior” way of life creates, and across time and space that blame has been consistently heaped upon our flawed and sinful nature. In that view, our misery is not our fault; it is simply because we were made badly. This is a very dismal view. It is our nature to be miserable, and we cannot escape it. Yet, the many cultures that do live happily stand as a living testament against that excuse. They live well, and happily, and have for tens of thousands of years. Their mere existence proves that humans are not flawed. We are not damned to destruction, nor eternal unhappiness.

Collapse was not always inevitable. It is the consequence of agricultural life. When we decided to live in this way, only then did collapse become inevitable. The way we choose to live has consequences.

The first Inka’s father prophesied that after five kings, the ancestors would stop listening to his people, and their way of life would end. The Inka founded the empire in order to keep a flow of sacrifices, begging the ancestors to stop time, to cheat their fate. The fifth king—Atahualpa—was pulled from his litter at Cajamarca by Spanish conquistadors in 1532. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, followed a brutal policy that began the Chinese tradition of alchemy, in pursuit of an elixir of life so that he could cheat his own death. The Egyptian pharoahs used pyramids and buried boats and mummification in hopes that they would live forever. Again and again, among the autochthonous civilizations, we see an explicit desire in their very foundations to cheat the natural cycle of life and death—to become the one thing in all of history that lived forever, that took without ever giving back. We see echoes of that same sentiment in our own civilization today. We look at the earth around us as a resource to be exploited; taking care of it is, at best, an act of charity. Even in death, as a final act of spite, we seal ourselves in boxes and poison our bodies with chemicals to hold off as long as possible the moment when we will be forced to give something back to the community of life that fed us, gave us water and air to breathe, and supported every endeavor we ever undertook.

Such attempts are not without their consequences. The cycles of life cannot be cheated forever. The longer we do manage to hold that moment off, the more dire the consequences. Collapse is a special case of overshoot—and the more we overshoot, the more drastic the consequences. But we are not bound to an eternal cycle of complexity and collapse. Ever-escalating complexity must always end in collapse—that is the consequence of such unsustainable madness. But we are not inherently mad—and no one forces us down the road of ever-escalating complexity.

In fact, as we saw in the previous thesis, that road will be all but cut off. Complexity may be subject to diminishing returns, but many other things are not. The forager spectrum spans from the Inuit, to the !Kung, to the Kwakiutl, to the Pygmies. How much more diverse might the foragers of the future be? Will there be Huns thundering across the plains of Kansas, or an Iroquois-like Confederacy practicing permaculture across upstate New York?

The future promises us lives as humans were meant to live them—free, respected as persons, respected as peers, subject to none. It promises us a true community—something most of us have never really experienced. It promises a mind-boggling diversity of belief, tradition, culture and lifestyle.

For ten thousand years, we have been caught in a positive feedback loop of ever-escalating complexity. Our lives have been created by the consequences of our ancestors’ actions, and we have had little choice but to find our way within the ever-constricting confines of that destiny. That was the dismal reality of our parents, and their parents, and that is the dismal reality that has shaped us and brought us to this moment.

But now, collapse is upon us. It has already begun. The choice is ours, whether we will remain true to that culture that bore us and die with it, or whether we will choose to create a new future—a new culture. With collapse, the long curse visited upon us by our Neolithic ancestors finally ends, and we will become the first generation in ten millennia to truly claim its own destiny. Collapse will be the most horrific crisis any animal has ever faced, but with it also comes a great opportunity to claim our own future. The possibilities are limitless; the diversity of the future that awaits us is infinite.

There is a strikingly widespread astrology amongst many American tribes. The Milky Way is associated with the axis mundi, the world tree, the same mythological archetype as the Norse Yggdrasil, the Slavic Oak, or the Hindu banyan. The area about the North Star is considered “the Heart of the Sky,” or the door to the underworld. When the sun rises in the Milky Way on the winter solstice, it is said to climb the World Tree, to open the door of heaven, and begin a new age of the world. It was this astrological interpretation that laid the framework of the Inka’s prophecy, and the basis of the Mayan calendar. Interestingly, the Mayans predicted the end of this fourth world, and the beginning of the next, fifth world at precisely such an astrological event—in 2012.

By 2012, if peak oil, global warming or mass extinction will have any role in civilization’s collapse, it will be well underway. By 2012, we will likely be embroiled in world-wide recession and constant warfare. By 2012, the collapse of our globalized civilization should be undeniable—and those of us who wish to find a new way to live should be able to find that the beginning of collapse has left enough space for us to do just that. By 2012, curiously enough, the door of heaven may well be open for anyone who wishes to pass through it and create the future.

What we do after that, is up to us.

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Collapse Is Inevitable

Wed, 05 Jun 2019 12:24:59 -1000

Jason Godesky / Tribe of Anthropik. Minor edits for readability by Stop Fossil Fuels.
#26 of Thirty Theses
Republished in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

Agricultural societies have the unique ability to arbitrarily raise their food supply, simply by intensifying their cultivation. By bringing more land under cultivation, or by cultivating what land they have more intensively, or by the occasional technological innovation, agriculturalists can increase their output. By raising the food supply, agriculturalists can arbitrarily raise their population (see thesis #4). Thus increasing the energy throughput of their society, agriculturalists can arbitrarily raise their level of complexity. This draws all individuals in that society, and all neighboring societies, into a catastrophic game of prisoner’s dilemma (see thesis #12). Because complexity is subject to diminishing returns (see thesis #14), the effort required to further increase complexity rises, while the value of such an investment drops. Competition, however, keeps driving the assemblage forward, even after further investment in complexity has long ceased to be an economical decision. If any party does decide to make that investment—however large it may be—then they will enjoy an edge—however slight—over everyone else, forcing all parties to move to the next level of complexity to remain competitive. Thus, competition drives civilization headlong towards collapse.

The diminishing returns of complexity represent an escalating probability of disaster. As that probability approaches one, disasters continue at their normal pace. Sometimes, as we can see in our own world, our own complexity may accelerate that pace, as with our environmental problems (see thesis #17), or it may even create those problems, as with Peak Oil (see thesis #18). Even were this not the case, there is a regular, background pace of problems any society faces. Answering all of them with increased complexity—whether by pursuing technical solutions to systemic problems, inventing new technologies, or creating governmental bureaucracies in response—only aggravates the greater, underlying crisis of complexity’s diminishing returns. Following this strategy, a routine crisis will eventually arise, but the response of greater complexity will be impossible due to its prohibitive cost.

Thus, a society faces catabolic collapse.

In dealing with some of the problematic details of Tainter’s model, John Michael Greer offered a refinement with “How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse.” Greer noted that, contrary to Tainter’s definition, many of the collapses he considered took place over significant periods of time—centuries or more—while others collapsed catastrophically. This led Greer to develop a model that distinguishes between a “maintenance crisis” and a catabolic collapse.

A society that uses resources beyond replenishment rate … when production of new capital falls short of maintenance needs, risks a depletion crisis in which key features of a maintenance crisis are amplified by the impact of depletion on production. As M(p) exceeds C(p) and capital can no longer be maintained, it is converted to waste and unavailable for use. Since depletion requires progressively greater investments of capital in production, the loss of capital affects production more seriously than in an equivalent maintenance crisis. Meanwhile further production, even at a diminished rate, requires further use of depleted resources, exacerbating the impact of depletion and the need for increased capital to maintain production. With demand for capital rising as the supply of capital falls, C(p) tends to decrease faster than M(p) and to perpetuate the crisis. The result is a catabolic cycle, a self-reinforcing process in which C(p) stays below M(p) while both decline. Catabolic cycles may occur in maintenance crises if the gap between C(p) and M(p) is large enough, but tend to be self-limiting in such cases. In depletion crises, by contrast, catabolic cycles can proceed to catabolic collapse, in which C(p) approaches zero and most of a society’s capital is converted to waste. …

Any society that displays broad increases in most measures of capital production coupled with signs of serious depletion of key resources, in particular, may be considered a potential candidate for catabolic collapse.

Once begun, the process of catabolic collapse creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop: the same kind of unbreakable, self-reinforcing process that propels civilization’s anabolic growth, as we discussed in thesis #12. That process only ends when that society reaches the next lower sustainable level of complexity.

The question, then, is not whether but when this process will impact our own civilization. As we have seen, we have already passed the point of diminishing returns (see thesis #15), leaving us open to the possibility of collapse. Peak Oil (see thesis #18) and environmental problems (see thesis #17) are already poised as potentially unsolvable problems that could lead to collapse in the near future, but ultimately, predicting the proximate cause of collapse is much more difficult than predicting its timeline. The best answer to that question is almost certainly, “soon.”

The U.N. expects human population growth to “level off” at 9 billion in the next century, but humans already take up 40% of the earth’s photosynthetic capacity to feed the 6.5 billion we already have. That is the ultimate cause behind the Holocene Extinction—already the worst mass extinction ever seen on the planet, and driven entirely by human agriculture. Global warming is radically altering the fragile interglacial climate that agriculture requires, and the fossil fuel subsidy that is so fundamental to our civilization’s current mode of existence is running out. As Tainter wrote in his 1996 paper, “Complexity, Problem Solving and Sustainable Societies”:

With subsidies of inexpensive fossil fuels, for a long time many consequences of industrialism effectively did not matter. Industrial societies could afford them. When energy costs are met easily and painlessly, benefit/cost ratio to social investments can be substantially ignored (as it has been in contemporary industrial agriculture). Fossil fuels made industrialism, and all that flowed from it (such as science, transportation, medicine, employment, consumerism, high-technology war, and contemporary political organization), a system of problem solving that was sustainable for several generations.

Of course, any course of action is “sustainable” over a sufficiently short time frame. Burning your house down for heat is sustainable for several minutes. The use of fossil fuels was sustainable for almost two centuries, but now we are facing the end of that subsidy—meaning that all those costs that we ignored in the past must now be paid.

