The movie’s title is an endorsement of domestic terrorism in the name of climate change activism— “How to Blow up a Pipeline.”
It’s directed by Boulder native Daniel Goldhaber, who is the product of an upbringing by climate scientists who worked at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
In an interview with Colorado Public Radio, neither shied away from the radical content that endorses and glorifies the destruction of property if it’s linked to the fossil fuels that powers the planet and feeds the masses.
It’s idealism gone too far, clouded by an ignorant belief system that confuses weather and natural disasters with a coming climate change so disastrous it will render mankind extinct.
Described as a thriller, the movie premiers April 13 and is based on the book of the same name by Swedish author Andreas Malm.
It points out that other human rights advocates—from suffragettes to civil rights leaders— ultimately resorted to sabotage to advance their political goals.
Those movements, Malm argues, refused to value property above their cause. He calls on a new generation of climate activists to learn from their example and actively dismantle the fossil fuel industry before it makes the planet any less habitable.
And by dismantle, Goldhaber is careful to claim that making a movie called “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” that calls for action other than nonviolence to dismantle an entire industry doesn’t specifically call for bombing a pipeline, they just to talk about doing it.
Rather than showing the violence, he just romanticizes it.
Instead, the filmmakers decided to dramatize the ideas that might appeal to a wider audience. By showing characters carrying out the arguments in the book, Goldhaber said it offers an opportunity for people to discuss whether current circumstances justify more aggressive—albeit illegal—forms of resistance.
“The fossil fuel industry and the practice of consumptive capitalism writ large has a gun to the head of the world. And I think that the movie is saying: maybe we have a right to take that gun away from them and dismantle it,” Goldhaber said.
They can dance around it all they want, but calling for action beyond nonviolent means to dismantle the nation’s fossil fuel infrastructure under the title of “How to Blow up a Pipeline” sure sounds like a manifesto for domestic terrorism.