Why Don’t More Climate Activists Turn to Sabotage?

Climate mitigation is not going well. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, heat waves grow longer and deadlier, and extreme weather becomes more costly.¹ What matters to the atmosphere is not the rapid rise of clean energy technologies but the continued operation and even expansion of the fossil fuel infrastructure that is overheating the world.

What this means is that the member states of the UN have failed to address the climate problem in the thirty-plus years since they signed a treaty promising to do so, despite the efforts and urging of climate activists.² A pipeline cancellation here, a new solar power subsidy there: These victories for activists are only minor speed bumps for the runaway SUV that is the climate crisis.

A gap looms between the rhetoric and actions of global authorities. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and former U.S. president Joe Biden both called climate change an “existential threat” in the early 2020s.³ Another world leader, UN Secretary General António Guterres, has spoken plaintively of politicians’ inability to get a handle on the challenge despite the demands for climate action. “Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels,” he has said.⁴

Other analysts or policymakers, from across the spectrum of climate politics, have raised questions about what type of activism would be appropriate in the face of catastrophe. There is the Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from the fifth district of California, Tom McClintock—a skeptic of the scientific consensus on global warming—who asks: “If the Earth truly hangs in the balance, well, then no measure is too extreme. No cost is too great. . . . How much of a sacrifice is it if the alternative is a dead planet?”⁵ There is Andreas Malm, the professor of Human Ecology at Lund University in Sweden and the author of the book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, who has said:

“Were we governed by reason, we would be on the barricades today, dragging the drivers of Range Rovers and Nissan Patrols out of their seats, occupying and shutting down the coal-burning power stations, bursting in upon the Blairs’ retreat from reality in Barbados and demanding a reversal of economic life as dramatic as the one we bore when we went to war with Hitler.”⁶

This article asks what comes next for climate activists dealing with failure. As climate impacts get more severe, might climate activists become more inclined to take matters into their own hands, more willing to physically obstruct the workings of the fossil fuel machine or even to deploy violence against the people at the controls?

While the radical flank of the global climate movement is currently much smaller than headlines may suggest, these kinds of tactics may grow in popularity if decisionmakers continue to insufficiently address climate change. There is evidence of an overall intensification of climate activism, both of the actions of activists themselves, covered in this article, and of the backlash from civil society and leadership alike, covered by Oscar Berglund in an accompanying piece in the series. This article defines “climatage,” identifies trends in methods of activism, and explores what might come next for the radical flank of climate movements.

Defining Obstruction for the Climate and “Climatage”

This article is interested not only in property damage—often called “climatage,” a portmanteau of climate and sabotage—but also in occupations and blockades of infrastructure or key command centers, in which no property is damaged but the target is inhibited from taking action that exacerbates the climate crisis. The latter actions can be described as “obstruction for the climate.” This scope includes an occupation of a power plant that burns coal, or of a political building that approves new oil and gas pipelines, such as the U.S. Department of Interior headquarters, which protesters occupied in 2021. It does not include mainly symbolic actions that seek to garner media attention rather than disrupt fossil fuel—such as the throwing of soup on a famous Van Gogh painting in London by two Just Stop Oil activists in 2022. (The sociologist Dana Fisher calls such activists “shockers and disruptors”).⁷ This article also does not cover related but distinct forms of obstruction or violence for climate-related activism, such as physical actions that aim to prevent taxes on planet-warming fuels, like the Yellow Vest protests in France in 2021 or the farmers’ protests in Europe in 2023–2024; ecofascist violence; or land and environmental defenders’ obstruction of mining projects to protect their local ecosystems (when not explicitly linking their actions to climate change).⁸

What are some important types of climatage and obstruction? Activists often target coal infrastructure. In 2007, a group known as the Kingsnorth Six occupied the smokestack at a UK power plant in an attempt to shut it down. In a remarkable ruling, they were acquitted of property damage after turning to the “lawful excuse” defense in court, arguing that “by shutting down the coal plant for a day, they prevented greater damage to even more valuable property.”⁹ These activists later joined Greenpeace colleagues for further coal plant occupations in the UK to highlight the risks of carbon pollution.¹⁰