Nothing can grow forever in a finite world. That basic truism is the ultimate doom for civilization. Its very nature will not permit it to exist in a steady state; it must grow. If it is not growing, it is dying. If the economy is not growing, and most investments will have negative returns, who is willing to invest? Without investment, how can we build the infrastructure to continue the civilized life—the roads, telephony, satellites or buildings we need now, much less the investments in future technology and complexity we will need to continue such a pace? That makes investment in complexity even less compelling, since its total cost must be divided among fewer investors. Being the last one “holding the door” is the worst possible strategy. The snowball may take some time to build up, but ultimately, if investment in complexity were a traded stock, collapse works in much the same way as a “run.”

Thus, the “point of no return” in the collapse of any society is when an increasing percentage of the population begins to believe that further complexity is no longer worth it. That fringe always exists, in small numbers; collapse comes when that fringe begins to grow. We see the first signs of collapse in the growth of primitivism. The spread of ideas like slow food, voluntary simplicity, Ethan Watters’ Urban Tribes—and the even less obvious attacks on complexity such as open source and blogging described in “The Hunter-Gatherers of the Knowledge Economy”—shows a general discontent with the current level of complexity, and a growing antipathy for further investment in it.

Much of the world has already collapsed, with countries now propped up only by the peer polity system in which they are enmeshed. The following map shows those countries in red, showing how far along in the process of collapse we already are.

Fragile States Index

In collapse, all the rules reverse themselves. Sustainability becomes not only feasible, but advantageous. Small, egalitarian groups out-compete large, hierarchical ones. Human nature becomes adaptive, rather than something we must suppress. That process is the inevitable end of any civilization, because nothing can grow forever and without limit in a finite universe. Moreover, that process will begin sooner, rather than later. It has already begun, and in all likelihood, most of us alive today will live to see its completion.

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Tor Browser

Sat, 01 Jun 2019 14:11:04 -1000

Tor Browser helps provide security and privacy while browsing the web, by masking your IP address. Though it’s unlikely that governments presently monitor traffic to Stop Fossil Fuels sites, the danger will increase if and when the environmental movement becomes effective. Those considering underground action would be wise to protect themselves by browsing sensitive content only with Tor, and even those committed to aboveground work may feel more comfortable obfuscating their web activity as a precaution against future backlash.

Internet users with nothing in particular to hide still benefit from Tor and other privacy tools. Corporations surveil us constantly, mining our data—our digital identity—to sell to advertisers, insurance companies, governments, and any other interested entities. If you’re using a free service, then you’re probably the product.

Most importantly, the more people using Tor and other privacy tools, the less unusual will seem underground activists, and the more difficult it will be for governments to break the systems. Use Tor and other digital security tools whenever feasible. Encourage others, even non-activists, to do so.

If you’re technically savvy, consider running a Tor Relay.

Tor and Stop Fossil Fuels sites

Many Tor users prefer to disable JavaScript by setting the Tor Browser security level to “Safest.” They then selectively allow JavaScript only from specific sites. Without JavaScript, many website don’t display properly; sometimes they don’t display at all.

This website is designed to work almost 100% normally with JavaScript disabled. We do not use Cloudflare or other intermediate proxies which track you and/or make it difficult to access the site with Tor.
Our r/StopFossilFuels subreddit can be used with JavaScript disabled, except that you won’t be able to vote. Reddit occasionally blocks a Tor exit node, but requesting a “New Tor Circuit” within the Tor browser works around this.
You can watch videos on our YouTube channel with Tor in “Standard” or “Safer” modes. “Safest” mode makes pages and videos difficult or impossible to view.
Facebook offers an onion address for use with Tor: facebookcorewwwi.onion/stopfossfuels. With JavaScript disabled, use the mobile version. If you’re not logged in, Facebook seems to prompt often for verification that you’re human. Jump through their hoops or request a “New Tor Circuit.”
Twitter seems to work normally with JavaScript enabled, or the mobile version with JavaScript disabled.

Caveats & Further Resources

If you use Tor to log in to a social media account linked to your real identity, you won’t be anonymous.
Read the Tor Most Frequently Asked Questions to better understand ways you can screw up your anonymity.
Underground activists should never rely on tools alone to protect them. They must also study and implement operational security.
How to Use the Tor Browser for Privacy Online

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Going Underground

Thu, 30 May 2019 13:39:02 -1000

Excerpt from Going Underground for Animal Liberation. Even decades later, this excerpt remains almost fully relevant to underground environmental activism.

Most people who decide to take up direct action have been involved in legal campaigning, and local groups etc. Unfortunately, they nearly always have carried on with these campaigns whilst undertaking direct action. This must be one of the biggest mistakes that could be made, and is one of the main reasons that people have been arrested and imprisoned. The police keep a very vigilant eye on, what is, in terms of their resources, a small movement. If people carry on ANY form of legal campaigning whilst carrying out direct action, it is merely attracting attention to themselves, because the police know from experience of infiltrating the movement in the past, it has been the most active people campaigning who have nearly always been the most active illegally. We simply MUST stop this mistake NOW! Once someone has decided that direct action is the best way to right for Animal Liberation, then the seriousness of the action must be realised. Because direct action works, and because it attacks the very core that abusive modern society is based on, the authorities in the system will do all they can to stop it. Thus, any activist really should do all they can to remain anonymous and quiet as a shadow, because the stakes are very high the longer an activist keeps fighting, the more animals are saved and the closer Total Liberation. Also it means freedom, as opposed to imprisonment for the activists themselves.

There’s no way that someone should insist on handing out leaflets to someone, especially if they actually have little faith in that activity and whilst they are carrying out acts of REAL Liberation that involve high risks.

Some very, basic ideas on how to go underground and remain active, learning from some obvious mistakes in the past, would include:

As soon as someone has realised that they are going to take up direct action then it is wise to stop any other kind of work within the movement, and stay like this until well after they have given up direct action.
It is worth leaving a gap between any work you were doing within the movement before taking up direct action, and using this time to prepare. Leaving gaps of weeks or months between periods of high activity, or serious actions is wise. Although difficult for most, it is also advantageous to move house or flat as often as possible.
Preparation would involve spending time getting money together to fund actions, and also to buy tools, vehicles, and general equipment. Scouting out different areas and checking out animal abusers within those areas is advisable, whilst also arranging for safe houses and places, and people interested in taking in animals.
Actions are best carried out in another part of the country from where you live, preferably at least a couple of counties away. To “shit in your own back yard” is very tempting, bur has led to many arrests by giving the police an easy ride by not having to look far for the culprits. When there are periods of high activity in an area, the police quickly respond by setting up intense surveillance to watch local/regional animal rights campaigners, or people living in that county/region who have previous convictions for Animal Liberation related activities. For this reason it is also advisable not to associate at all with local animal rights groups, or people in them.
Only ever work with the minimal amount of people; and make sure the trust between you is total. Try not to have a social life that revolves around the same people you carry out actions with the police can (and have done so in the past) try to allege a “conspiracy” if one of you is arrested, and they can prove you all know each other and share a common belief towards Animal Liberation. Generally speaking, this isn’t too much of a risk as long as you don’t all frequent the same place (someone’s house, for instance) regularly.
Never talk about actions with anybody even those people who you undertook that action with.
Never go back to the scene of a crime, especially never soon after, to see the success the police will be watching for the slightest clue. (Many criminals of all sorts have been caught in this needless way to checking out the result of their crime.)
NEVER EVER talk in a building, even if you think it is the safest place in the world because the police have put bugs against activists in the most unlikely places. Anything that can be to be connected to illegal activities or subversive ideas should be discussed somewhere very safe. This point could never be stressed too much; some extremely clever and efficient activists have been caught out by this. It’s so easy to get lazy and start talking in a friend’s place: just don’t do it. There probably isn’t anything much worse than seeing your own words written down in black and white that you spoke a few weeks earlier used in evidence against you! Obviously, nothing dodgy should be said on the phone either, and it is worth remembering that if the cops are tapping your phone they will probably be tapping the public boxes nearby as well. No phone or building is safe a simple security procedure that is worth the small effort.
Make sure that your address is clear of anything that could link you with an “animal rights/liberation” philosophy, especially not anything illegal.
Constantly assess your aims, methods and strategies, and keep a sense of realism and cool about your planning. Gradually gaining the courage to carry out direct action regularly, takes some time. However, once the realisation that it is quite easy has hit you, it is important to remember exactly what you are up against. It has too often been the case that success can lead to over-confidence, which in turn can lead to recklessness.

These are just very basic points to consider. Unfortunately, in the past, Animal Liberationists have been caught out by all of these problems, by falling into the easy trap of the “it can’t really happen to me” way of thinking. Well it can, and has done; and unless we really do decide to go completely underground and treat Animal Liberation as seriously as it deserves, it will continue to do so!

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Shooting Transformers Disables Substations

Sat, 11 May 2019 14:54:18 -1000

Damaged transformer emptied of cooling oil by shooting

Sabotage

In May 2019, Stephen Plato McRae pled guilty to a 2016 attack on a Utah substation, in which he shot the radiator cooling fins of a transformer with his Springfield 30-40 rifle. The radiator leaked cooling oil into the holding basin designed to catch spills; without cooling oil, the transformer overheated and failed.¹ The resulting power outage affected thousands of residents across two counties for over seven hours, with power only restored during the six to twelve month repair thanks to a mobile substation.²

McRae eventually admitted to four substation attacks across 18 months:³

April 1, 2015: Libson Valley Substation, San Juan County, UT
August 31, 2016: Quinn River Substation, Humboldt County, NV
September 14, 2016: Baker Substation, White Pine County, NV
September 25, 2016: Buckskin Electrical Substation, Kane County, UT

Interestingly, we can’t find news reports of the first three, so we don’t know whether he shot transformer cooling fins as in the Buckskin sabotage. Not until his 2019 plea deal did the general public hear about the earlier attacks, suggesting there may be many more attacks on fossil fuel and grid infrastructure than we suspect. It may also suggest that McRae’s attacks on these substations were unsuccessful in damaging equipment or disrupting service, thus not warranting news coverage. Perhaps we’ll learn more details in time.

Prosecutors charged McRae with only the Buckskin substation shooting, perhaps intimating that they didn’t have strong evidence against McRae for the other incidents. News reports don’t recount how investigators caught McRae, but the available information strongly suggests that McRae talked to someone he shouldn’t have. After Garkane Energy Cooperative posted a $50,000 reward:

[…] a confidential witness told the [FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force] and the Kane County Sheriff’s Office that McRae had been keeping a blue container containing a rifle in the back of his 1990 Isuzu pickup truck. McRae allegedly moved the container in early October to the basement of a motel.

The witness also told the law-enforcement officers that McRae said he “shot stuff up” in Nevada and that he purchased ammunition at small retailers to avoid scrutiny.⁴

Effectiveness and risk of shooting transformers

As in the Metcalf substation attack, McRae demonstrated that the simple tactic of shooting radiators on transformers can damage critical grid components for months. The risk seems low; authorities never arrested anyone for the Metcalf sabotage, and McRae attacked three substations in 17 months with no indication that he ever would have been caught. His arrest after the fourth attack hinged on an informant, underscoring the importance of keeping all information on a strict “need to know” basis. Those who attack energy infrastructure would be wise to assume a large future reward for information about their actions.

However, despite transformers’ critical role in the electric grid, long-term damage to these components doesn’t necessarily lead to long-term system disruption. The grid is designed to withstand the failure of a single major node, so in the case of Metcalf, there were no service outages at all. McRae’s sabotage caused a multi-hour local blackout, suggesting that failure of even one minor node may disrupt delivery to a relatively small set of consumers. But where grid operators can’t simply reroute the electrons, they quickly restore flows with spare transformers and mobile substations. It would likely take failure of multiple nodes, à la the hypothetical Operation Circuit Breaker, to cause persistent disruption.

Ecosabotage? A larger plan?

McRae probably wasn’t acting as an ecosaboteur. As far as we can tell, he attacked four small, rural substations primarily servicing residential customers. An ecosaboteur would likely have practiced initially with a small substation, then targeted multiple larger substations—simultaneously or in rapid succession—in an effort to knock out power to industrial targets such as factories and fossil fuel infrastructure.

Garkane Energy CEO Dan McClendon acknowledged:

[…] the damage to the Buckskin substation included three shots by someone who knew what they were doing, causing cooling oil to leak. “It was devastating,” said McClendon, “but could have been worse.”

Because the company cannot tap into other power sources, it was necessary to bring in a mobile substation to restore power while it took several months for repairs at the substation.

“The mobile substations worked, and I am glad it did [sic], because I didn’t have a plan C,” he said.⁵

It would have been interesting to see whether and how McRae would have escalated his attacks to defeat “plan B,” had he not gotten himself turned in by an informant. Perhaps he intended a follow-up attack on the portable transformer carrying Buckskin’s load during its many months of repair, or on other substations in the network.

However, McRae may not have had any coherent, larger plan. As he asked to represent himself and filed a “short, rambling statement written on a postcard” likening himself to a John Steinbeck protagonist, he underwent two court-ordered psychological evaluations to determine his competency to stand trial.⁵ We don’t have enough information to know whether he had good reason to confide in the informant who got him arrested, but in conjunction with his seeming difficulty navigating the court system, the evidence points towards McRae not having methodically planned his strategy.

Regardless, his action is an interesting case study and suggests the potential of ecosabotage to stop fossil fuels. For another inspiring example of direct action, read about DAPL ecosaboteurs Ruby & Jessica.

McRae Pleads Guilty To Destruction Of Energy Facility; Admits He Used Rifle To Fire Shots Into Cooling Fins, US Department of Justice, May 10, 2019 ↩︎
Power company offers rare $50K reward for information on vandalism, Deseret News, September 29, 2016 ↩︎
Southern Utah man pleads guilty to shooting up substation, faces 8 years in prison, St George News, May 11, 2019 ↩︎
Utah man accused of shooting So. Utah transformer and knocking out power, The Salt Lake Tribune, February 15, 2017 ↩︎
Whatever happened to Stephen McRae?, Southern Utah News, March 29, 2018 ↩︎ ↩︎

If It's a Movement, It Has to Move: guerrilla strategy for activists

Fri, 03 May 2019 20:28:20 -1000

A publication of the Killer Bee Syndicate — Illustrations by Jonas Goonface — Webified by Stop Fossil Fuels
Download PDF to read — Download PDF to print

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Introduction

The Earth is gasping for air and so are all the living beings on her. The tightest knots around our throats are black snakes, the pipelines that pulse out of the oil fields in Alberta carrying climate-killing carbon across land and water. The fights against these pipelines embody a series of battles in the war for the future of life on this planet: The Tar Sands Blockade. Standing Rock. Unis’tot’en Camp. L’eau Est La Vie Camp. These are places we have made our stands against annihilation. But the battle goes beyond these camps. This is a fight for every one of our futures, and defeat is not an option.

Through hard fought struggle, we have forged and sharpened our tactics in order to adapt and win. This zine has been written and edited by a number of frontline veterans in the climate struggle, hoping to address new concepts around how we fight those who would drive us to extinction. Specifically, we wish to introduce the concept of swarming and the strategy of roving caravans, using the Mississippi Stand campaign as a case study.

Swarm tactics are the use of autonomously-acting cells on the battlefield, acting in coordination without a centralized or hierarchical command structure. This way of carrying out actions mimics swarms in nature, such as bees or piranhas. Humans have used swarm tactics for thousands of years, especially for guerrilla and insurgent forces facing better-funded occupying forces.

The mobile caravan tactic takes the analysis of the pipeline fight as an asymmetric, “guerrilla” struggle against an occupying force to its logical next step. Rather than relying solely on stationary camps set up to block a pipeline, the mobile caravan approach relies on disrupting production up and down the pipeline, stretching police and security forces thin and maximizing disruption.

We aim to bring these ideas into the consciousness of the broader movement for discussion, debate, and subsequent application in the field. This zine has been written in the context of the brewing Line 3 struggle across Ojibwe and Dakota lands and the watersheds of northern Minnesota. However, we believe that the lessons we explore here and the experiences we gain through struggle will find relevance well beyond this particular pipeline fight. We believe that if adopted, these tactics can significantly increase the effectiveness of our struggles against fossil fuel infrastructure.

Enbridge Line 3 Impact on Treaty Resources

Enbridge Line 3 struggle

The existing Line 3 is an Enbridge pipeline that transports Tar Sands crude oil from Alberta to Superior, Wisconsin, spanning northern Minnesota and crossing the Leech Lake and Fond du Lac reservations and the 1855, 1854, and 1842 treaty areas.

In operation since 1968, it has leaked numerous times. One of those leaks was the largest inland oil spill in the U.S: In 1991, 1.7 million gallons ruptured and spilled in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Now reaching the end of its lifespan, the decaying pipeline cannot continue to haul oil. Instead of decommissioning Line 3 and paying for its removal and the rehabilitation of the lands it has destroyed, Enbridge is branding their aims to expand the pipeline–in order to transport oil at a higher volume and in a new corridor–as a “replacement.”

At $7.5 billion, the proposed new Line 3 would be the largest project in Enbridge’s history and one of the largest crude oil pipelines in the world, carrying up to 915,000 barrels per day of the dirtiest fuel on earth, tar sands crude. According to retired NASA scientist James Hanson:

“If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate. Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction.”

This project poses a direct threat not only to frontline indigenous communities and millions of people who depend on the rivers and lakes for clean drinking water, but also to living beings all over the planet who would be annihilated by the carbon bomb this project would emit.

Line 3 is poised to be a linchpin in tar sands infrastructure. It is designed to prop up a dying industry for decades more. According to Winona Laduke, a long time indigenous and environmental activist fighting this pipeline, “Enbridge—they need this to stay alive. This is their last vampire suck of blood…”

Enbridge has put most of its eggs in this basket, and stopping this project would be a major blow to them. Moreover, the failure of this project would send shockwaves across the entire fossil fuel industry, aiding our comrades in struggle against similar development projects. Before Obama vetoed a bill approving the Keystone XL pipeline (which has since been reopened for approval by the Trump Administration) the shaky standing of the project caused a number of corporations to abandon tar sands project plans: Norwegian oil giant Statoil, Royal Dutch Shell, the French energy company Total, and SunCor Energy of Canada. That’s billions of dollars of profit these companies didn’t make just by putting Keystone on the ropes. According to Brian Palmer, writer for Earth Magazine in 2014, Keystone was crucial to tar sands projects being profitable, and without it “a marginally profitable business [turns] into a completely unprofitable business— and that’s scaring oil producers off of tar sands projects.” The relevance of major pipeline projects to the continuation of tar sands is especially true in the case of Line 3.

It should be noted that without pipelines, the fossil fuel industry would be forced to rely on oil trains, and would certainly attempt to increase oil train traffic. However, oil trains are much less economically feasible for the industry. The pipeline is a chokepoint, and cutting it off means forcing the industry to rely on the less profitable oil trains. Resistance to rail is still a key front; many are doing this work, and if the pipelines are defeated, the oil trains will remain a point of struggle. While aspects of the content covered in this zine could aid and be adapted to that front of the struggle, that is beyond our scope of focus for now.

Line 3 has become the frontline in the fight against climate change. The ability for one pipeline to transport nearly a million barrels daily of the dirtiest substance on the planet is simply “game over” for any chance we have of combating climate change, just in terms of carbon output alone. Moreover, it is the most valuable project that the largest oil company in north america has. Stopping this pipeline would be like severing an artery to the oil industry and removing the flow of the lifeblood necessary to function at all in its current capacity. A victory here would have resounding effects for all of our struggles against the oil industry. We simply cannot afford to lose.

Pressing the offensive

Our stance: If we want to win, we need to innovate in our direct action strategy. Our current approach of lobbying, mass demonstrations, temporary and even long term action camps–while indispensable–is not sufficient to push the tar sands industry off the cliff they are hanging over. Furthermore, lockdown after lockdown leaves us at the mercy of an often unsympathetic court system that can leave us facing thousands of dollars in fines and years in prison. The state of our pipeline movement is clear: We need to create a new paradigm, that thinks more strategically, and come up with tactics that will be new to our enemy and the law enforcement that protects them.