Coal blockades also took place in Australia in the 2000s and 2010s, as groups like Rising Tide used their bodies to try to slow the transport of the dirtiest fossil fuel.¹¹ In 2014 hundreds of protesters, many of whom were Indigenous people who called themselves Pacific Climate Warriors, attempted to use their canoes and kayaks to disrupt coal shipments from a Sydney port that they said was contributing to sea level rise. One activist from Fiji said, “We are not willing to drown because of climate change.”¹²

Further significant obstruction of coal infrastructure has come from the German group Ende Gelände, which roughly translates to “end of the line.” Since 2014 this group has occupied numerous coal mines.¹³ “By using our bodies to block the mining and by taking actions that break that law (with all the potential consequences),” said two members, “we point to the urgency of more effective action against climate change and halting lignite coal mining in Germany.”¹⁴ People have been hurt at some of these protests: In 2019 at a mine near Aachen, the police beat five protesters to the point of hospitalization, while four police officers suffered injuries, reportedly in connection with resistance from protesters.¹⁵ The group has also admitted to climatage in damaging machinery and pipes in an action at the Wilhelmshaven liquefied natural gas terminal in 2022.¹⁶

Oil and gas infrastructure is another common target. Activists with Climate Direction Action have temporarily stopped the flow of oil on the Keystone Pipeline in the United States.¹⁷ In Europe, protesters associated with Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion have occupied oil terminals, obstructed pipeline construction, and disrupted fuel depots, airports, and government offices.¹⁸ Another mainly European group called Tyre Extinguishers prefers to target privately owned fossil fuel machines: The group says the aim is “to make it impossible to own a huge polluting 4x4 in the world’s urban areas.”¹⁹ Their fellow organizers in the Netherlands target an even more polluting type of transportation, the private planes at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam: In 2022 hundreds of activists wearing white overalls sat in front of these planes’ wheels to prevent takeoff.²⁰

Nearly every aspect of modern industrial society contributes to the climate crisis, and recently some activists have taken climatage beyond the usual energy targets.

Nearly every aspect of modern industrial society contributes to the climate crisis, and recently some activists have taken climatage beyond the usual energy targets. In 2022, Swedish activists occupied a limestone mine in Gotland, complaining that the company running the associated cement plant was the country’s second-largest CO₂ emitter.²¹

Some groups take actions that could be understood as both climatage and sabotage to protect the local environment, sometimes called “ecotage.” In March 2022, the French group Soulèvements de la Terre built a wall to stop the construction of a new highway and built a camp to prevent the opening of a new reservoir, even firing improvised firework mortars at police officers.²² Their concern was that the giant reservoir represented the “privatization of water” and would damage the environment.²³ Days later, the group peacefully protested a nearby motorway project that one activist argued would entrench car culture and exacerbate global warming. In another instance in 2016, U.S. activists Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek set fire to six machines constructing the Dakota Access Pipeline in Iowa.²⁴ In a statement before their arrest, they focused on the risk of oil spills and corporations “brutalizing the land, water, and people,” though their attorney did emphasize they felt a desire to halt climate change.²⁵ And they were part of a movement that did focus on climate impacts—indeed Greenpeace was found liable for $650 million in damages for “defamation and other claims.”²⁶

Trends in Climatage

One thing that immediately stands out about these rare instances of climatage is where they have been recorded: predominantly in the rich countries of the so-called Global North. Investigating why can offer insight into the future of climatage and the climate fight in general.