In this zine, we will be looking at Mississippi Stand as a case study to understand mobile caravans and the swarm tactics they employed. Mississippi Stand as far as we know was the first of its kind to employ this strategy towards pipeline infrastructure.

Resisting as a good relative

With the world at risk we all have a stake in this fight. That said, we want to make it clear that folks planning on taking action in indigenous territory, not their own, need to be mindful of the impact that their actions could have on frontline native communities. Those communities are the most directly impacted and have been leading the fight against colonial capitalist ecocide for centuries. Not being plugged into “on the ground” contexts can lead to strategic blunders that can adversely impact frontline communities and the entirety of the pipeline struggle.

We feel that those considering employing the tactics described here on reservation land should develop relationships with radical native folk who are rooted in their communities and who the caravan members find themselves in political solidarity with. While outside the scope of this zine, at the end we provide some links regarding principled ways of engagement when fighting alongside indigenous people or within indigenous-led struggles.¹ ² ³

From camp to caravan

The caravan strategy grew out of the Mississippi Stand camp in Keokuk, Iowa as water protectors learned to adapt and overcome the tactical limitations of maintaining a stationary camp.

Keokuk is a predominantly white working class town, on the banks of the Mississippi where Energy Transfer Partners would have to bore under the river to lay the pipeline.

Mississippi Stand

Mississippi Stand was started by Jessica Reznicek and other Catholic Workers the first day Jessica pitched her tent and asked folks to join her 24 hours after her first blockade to block the trucks that were crucial to boring under the Mississippi River. They engaged often in tactical direct action to stop construction that included locking arms and blockading the road to the construction site. The very first lockdown to the drill site was initiated by Jessica and two others. This campaign was birthed out of this work and the camp was established at the bottom of the hill to the construction site.

With so much happening at Standing Rock, local water protectors had chosen to open up this new front for direct action in the fight against DAPL. There was not a large native community or a native-led struggle in this town on the pipeline path. The local contingent invited outside activists for their expertise and willingness to commit to action. These outside activists did important work early on with community members who had been resisting the pipeline for years in court. They built relationships at stores, churches, and community events. They served food at the initial camp alongside the Mississippi River. This growing solidarity with the out-of-town water protectors built up a sense of comfort among more locals to participate in direct actions and civil disobedience themselves. Many people had never participated in a political march before, but after participating in a number of marches, locals took training to do actual walk-ons onto the construction site to halt work. This was the initial organizing that led to the camp which the mobile caravan sprang from.

Early on, the camp struggled with logistical problems such as locating decision-making power among jostling parties: the land owner on whose land the camp was later relocated to, the original founders of the movement, those who had been there longer, and the newer participants involved. To move past this impasse, anarchists proposed and implemented a horizontal structure with the consensus of the group.

From the beginning, the camp was as much a target for surveillance as it was a place of refuge. Tents are not soundproof in the open prairie, and voices travel far. Folks had to leave camp anytime they wanted to plan an action. Police officers posted themselves just up the road from the camp, in plain sight. Surveillance by private mercenaries went even further than the cops, as is familiar to veterans of Standing Rock and anyone who’s read the Tigerswan Papers. Planning actions at the camp also meant planning in a space where many fellow campers who were not aligned with the anarchist contingent could hear. Many of these campers were OK with protesting the pipeline, but not with taking direct action to lock down to equipment or disrupt construction. Others simply could not be trusted with sensitive information—either because they had not learned good information security practices, or because they [sentence incomplete in the zine.] As we will see later in “Information Security,” the Mississippi Stand camp did have an informant in it working for private security.

Unable to use the camp to plan actions, the contingent that was more focused on direct action ultimately formed a second, secret camp. An affinity group, in turn, developed out of that camp. An affinity group is a closed group of people who act together around a common cause—often in secret, when engaged in direct action. However, affinity groups do not need to be born in action camps, or even be part of the camp. In a camp that allows for anyone to come, it is imperative that action committees remain separate from the main camp.

Strategic disruption: halt the underbore

In action after action, water protectors rushed the pipeline construction site, locking down to equipment and shutting down production for a few hours at a time. They developed a familiarity with swarm tactics, which we will detail further on. As the struggle went on, some of the pipeline workers and private security grew disgruntled. Some workers revealed an Achilles’ heel to the pipeline: if the immense amount of pressure it takes to push a pipe underneath a river were halted during the process called the underbore, that could be enough to collapse the tunnel. This would potentially set construction back months. The economic damage would be even greater than many forms of direct sabotage, and at a smaller risk. The findings were confirmed with some engineers, and the water protectors set to work.

In the days that followed, scouts were sent out to observe the sites on either side of the river via drone and binocular, as well as tail the traffic in and out of the site. Intelligence was gathered and reviewed by the action committee who, after much discussion, identified a dump site necessary for the removal of toxic wastewater in the underbore process. This was a weak point vulnerable to a blockade. A march was planned to confront the main bore site but then diverted to the dump site. Here, an action group used the crowd as cover to set up a 400-pound concrete lock box to shut down the site. At first, both the police and mercenaries proclaimed that this was a waste of time, that the site wasn’t valuable and they didn’t care if they stayed. Confident in the information that had been gathered, the water protectors doubled down and reinforced their position with a trailer purchased cheaply online, and locked a person to that as well. As time went on, scouts found that work had indeed halted. And the police, aided by mercenaries, attempted for days to dislodge the blockade. Mississippi Stand dug in, took a number of arrests, called for reinforcements, and developed a plan to make a counter-offensive on the bore site.

Blockade of Keokuk sludge dump site

Unfortunately, two dozen water protectors were not enough to hold the blockade, especially amidst a number of arrests and the legal support that was required. Also, DAPL workers ultimately chose to illegally dispose of the waste water into an already spent site that immediately spilled into the nearby river. They had decided that the risk of fines did not outweigh the cost of halting construction a day longer. Sadly, with a number of their members arrested and without reinforcements, Mississippi Stand could not directly challenge the site of the underbore, maintain the blockade, produce media, and also offer legal support. Construction continued and the underbore was completed.

If it’s a movement, it has to move

After failing to hit the weak spot in Keokuk, the water protectors chose to try again on another portion of the pipeline at another river underbore. This is the decision that more or less formally began the mobile caravan. In action camps, people are often rooted in one place with only a limited range of targets that can be focused on. The advantage of mobile groups is that they allow for pressing the offensive from anywhere. Having lost the fight in Keokuk, the caravan could now hit anywhere on the pipeline. Constantly moving through different counties and states kept any single local law enforcement agency from getting a good handle on them, allowing the element of surprise at every new site they struck. As a group that specialized in mobility, they could come in, scout the site, and strike. A single area near a camp can be contained, but it is hard to defend a whole pipeline route. The disadvantage for state and corporate forces is the amount of terrain they have to protect. This makes mobility an advantage for smaller opposition.

The caravan group was a smaller crew, each person vetted, and each of them more able to trust one another. This allowed for greater precision in carrying out actions. The clutter of camp life was left behind: the daily surveillance, the lack of privacy, the security risks by unknown people coming to camp. Familiarity with each other allowed them to put each person in a role that played to their strengths. As they struggled together and learned to work as a unit, they were able to carry out actions with greater complexity of movement and with more variables at play. This familiarity with each other allowed them to remain flexible, and in this struggle, flexibility is key. You can’t have a rigid plan and expect it to unfold without complications. You have to be able to see and take advantage of opportunities that present themselves, to press the offensive with the resources you have. On a day to day basis, tasks were better delegated in a tight-knit crew. Auto maintenance aside, resources were used more efficiently.

Still, after months of constant planning and mobile direct actions, their efforts failed. At their last action, during the final underbore, they were unable to pinpoint the exact moment they needed to disrupt the boring process. Communication issues, indecision, and uncertainty of timing led to the window of opportunity being missed to stop the bore. Also, attempts from another crew to lock down to a moving truck going into the bore site failed due to a technical mishap with the lockbox. A water protector was wearing too thick a sweater, which made it difficult to lock into the lockbox while security guards were also pulling them away from the truck. In these actions, no detail is too small to overlook.

Caravan limitations

It is clear that this model had limitations and disadvantages. We feel it is important to be honest about this so that other water protectors are not caught off guard. These problems should be understood, for the model to be improved in the fight against Line 3 and beyond.

First, the model was not geared towards community organizing. Constantly moving, and not forming ties with communities, they were not able to reliably mobilize local residents to fight the pipeline in areas where that work had not already been done, and they were often operating in communities where they didn’t have support networks for their work. This is important work that needs to be done by activists and organizers rooted in their communities. The caravan is not the tool for that job; it is a tool for direct action.

The caravan was traveling long distances, and constantly at the mercy of cars breaking down. Many if not most of the water protectors were poor, funded only by what was raised through an aggressive media and fundraising campaign. They were reliant on their own vehicles to carry out these actions. One reliable truck would have done wonders for the campaign—O the kind of equipment that caravans could have with support from the broader movement. They could have benefitted from having someone in our group assigned to drumming up that support, by providing communiques and press releases to radical media, or by reaching out to other groups and communities, and asking for fundraising.

Their lack of technical knowledge was a liability at first, though strides were taken to overcome this through careful research and consultation. Initially there had been a number of false perceptions of what would be necessary to stop the underbore. Good tactics based off of faulty information does not do you any good. So, engineers were consulted. Their expertise properly informed the caravan to target crucial moments in the process. Good information is essential for carrying out a successful campaign.

Another weakness was that there was only one caravan. Given enough determination, law enforcement can learn to track and anticipate the movement of a single caravan. If there had been multiple caravans roving and doing actions across the entirety of the pipeline route, the impact would have been exponentially multiplied. Mississippi Stand alone just didn’t have the numbers to create a proper swarm.

The potential of ecosabotage

The biggest limitations were the ones Mississippi Stand imposed on themselves, revolving around ongoing debates concerning violence versus nonviolence or direct sabotage versus non-sabotage. During the NoDAPL struggle in Iowa, other individuals independent of Mississippi Stand chose to commit acts of direct sabotage, involving the arson of equipment among a number of other tactics. Though much riskier, these acts had varying degrees of success in delaying construction for weeks or even months. They could arguably be considered more effective than any other individual action at the time. They caused a significant price-tag effect through increased security and delayed investment returns, and led to millions in damaged equipment.

Those who choose to take greater risks have a responsibility to do so in a cautious and serious fashion, keeping in mind the greater impact actions can have on the broader movement. The fight to save the planet requires nothing short of a diversity of tactics. Everyone must decide the way they engage in this struggle for themselves. Our solidarity with one another must be steadfast against state and corporate forces that seek to divide and destroy our movements.

We know that after the overall NoDAPL struggle from Standing Rock to Mississippi Stand, Energy Transfer Partners was forced to negotiate new shipping contracts and it cost them more than a billion dollars. If not for Enbridge buying a significant portion of Energy Transfer Partners and securing them as an investment, ETP would likely have gone under. Investors have been pulling money out of dirty fossil fuel projects for safer, less volatile investments. The cultural impact is important too; resistance generates buzz and this mobilizes more people to get involved against fossil fuel projects in their communities. A number of fossil fuel projects are also being shut down in courts. Inarguably, the NoDAPL movement’s influence has spread like wildfire since the height of the conflict and turned the tide against the industry.

Information security

The art of deception is pivotal to any effective struggle, especially between the “David” of water protectors and “Goliath” of the oil industry and the state. This was an understanding that evolved during the campaign. In the beginning, trainings and action planning were actually being done in front of law enforcement, at the site of the direct actions. This was a monumental security breach which utterly destroyed the element of surprise necessary for any successful action. Once water protectors got into place to act, the police would simply arrest them before any real disruption to construction took place. The ineffective arrests costs thousands in fines that the movement struggled to fundraise for months. With time and the involvement of new people, deception was embraced as a necessity.

Mississippi Stand consistently feigned actions to draw security forces away from their actual intended targets. A protest would be planned to draw law enforcement away while water protectors struck various nodes of construction infrastructure elsewhere or hidden in the protest. Often times when leaving camp, decoy drivers would be sent one direction, DAPL forces would pursue, and the real action group would go a separate way free of harassment. Misdirection became a necessary daily routine.

Also, after the on-the-ground DAPL struggle ended, documents came out showing the extent that Tiger Swan, a private security firm, had surveilled their activities. An informant for Tiger Swan named Joel Edward McCollough was present at the action camp. He tried persistently to insert himself in the actions of the mobile caravan—however, Joel’s behavior and the caravan’s overall lack of affinity with him led them to keep him at arm’s length. This situation highlights the importance of doing direct action work only with those you trust and ideally have been working with for a couple of years. While everyone in the Mississippi Stand caravan had been vetted, people had relationships that ranged from years of working together to just meeting at the action camp. The circumstances are never ideal—however, having trust with one another when taking on this work is a must to ensure the safety of all those involved.

Counter-surveillance was also important to the work. Water protectors observed security forces’ behavior and would take note of their cars being followed. They also followed the vehicles of both security and work vehicles going back and forth to the work site, and noted unusual patterns that roughly indicated to them the level of activity around certain facets of construction sites. This information was used to identify weaknesses in the construction process.

Water protectors used drones to get full access to topical views of their targets. Drones turned out to be infrastructure well worth spending money on. Counter-surveillance is a constantly-evolving process as our enemies and specific situations change. You must use what is at your disposal to adapt.

Resource efficiency

As the pipeline struggle dragged on, Mississippi Stand learned that each arrest meant hard and prolonged legal support work. A disruption that lasts a few hours—or even worse, a symbolic arrest—could spell months of legal support for and around the arrestee. This takes up the time of organizers, legal defense volunteers, movement lawyers, and performers raising funds that could otherwise go to supplies to sustain the struggle. Even worse, some arrestees never get the legal support they need after locking down, and end up paying heavy, life-altering consequences for their stand. This is not the way to sustain a movement.

So, for each arrest planned, water protectors tried to maximize the disruption they caused.They learned to be discreet and to use the limited resources at their disposal to continuously strike the pipeline in the most efficient ways they could, maintaining a constant pulse of actions. It is difficult to ascertain how much damage you have done without achieving your final goal. However, we know that Energy Transfer Partners spent tens of millions of dollars on private security and that contracts were added and extended due to continuous resistance. If our movements are creating work stoppages, it affects public and investor perceptions. By turning the tide of public opinion against companies and banks connected to the project, we can turn it into a toxic investment. Work delays are key to this. From lockdowns to blockades, you must find ways to consistently delay work or halt it. Other financial drains include the cost of security, refinancing loans, and the loss of political capital. Effective resistance means knowing our enemy. Greater knowledge of the way that the industry works and greater knowledge of the construction process will allow us to strike the pipeline in the right place at the right time, to derail all of their carefully laid plans.

The shortage of resources is a key weakness for water protectors. The movement needs reliable cars, for example, to have multiple caravans. We need food and supplies for camps and caravans alike. We need safe houses where travelers can rest and regroup. We need legal defense money and strong support networks that can provide sustained, reliable support for arrestees. We need decent winter gear for everyone and the means to keep warm. The movement needs more resources, the right resources, and it needs to use them wisely.

Once the caravan began, having places to recoup, store supplies, and retrofit the trailer with insulation and bunk beds was crucial. A $300 trailer became a mobile bunkhouse that could house a dozen and hold hundreds of pounds of supplies. Living out of cars and three-season tents in winter isn’t sustainable. Necessary gear is worth investing in.

Fundraising quickly becomes a concern for sustaining the movement. As a direct action group, the caravan understood that the more badass actions looked, the more money was raised online. The media branch of the group was absolutely critical in not only spreading the message but securing the majority of its funds. However, the goal isn’t to pull off flashy actions. It’s to conduct effective ones. The caravan never lost sight of the goal: stopping the pipeline and causing as much economic damage as possible along the way. For supporters behind the front lines, the challenge is to raise money for supplies and legal defense and keep it available for when frontline crews need it. This needs to be sustained, accountable work and is a key place to plug in for anyone who can’t go to the front. Logistics win wars.

Swarm tactics

Mobility is key not only on a strategic level, with the caravans, but on a tactical level as well. In Keokuk, water protectors adapted swarm theory to the struggle. A swarm is a network of autonomous structures found in nature, such as bees. As a military tactic, it has been used successfully for thousands of years. Now, in the age of information, it is easier than ever for autonomous actors on the battlefield to rapidly coordinate and adapt. Land defenders and anti-authoritarians have developed the concept more than anyone in recent years, and it has been documented by military researchers.

One such research group, the RAND corporation, is a military think tank that crunches data for the war machine and innovates new tactics for the US military. While we’re disgusted with their collaboration with the worst elements of imperialist forces, we have found their particular research on swarm strategy illuminating. They write in their thesis paper “[Swarming & The Future of Conflict](https://stopfossilfuels.org/files/Swarming and the Future of Conflict - RAND.pdf)”:

“Swarming is seemingly amorphous, but it is a deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to strike from all directions, by means of a sustainable pulsing force and/or fire, close-in as well as from stand off positions. It will work best—perhaps it will only work—if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad, small, dispersed, networked maneuver unit.”

They later go on to state:

“…Swarming depends on a devolution of power to small units and a capacity to interconnect those units that has only recently became feasible, due to the information revolution.”

As their paper instructs, networks come in basically three major types:

The chain or line network, in which people, materials,or information move along a line of separated contacts, and where end-to-end communication travels through the intermediate nodes
The star hub, or wheel network, in which a set of actors are tied to a central (but not hierarchical) node or actor and must go through that node to communicate and coordinate with each other
The all-channel network, in which everyone is connected to everyone else.

In Mississippi Stand, the all-channel network swarm was used for many actions. In one such action, water protectors rushed onto the construction site, disorienting DAPL security forces in order to gain access to the equipment necessary to lockdown to (watch the video “#NoDAPL resistance punks security and locksdown to backhoe” to see one of their swarms in action.) As security forces moved to intercept one group, another could move closer to the target. In this way, the mission of each autonomous group became fluid: In one moment, you are the strike force. As security blocks you, you become the decoy while another team moves towards the target. When security goes to block them, you take back the offensive.

They found that swarming helped them avoid costly arrests. During the blockade of the dumping site, private security attempted to capture folks with zip ties to take into their private custody and later into police custody. This was a dangerous situation. Mississippi Stand used swarm tactics to overwhelm the mercenaries and subsequently unarrested their comrades.

Building up forces, breaking down hang ups

We think it is important to spread this tactical knowledge in the hopes of multiplying from one caravan to many, from one swarm to a swarm of swarms. In Mississippi Stand, a direct action training was introduced to prepare activists for the struggle and to get people working in a shared framework together. Many activists were used to more conventional civil disobedience trainings, which emphasize more centralized and less spontaneous direct action; these trainings often focus on symbolic arrests rather than causing disruption, and normalize willingly getting arrested. So for many, this was the first training they’d taken that encouraged autonomous formations and actions. The training worked to dispel the nebulous divide between violent and nonviolent direct action. Instead it just focused on strategic direct action. Given the miseducation around these topics, the training differentiated between violent action (harm to life) and sabotage (harm to property, in defense of life). It introduced concepts of security culture in regards to these matters, and embraced the importance of a movement-wide diversity of tactics.

Due to the trainings, Mississippi Stand saw an increase in direct action and a greater willingness by people to de-arrest water protectors, which was a radical concept for many. It is important to have these hard conversations about our movement’s priorities, resources, and tactics to move to a more effective, efficient model.

Fight like the bees

Looking back on Mississippi Stand, its potential is clear. While it is true that the DAPL struggle in Iowa lost, the many lessons learned show us the potential of the caravan model if improved upon and expanded. We need to take the struggle out of just the camps and strike the pipelines up and down their routes in autonomous roving caravans.

We imagine caravans as a swarm unto themselves, moving as a “swarm of swarms” across the whole battlefield. Let the security forces focus on front-line camps, if those camps will act as magnets drawing their efforts. The caravans can complement those camps, opening up new fronts until there is no more front line any more—just an asymmetric fight that the state can’t contain.