The rich countries of the North Atlantic are where emissions are generally highest in per-capita terms, so there are plenty of targets for activists. But personal safety is also a factor. It is safer for three British citizens to spray-paint the UK offices of the corporation that insures the controversial East African Crude Oil Pipeline, which will run from Uganda to Tanzania, than it is to try to stop the pipeline on the ground in Africa, due to Britain’s stronger protections of civic freedoms.²⁷ In Uganda, activist Stephen Kwikiriza was allegedly abducted by national armed forces, beaten, and dumped on the side of the road as punishment for his campaign against the pipeline, whereas the British spray-painters were assigned community service.²⁸

That climatage and obstruction are concentrated in these rich countries may also indicate that considerable resources are required to engage in these activities. Even if an activist does not fear extrajudicial violence by the police, in order to engage in direct action they must have enough time to volunteer rather than work, enough money to contest a court case, and enough social connections to believe that a criminal conviction will not be the end of their career. As one study has shown, even within these wealthy countries, it is mostly educated members of the middle class who take part in climate protests.²⁹ The insidious nature of the threat has been a challenge for the climate movement in general: Climate change is faceless; and its effects are gradual, indirect, and to some extent manageable for the world’s richest and most influential, which means that society gets more animated about immediate problems like high prices or unwanted immigration.³⁰

The concentration of climatage and obstruction in rich countries may also indicate that considerable resources are required to engage in these activities.

Which protests are legitimate and who may take part? North Atlantic states and judicial systems display some implicit preferences. The contrast between how the media and courts treat protesting farmers and protesting climate activists is illustrative—for the latter, most face harsher punishment than community service. Five climate activists from the group Just Stop Oil were sentenced to four-plus years in prison for their role in blocking a British motorway in 2022³¹; the judge described them as “fanatics.” The long sentences fit a pattern of disproportionately harsh punishment for climate activists in wealthy European democracies.³² Germany and the Netherlands have even pre-emptively arrested activists before they arrive at protests.

On the other hand, protesting European farmers have often received gentler treatment from the authorities. The Dutch criminal lawyer Christian Flokstra, pointing this out, argues that “the sense of legal equality gnaws when police and the judicial authorities respond differently to civil disobedience or forms of activism. After all, the actions of climate activists did not endanger lives. Farmers’ actions did: they blocked highways, set fire to hay bales, and threatened politicians and journalists.” ³³ In Belgium on February 26, 2024, farmers blocked the roads surrounding the European Commission with tractors and burning tires and threw objects at police officers, injuring three of them.³⁴ Only three protesters were arrested.³⁵ The angry farmers were back in force a month later.

Efficacy of Violence Versus Nonviolence

Another question concerning climatage is not whether it is morally justified or even legally justified, as the occupiers of the Kingsnorth coal plant successfully argued, but whether it works. Climatage is a tactic of the “radical flank,” which sociologists Brent Simpson, Robb Willer, and Matthew Feinberg define as a “discrete activist group within a larger movement that adopts an agenda and/or uses tactics that are perceptibly more radical than other groups within the movement.”³⁶ The radical flank effect can be positive or negative for a movement, either aiding it by making the demands of moderates appear more reasonable, or harming it by causing backlash against the movement as a whole.³⁷ For the climate movement, the idea is that radical sabotage can make politicians look more favorably on calls for moderate change by more institutionalized, formal climate organizations, just as the violent activity of the armed wing of the African National Congress eventually made the South African apartheid regime more willing to negotiate with Nelson Mandela.³⁸

A key text arguing against the use of violence in resistance movements comes from political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, who found that nonviolent resistance movements since 1900 have been twice as successful as violent ones—though there are challenges drawing parallels between this research and the climate struggle.³⁹ The scholars Ryan Gunderson and William Charles argue that nonviolent tactics will prove more effective in part because “(1) property destruction will likely decrease public support for climate activists and climate policy, [and] (2) property destruction will almost certainly increase state repression, a fight that climate activists will likely lose.”⁴⁰ These findings will encourage burgeoning groups like the Washington, DC–focused group Climate Defiance, which uses nonviolent direct action to “force [their] politicians to take action.”⁴¹