There are still problems with our model which need to be worked out. Effective but secure ways for each caravan to communicate with others and coordinate actions would scale up our impact. Research on the pipeline process would help each group strike weak spots at opportune times. A strong support network of fundraising, material aid, and legal defense, as well as organizing by community members rooted in their home places, is necessary to sustain the struggle long-term.

We are fighting against an industry, with the full backing of the state, intent on setting off a climate bomb and building their pipeline over Native lands and water. We are fighting mass extinction. They do not care about playing fair, about life, about their own workers, or about the gun they’re putting to the planet’s head in the name of their profit. We need to stop the pipelines, both the ones being built and the ones already built. We need to stop the refineries, the tar sands, the fracking wells, the whole infrastructure of fossil fuels. They have an industry spanning the planet and choking the skies.

The whole world is our battleground and its fate hangs in the balance. We have a duty to win.

Frac Sand Supply Chain

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 12:25:54 -1000

Wisconsin frac sand mine
FRACTRACKER

Fracking of gas and oil requires forcing open rock, usually with an initial round of explosives followed by high pressure pumping of a toxic cocktail of water, chemicals, and suspended grains of sand. Massive quantities—up to 25,000 tons per well—of this frac sand prop open the blasted and pressurized fissures in the rock.

Until 2018, midwestern US mines thoroughly dominated the frac sand supply. Since mid 2017, perhaps two dozen mines have opened in the Permian Basin region, in a scramble by the increasingly debt-ridden shale industry to cut costs with inferior but cheaper sand. These mines may supply two third of US frac sand demand by the end of 2019¹.

RBN Energy

Besides enabling dirty fossil fuel extraction by supplying a crucial input, sand mines are destructive, water-polluting, and energy-hungry in and of themselves. The required steps²:

Kill and clear trees, shrubs, and all other vegetation
Dig out topsoil, killing the microbial communities on whom fertility depends
Remove unwanted rock layers
Blast, dig out and crush the sandstone
Transport by truck or conveyor belt to an on-site or remote processing plant
Wash, dry, screen, and sort sand
Transport sand by rail and/or truck

Rail and truck transport are vulnerable: railways have been disrupted by blockades and with jumper cables, though single incidents don’t have broad or long-lasting results. Truck transport, being decentralized, is normally difficult to impact. However, in 2019, industry analysts expect nearly 6,000 round-trip truckloads of sand per day to be delivered from a concentrated set of Permian sand mines between the Midland and Delaware basins. Highways in the vicinity of the mine cluster become potential bottlenecks.

Frac sand supply is perhaps most vulnerable in the stages dependent on electricity, including during conveyor transport, at processing plants, and during loading and unloading of railcars and trucks. When the electrons stop flowing, so does the sand. The industry is increasingly moving to assembly-line operations, which improves efficiency when everything works as planned, but otherwise can easily break down into cascading failure. When frac sites depend on just-in-time sand delivery, extraordinary delays may impose disproportionate costs. RBN Energy explains³:

Hydraulic fracturing of a typical Permian well with a 10,000-foot lateral requires about 12,500 tons of frac sand—enough sand to fill more than 500 large sand trucks. That sand needs to be at the ready—delivered, offloaded, stored, and set for blending and use. If it’s not, the well completion and the start of production would be delayed or the hydraulic fracturing process would be shut down after starting—a mortal sin in the shale world.

Managing a steady flow of frac-sand deliveries to multiple well sites in the Permian and the other shale plays is akin to air traffic control […] The goals are to minimize both driving time and waiting time—either at the sand mine (when picking up sand) or at the lease, where long queues can leave drivers waiting for hours if the pace of deliveries is not properly managed.

Problems at centralized loading sites might impact multiple frac sites. For example, at the Black Mountain Sand mine⁴:

It takes an army of trucks to haul that much sand to well sites. And they need to get in and out of the mines efficiently. An automated system that knows which sand to feed each truck speeds the process along. Still, they come in so fast that the line can back up quickly. On a recent afternoon, it was several deep. On a really hectic day, it can swell to 100.⁵

An activist blockade, an electrical outage, disruptions to loading equipment, or hardware or software damage to the automated system would make the loading process much less efficient—or perhaps shut it down entirely.

Big picture

As of early 2019, sand mining is in a bust phase⁶ of the typical boom/bust commodity cycle. Multiple mines have been idled.⁷ Disruption to supply from one mine or processing plant is fairly easily replaced from others; if activist intervention forced a mine or plant to shut down, idled sites could restart to meet the demand. Targeting mines, plants, or decentralized transport would be attacks of attrition, unlikely to have systemic impact.

In contrast, truck loading sites are transportation bottlenecks before the final journey to dispersed drill sites. Breakdown in these hubs would delay critical supply of sand to multiple frac operations at once, so would more likely trigger cascading failure.

US Silica Q4 2018 Earnings Call ↩︎
“Frac sand: How is it mined?” ↩︎
“The Frac Sand Revolution” part 4, April 16, 2019 ↩︎
Frac Sand Load-in Proccess at Black Mountain Sand ↩︎
“Worthless Just Two Years Ago, West Texas Sand Now Brings in Billions”, July 10, 2018 ↩︎
“Texas-Size Glut of Frack Sand Means 19% Drop in Prices”, February 6, 2019 ↩︎
“As pipeline shortage slows Permian output, sand miners take hit”, September 27, 2018 ↩︎

From Reform to Devolution: Jem Bendell's Deep Adaptation

Thu, 11 Apr 2019 18:25:47 -1000

Environmentalists advocate reduce, reuse, and recycle as the 3 R’s of sustainability—good practices, but incommensurate with the scope of our emergency. To better mitigate the looming ecological and social crises, we propose superseding these R’s with resilience, relinquishment, and restoration.

Along the way, we’ll look at the three I’s of denial which helped get us into this mess: ignorant, interpretative, and implicative.

We draw on Jem Bendell’s academic paper “Deep Adaptation” which urges his fellow sustainability professionals to stop tinkering with an irreparable system and instead prepare for collapse. Beneath the surface of his mostly placid, formal prose, he implies an even more radical necessity: active replacement of the industrial system. This will be less a revolution than a devolution—transferring power and decision making to local communities.

Jem Bendell

Bendell has a background in sustainable business and finance, with an impressive list of accomplishments from twenty years in the field. When he reviewed and grappled with climate science for the first time since 1994, he came to some of the same shocking realizations as have we: the 2°C warming limit was chosen more for political than scientific reasons; we’ve already overdrafted our carbon budget; “green” tech and governments and decades of environmentalism “have not produced a net positive outcome.”

Like us, he now deems catastrophic climate disruption and near term societal collapse to be inevitable, rendering his field’s traditional work mostly irrelevant. Minor progress on an agenda more concerned with industrial development than with true sustainability is pointless if the wins are dwarfed by the losses. “For instance, discussing progress in the health and safety policies of the White Star Line with the captain of the Titanic as it sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic would not be a sensible use of time.”

Bendell wrote the sober “Deep Adaptation” for colleagues unaware of the likelihood of short term societal collapse or the possibility of near term human extinction, so it’s worth reading in full if those concepts are new to you. We’ll explore some psychological underpinnings of our collective failure to change course, introduce Bendell’s deep adaptation framework, and relate his paper to our goal of stopping fossil fuels.

The Three I’s of Denial

We often process information according to “perspectives we wish for ourselves and others to have, rather than what the data may suggest is happening.” Social norms exacerbate this self-censorship, as people fear disturbing the peace with the truth of how bad things are. Sustainability professionals risk careers if they question an upbeat resilience narrative of “development” and “progress.”

Sociologist Stanley Cohen built a theoretical framework of denial in his book States of Denial. More recently, sociologist Ron Kramer and author John Foster have each applied his ideas to global warming denial.

Ignorant denial

Ignorant denial¹ is used actively, to justify apathy or to shield against reality. Comfortable citizens give in to entertainment and diversions while knowing they’re disengaged from reality. Distractions include not only TV sitcoms and sports, but also corporate news and political spectacle. Accepting prepackaged memes from one’s subculture or political tribe, without employing critical thinking, is as much an avoidance of difficult truths as is refusing to think at all.

Interpretative denial

Interpretative denial accepts the facts, but gives them different meaning than is normal. The denier may honestly believe this unusual interpretation, or may cynically undermine discourse. Global warming “skeptics” employ interpretive denial when they admit industrialism’s warming impact, but claim it will yield net benefits in plant growth and happier days basking in mild winter sunshine.

Implicative denial

Environmentalists don’t commonly indulge in ignorant or interpretative denial, but do in implicative denial—accepting and fully understanding the facts, but avoiding the logical conclusions. Of course reasonable people can debate those conclusions, but most would agree with Foster’s assessment: “From dipping into a local Transition Towns initiative, signing online petitions, or renouncing flying, there are endless ways for people to be ‘doing something’ without seriously confronting the reality of climate change.” Living a moral, fulfilling life requires honestly contemplating the implications of our environmental crises. Only by rejecting the well-traveled road of denial can one choose a meaningful path.

Not just individuals, but entire environmental organizations engage in implicative denial. From Big Green NGOs thriving on donations towards influencing legislation, to scrappy radicals fostering a reputation for obstructive lock downs, groups want to feel and appear effective. But ecological destruction is intimidatingly vast in scale and deeply entrenched within business as usual; in contrast, typical aboveground, attrition based actions can rarely achieve substantive change.

Activists come to accept environmentally fatal compromise as the only realistically achievable outcome, or abandon long-term systemic goals to pursue occasional small wins against one project at a time. Few acknowledge that we’re losing the war; fewer contemplate the implications for their future actions. Individuals and groups dodge analysis of their efficacy with the platitude that at least they’re “doing something.” Though such self deception is understandable as a morale boost amidst thankless work and heartbreaking losses, it undermines the movement. Denying reality in order to feel that our work counts for something is dangerous and ultimately unfulfilling. We must make our actions truly effective.

Choosing Our Framing

Humans aren’t as rational as we like to believe. Bendell outlines a range of scenarios imagined by those who accept some form of collapse as likely:

Transition to a beneficial post-consumerist way of life
Catastrophic descent without hope of a tolerable future
Near term human extinction

Transition to a better life

Catastrophic descent

Near term human extinction

People choose from and assign probabilities and timings to these alternatives based more on their preferred story than on data and analysis. Bendell himself chooses to interpret the facts as indicating inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe, and possible human extinction.

Our psychological need for purpose influences the stories we choose around collapse. George Marshall explains that humans “invest our efforts into our cultures and social groups to obtain a sense of permanence and survival beyond our death.” We subconsciously fear not only the immediate personal danger of collapse, but the total death threatened by loss of the entire society to which we might contribute.

Some reject the idea of societal collapse because acceptance would strip all meaning and purpose from life; others embrace it as an excuse for inaction and self-indulgence. In contrast, those ready for adult responsibility might welcome the opportunity to leave a legacy of unprecedented reach and longevity. They can impact not only their immediate society, but the future of all life.

We can’t know humanity’s fate with certainty—whether we’ll transition relatively smoothly through a long descent, or suffer a painful collapse, or go altogether extinct. But barring an extremely unlikely—and entirely preventable—scenario of life wiped out down to the bacteria, our actions matter. The more biological abundance and biodiversity which make it through the bottleneck of industrialism, the healthier will be the future for survivors. If society as we know it collapses, then the more intact the biosphere, the easier will be the lives of those humans picking up the pieces. If our species goes extinct, then the less damage we’ve inflicted on the way, the faster others can rebound. With recovery from mass extinctions taking millions of years, saving a species or habitat from destruction leaves a permanent legacy.

We are given both a heavy responsibility and a unique opportunity for purpose in life.

The Three R’s of Collapse

Bendell’s “deep adaptation” accepts near term collapse as inevitable, and avoids implicative denial by asking “what to do?” with eyes wide open. His answers revolve around identifying the core values we want to retain as we build new cultures. He doesn’t attempt to explore specifics of a deep adaptation agenda (so as not to reinforce the illusion that we can control or manage conditions), but he provides a framework:

Resilience

How do we keep what we really want to keep?

In institutional discussions, “resilience” planning often aims to maintain a close approximation of business as usual, complete with “development” and economic growth. But if material “progress” is incompatible with sustainability, its pursuit is counterproductive.

We might draw instead from a psychological understanding of resilience as the ability to “bounce back” from hardship or loss. In this framing, we prioritize valued societal norms and behaviors to retain (or on which we can even improve). These might include security and stability, physical and mental health, relationships with family and friends, meaningful work, spirituality, and interaction with the non-human world.

Tree planting: meaningful communal work in nature
Trees Atlanta

Relinquishment

What do we need to let go of in order not to make matters worse?

Our current lifestyle brought us to this point of collapse. If we cling to it, we’ll go down that much harder. To keep what we really want, we must let go of many expectations and customs. We need to put an end to industrial mining, fishing, logging, agriculture, transportation, manufacture, and consumption. We may have to withdraw from dense settlements, coastlines, deserts, and other areas uninhabitable in an overheated world.

One way or another, our unsustainable practices will cease. Giving them up voluntarily, sooner rather than later, promises individuals, families and communities the most autonomy and time to learn from mistakes.

Suburbia
Duncan Rawlinson

Restoration

What can we bring back to help us with the coming difficulties and tragedies?

Bendell suggests rewilding landscapes, changing diets, rediscovering non-electronic forms of play, and relocalizing. Industrialism has eroded the foundations not only of non-human life, but of human cooperation. Anywhere you look, there’s work to be done rebuilding topsoil, establishing perennial polycultures, reforesting, bringing down dams, and defending species and habitats. Human communities need post-carbon skills, practice working together, and localization of everything, including food, energy, education, decision making, construction, trade, and enforcing norms.

Perennial polyculture
Permaculture, Perennial Polycultures & Resistance

Conclusion: Get Proactive

“In abandoning hope that one way of life will continue, we open up a space for alternative hopes.” — Tommy Lynch

Bendell and other critical thinkers anticipate inevitable societal collapse, probable catastrophic break down of human communities, and possible near term human extinction. Elites want to “protect” the public from such analysis, in fear of instigating hopelessness, dismay and despair. Such paternalism makes sense in Hollywood movies, where disasters befall passive victims with scripted fates often ending in gruesome death. But in reality, hopelessness and despair seem appropriate responses to our predicament, and may be necessary precursors to grounded action. Bendell finds that sharing his analysis with students in a supportive environment leads not to apathy or depression, but to a positive focus on moving forward. Whichever scenario unfolds, we can still minimize and mitigate risks and damage. By choosing what to retain, what to relinquish, and what to restore, we shift from victims to actors in our and the planet’s destiny.

On a small scale, people can embrace voluntary simplicity, better preparing themselves and their communities for collapse. Tragically, at the international scale, society shows no sign of willingly transforming to a sane and sustainable way of living—in fact, it’s escalating its experiment in madness. 7.7 billion humans cling to an overcrowded extension ladder supported by ecological systems and secured by the web of life. Yet every day our society tears at that web and blasts away chunks of the ladder’s foundation, while squeezing on 227,000 more humans than the day before. For each step that proactive individuals descend towards solid ground, global industrialism extends the ladder ten higher.

A radical yet inescapable implication runs through Bendell’s piece: with collapse inevitable, the sooner it occurs, the gentler will be our collective transition. He suggests people must “com[e] together in solidarity to either undermine or overthrow a system that demands we participate in environmental degradation.” It’s not enough to relinquish solely as individuals; we must also forcibly loosen industrialism’s death grip. Freeing human and non-human communities from fossil fueled exploitation will open space for localization and restoration. Saving habitat and species from extermination will benefit all future beings, human and non-human.

If you’re ready to bring on devolution and leave behind the richest and most permanent life legacy possible, then read more about how to stop fossil fuels and how you can get involved.

Shale Oil: a Dying Fire Ready For Snuffing

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 15:11:29 -1000

The combination of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling has enabled the shale “revolution.” The US is now extracting¹ more oil than ever before, reversing a 38 year decline. Superficially, the industry has achieved an extraction success story. Mainstream media gush about rig counts, efficiency, and flows. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts ever-increasing growth through 2029, with only a mild decline into 2050. Drivers assume indefinitely cheap gasoline. Politicians promise energy independence.

Few realize the shale revolution wasn’t ignited solely by technical advances in drilling and busting rock. The post-2008 ultra-cheap money burning holes in investors’ pockets was equally necessary tinder—but it never kindled a fire able to sustain itself. Only by feeding billions of dollars into the sputtering flame have energy companies kept it from going out. Activists may be able to extinguish the flames relatively easily.

Shale vs conventional oil: inferno vs campfire in the rain

When oil was formed under great heat and pressure over millions of years, a large part of it rose to the surface and dissipated. Some—the oil fields we have been working our way through since the 1860s—could not migrate to the surface because it was trapped beneath non-porous cap rock. Most oil, however, remained in tiny droplets in the source rock where, given time, it would eventually migrate into larger pools and either form new oil fields or migrate to the surface.

When conventional oil is recovered, engineers simply drill through the cap rock and release the pressurised oil beneath (as the pressure drops, water and later carbon dioxide is pumped in to keep the oil flowing). When a shale deposit is fracked, in contrast, engineers are attempting to rapidly complete the process of gathering oil droplets into pools. Clearly, this is more expensive than conventional drilling—far more energy goes into the recovery process, and far less oil comes out as a result.

Tim Watkins: “Turning Low EROI Oil Into No EROI Oil”

Conventional vs unconventional oil & gas

The physics of shale oil strictly limits possible payback. In contrast to the inferno of highly profitable conventional wells, shale extraction is a camp fire in the rain, requiring constant intervention and yielding marginal returns at best. Yet few recognize that fracking makes as little energetic, economic and ecological sense as would trying to burn a rainforest to harvest charcoal.

US shale plays

Shale oil comprised 60% of the 11.65 million barrels of oil extracted in the US each day in December 2018. Fracking is concentrated in 5 areas:

Area	Location	Barrels/day *
Permian Basin	Northwest TX & southeast NM	3.4 million
Bakken	ND & eastern MT	1.4 million
Eagle Ford	Southern TX	1.3 million
Niobrara-Codell	CO, WY & southwest NE	.5 million
Anadarko Basin	OK	.4 million
Other	misc	.5 million

* December 2018 “tight oil” data from the EIA

Tight oil extraction vs price

Of these areas, only the Permian Basin had significant oil output prior to fracking. Even in the Permian, the three plays accounting for nearly all the fracked oil—the Spraberry, Wolfcamp, and Bonespring—had almost no flow prior to fracking.

Fracking in the Permian expanded relentlessly even through the 2014-2015 oil price crash. Anadarko wasn’t much affected, but in the Eagle Ford, Bakken, and Niobrara-Codell, fracking crashed in tandem with the price. Extraction in the latter two has since rebounded above their 2015 peak flows.

As suggested by the Permian’s continued growth regardless of oil price, analysts consider the area to have the most potential for profit—or perhaps more accurately, the potential to burn through money the slowest.

A dying fire

Fracking blasts open otherwise impermeable rock with explosives and a high-pressure slurry of water, chemicals, and thousands of tons of sand. Once pumps force out the oil closest to the frac zone, extraction slows to a trickle. As Post Carbon Institute’s “Shale Reality Check” summarizes, “[Extraction] from individual wells falls 70-90% in the first three years, and field declines without new drilling typically range 20-40% per year.” Companies must incessently drill expensive new wells to offset rapid depletion of the old. Since they usually develop their most productive and profitable spots first, they must drill an ever increasing number of wells simply to keep output steady.

Fracked wells decline precipitously
EIA

Worse yet for investors, companies are losing a staggering amount of money. From 2007 through 2018, they burned through more than $280 billion in investment cash, likely with no hope of ever repaying all outstanding debt. After the 2014-15 oil price crash, 150 fracking companies went bankrupt² and extraction dropped one million barrels per day. Subsequent industry recovery was rekindled more by hope than by fundamentals; in the third quarter of 2018, even with oil prices touching a four-year high of $80, the industry spent nearly a billion dollars more than it earned. It can’t fund itself from product sales; it depends on “creative” accounting to attract ongoing investment. Perversely, CEO rewards and investor enchantment by high flow rates incentivise boosted extraction, even when unprofitable. The supply glut devalues oil and slashes fracking income. Profitability slips ever further out of reach.

Investment community concerns have threatened to dampen cash infusions for years, but fund managers desperate for returns in the post-2008 low-interest era kept shoveling money into the fire. They seem increasingly reluctant to continue shoveling, though, and could stop at any moment. In speculative markets, fear is contagious—and since news and price signals now spread globally within minutes, a credible threat to the industry could make fund managers as desperate to get their money out as they were to put it in.

With no more investor money stoking new wells, dramatically less oil would flow out. If the fracking flame snuffed out in early 2019, then the flow of 7.4 million barrels per day might be down to 5.2 million in 2020, and less than 1 million by 2025—a massive improvement over the EIA’s forecast of an increase to 11 mllion under business as usual.³

Potential cold water

As with any complex system, the shale oil industry has multiple dependencies and bottlenecks. Understanding its critical infrastructure will allow activists to maximize the impact of their actions.

Takeaway limitations

It doesn’t matter how much a company can extract if it can’t get it to market. Oil moves most cheaply via pipeline, with crude by rail or truck much less desirable fallback options. Takeaway capacity has heavily constrained shale oil patches for years. In mid-2018, so much more oil was being extracted in the Permian and Bakken than could easily be moved to market, that it was selling for $15-20 less per barrel than crude in areas with sufficient transportation capacity. (Similarly, in late 2018, the Alberta government forced a tar sands extraction cut as pipeline constraints devalued its oil by 50%.)

Extraction companies forego tens of millions of dollars in revenues per day when the discount increases in response to pipeline and refinery shutdowns. The industry is counting on completion of new pipelines to relieve the imbalance between extraction and takeaway capacity. Anti-pipeline activism would disproportionately impact profit margins where they’re razor thin or negative, and where takeaway capacity is tight. Disruption to new or existing pipelines might scare off investor funding, leaving tens of millions of barrels of oil in the ground. FracTracker tracks new pipeline projects and community opposition with which activists can get involved.

Electric supply

Although the initial stages of drilling and breaking open the earth are mostly independent of the electric grid, ongoing extraction uses electric submersible pumps, each drawing about 300kw, ten times that for conventional wells. Regional sand mines, gas compressors, processing plants, and often pipelines add additional grid load. On the heels of rapid growth in the Bakken, Permian electric suppliers are now “struggling to keep up” with exponentially growing demand threatening the grid’s reliability. All this growth requires new transmission lines, substations, and power plants.

Activist opposition to new electric projects might drive up fracking costs. Severe disruption to existing systems might trigger cascading failure within the grid, then within the oil and gas infrastructure dependent on the grid, and ultimately in the financing of new frac wells.

Frac sand supply

Frac sand supply chain: possible complications

Without frac sand, drillers can’t initiate flow in new wells. A single well can consume thousands of tons of sand, making it one of the largest costs. Unavailability would shut down drilling altogether, and even attrition driving up the price could help push companies into bankruptcy.

Water supply and disposal

A single frac well can consume millions of gallons of water, vomiting out nearly the same amount of polluted wastewater. Even a small increase in cost per gallon to source or dispose of water would significantly impact a well’s bottom line.

However, both sourcing and disposal seem to be distributed, without obvious bottlenecks. Drillers buy water from any of a myriad of public and private sources. On the other end, some wells do transport their wastewater to centralized treatment plants, so disruptions to those plants might increase disposal costs for some wells. But the great majority⁴ of waste is injected into the nearly 40,000⁵ Class II disposal wells across the US, offering little scope for strategic intervention.

Refinery or export terminal shutdowns

The price for which frackers can sell oil depends not just on proximate takeaway infrastructure, but also on the capacity of refineries and ports at the receiving ends of pipelines. If shale grows as expected, then refineries will be overwhelmed, necessitating export of millions of additional barrels of oil per day. Activists might depress the value of fracked oil by challenging increased tanker traffic, or by shutting down refineries or Very Large Crude Carrier loading sites.

Dousing the flame

Usually, only decisive failure of a critical system component can trigger cascading failure, but with the shale oil industry already so financially precarious, it may be vulnerable to even a sprinkle of attrition. The more financial uncertainties raining down, the more likely they are to douse its flame, but even a small splash could scare off skittish investors still feeding the blaze. Under these circumstances, actions normally falling under attrition may actually win decisive victory.

Nonetheless, activists should apply the principles behind the strategy of cascading failure. Protests and direct actions would be most effective if they took the offensive, targeting operational infrastructure with surprise actions of short duration, then dispersing before security forces could assemble. Natural disasters or activist intervention affecting pipelines, the grid, refineries and ports, or rail and truck transport of oil and sand could interrupt industry profits, rattling investors. Prolonged disruptions could culminate in no financing of new frac wells, and consequently fields declining up to 40% each year. If disturbances also forced curtailment of operational wells, the fall-off would be even steeper.

Extinguishing the already sputtering flame of shale oil could be one of the most strategic ways for US activists to stop fossil fuels. Let’s get to work.

Shale Oil & Tar Sands: Like Trying to Burn Rainforest

Wed, 27 Mar 2019 15:46:36 -1000

Extracting shale oil is like trying to burn rainforest to harvest soggy charcoal. Just as fracked shale wells are initiated with explosives and a high pressure slurry of water, chemicals, and thousands of tons of sand, so too are the fires in our analogous lush forest ignited by an expensive cocktail of gasoline, chemicals, and tinder. Just as fracked wells deliver an initial high volume flow before declining precipitously, so too our gasoline-kindled rain forest fires briefly yield copious charcoal before diminishing to a smolder.

Companies must continually set new fires for ongoing charcoal harvest, but since they sensibly burned the driest pockets of forest first, new fires are ever less productive. The companies reignite early patches, hoping the trees missed by the first fire can yield more charcoal than would virgin sodden patches—but there isn’t much wood left in the burnt over areas. Worse, as with frac hits in shale oil fields, auxiliary burns interfere with the still smoldering burn piles, reducing charcoal output.

The steady supply of charcoal impresses credulous media, politicians, financial markets, and the general public, but the companies invest so much energy into operations that they extract little net energy. The industry never makes a profit. Companies sink ever deeper into debt as they borrow more money to keep the forests burning.

Trying desperately to attract new investments to prolong their money-losing scheme, the companies extract charcoal as quickly as possible. In their haste to maximize short-term volume, they make inefficient use of the resource, burning off tree limbs without attempting to harness their energy. They flood the market with so much product at once that it sells at a discount, and the excess must be shipped thousands of miles overseas.

Natural gas flaring

This economic boondoggle degrades a giant pool of life-nurturing, safely sequestered carbon into deadly planet-heating gas. In the process, soot drifts and chemicals leach, toxifying surface and ground water. Roads and fires fragment and destroy habitat, reducing biodiversity to ash. Flaming gasoline and tinder add to the carbon load as the denouements of their own stories of damaging extraction, processing, and transport.

In the tar sands, mud slides buried our analogous rain forest, so companies dig up waterlogged trees before burning them. Though they needn’t endlessly ignite new fires, the enterprises make large up-front investments in earth moving and tree processing machinery, then pay ongoing mining and processing costs.

The companies continually claim that efficiency and technology improvements will soon make them profitable, but the bottom line is that rainforests just don’t burn well.

Peak oil is here

Exploitation of shale and tar sands confirms that industrial society has exhausted its stores of easy energy. Peak oil is here. Tragically, far from mobilizing an aggressive shift towards sustainability, it reveals us as energy addicts desperately pursuing even the dirtiest, most destructive and marginal resources.

We can’t wait for peak oil to end fossil fuel combustion; we must proactively shut down the flows. We might start by extinguishing the dying fire of shale oil.

Stop Fossil Fuels: Why We Must, How We Can

Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape by Brian Hayes

Chapters

Note on printings

William Shatner: A New Perspective on Earth

Collapse Overview

Our Role in the Environmental Movement: Intelligence

The movement’s limitations

Stop Fossil Fuels’s role

The Art of Guerilla Warfare: General Principles

Object

Objectives of guerilla warfare

Methods and Principles

Organization

“The Chief”, or Military Mission or Guerilla Bureau

Arms and Equipment

Information and Intelligence Service

Intercommunication.

Training

Enemy Counter Action

Planning and Action

Preparatory Planning

Friendly Population

Hostile Population

Neutral Countries

Geographical

Organization of Bands

Conclusion

Book Review: Apocalyptic Planet by Craig Childs

George Jackson Brigade Tactical Principles

What Is the George Jackson Brigade?

Tactical Lessons

Learn more about the George Jackson Brigade

Existential Climate Risk & Neoliberalism

UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

Scientific reticence

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Climate-model limitations

Getting risk wrong

An upside to non-linearity?

Help Wanted

On your own

Contact us to coordinate

Improve Energy Security: Make Infrastructure Less Reliable

Derailment: WW2 Train Sabotage Video

Indigenous Amazonians Stopping Oil

Without Rubber, the Machines Stop

Natural rubber sources

Natural rubber and fossil fuels

Further reading

Coal railway signal arson

The Potential of the South American Leaf Blight as a Biological Agent

Introduction

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

References

The Future Will Be What We Make Of It

Collapse Is Inevitable

Tor Browser

Tor and Stop Fossil Fuels sites

Caveats & Further Resources

Going Underground

Shooting Transformers Disables Substations

Sabotage

Effectiveness and risk of shooting transformers

Ecosabotage? A larger plan?

If It's a Movement, It Has to Move: guerrilla strategy for activists

Introduction

Enbridge Line 3 struggle

Pressing the offensive

Resisting as a good relative

From camp to caravan

Mississippi Stand

Strategic disruption: halt the underbore

If it’s a movement, it has to move

Caravan limitations

The potential of ecosabotage

Information security

Resource efficiency

Swarm tactics