But nonviolent, disruptive tactics like blockades can similarly sour public opinion: One German poll found that street blockades reduced support for the climate movement in the country.⁴² However, other research has found that the nonviolent, disruptive campaigns of Just Stop Oil did generate support for moderate groups like Friends of the Earth.⁴³ Polling data can be useful, but it is difficult to get clear results about how climatage causes changes in public opinion, issue salience, and climate policy, given all the confounding variables. In their inventory of direct action tactics, the scholars Benjamin Sovacool and Alexander Dunlap argue that “unsavory” actions in some contexts do offer a chance of creating social change, although violence against humans would likely backfire.⁴⁴ As the philosopher Laurence Delina notes, there is a real risk of violent climate activism being branded as terrorism, and the movement being unable to rein in the activities of less principled members of their cohort.⁴⁵ If the movement did carry out radical violence against humans in service of political goals—like the Rote Armee Fraktion’s 1977 kidnapping of industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, a representative of a capitalist German state they felt was still infested with fascism⁴⁶; or Luigi Mangione’s alleged 2024 killing of a healthcare executive in New York City, meant to strike a blow against what he called a “greed fueled health insurance cartel”—it could backfire on climate activists at large.⁴⁷ The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations has long treated animal rights activists and environmental activists as terrorists.⁴⁸

On one hand, it is possible that the backlash against climate action could make some activists feel as if climatage or obstruction is their only option, as Oscar Berglund also notes. In the United States in 2025, for example, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to reverse climate protection policies that it dismisses as a “Green New Scam,” removing pollution limits on power plants and subsidizing coal.⁴⁹ When the U.S. government threatens reprisals against peaceful protesters, as the Trump administration has threatened to deport noncitizens who speak up for Palestinians’ human rights, some activists may feel their only option is masked sabotage in the cover of night.⁵⁰ A number of U.S. states are also seeking draconian sentences for peaceful protests against oil or gas pipelines.⁵¹

On the other hand, the risks of sabotage tactics have likely increased as well. Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi have said that direct action against allies of the president, such as against the Tesla dealerships of former Trump adviser Elon Musk, will be treated as “domestic terrorism,” with the president adding that perpetrators will “go through hell.”⁵²

Those who perceive climatage as the least bad option could be wrong. Climate activists’ challenge is distinct and perhaps even more daunting than the challenges previous activists faced in other contexts. In some social struggles, activists seek to influence the decisionmaking of a relatively small set of actors. The Great Sit Down Strike of 1936–1937 at General Motors auto plants, for instance, helped force the company and other automakers to eventually accept the unionization of their factories.⁵³ Sabotage played a key role: Workers strategically occupied and shut down the few critical factories that produced car bodies, without which other factories could not operate.⁵⁴

Activists who want to stop the fossil fuel industry must change more than the behavior of a small number of firms or politicians. The fossil fuels, factories, and farms that cause the climate crisis are deeply ingrained in everyday life.

But activists who want to stop the fossil fuel industry must change more than the behavior of a small number of firms or politicians. The fossil fuels, factories, and farms that cause the climate crisis are deeply ingrained in everyday life, all over the world, and the injustice and suffering they cause is indirect and diffuse. It would take sabotage on a tremendous scale to noticeably raise the costs of fossil fuel extraction and combustion, and doing so successfully could raise energy prices—a driver of much backlash protest in recent years—unless policymakers moved aggressively to blunt the effects of a fossil fuel scaledown.⁵⁵ Would-be saboteurs may be tempted to turn to direct action by the sense that the walls are closing in, and they need only temporarily step outside the democratic process until some emissions target is reached and they can pull down their barricades. Climate change, though, is an open-ended challenge, and climate action will require popular support to endure.⁵⁶

And yet there is precedent for direct action against a small group of elites that sends a whole society over a tipping point and into reform. In his book Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons From Movements that Won, the scholar Kevin A. Young argues that “the fundamental source of power” of the movements for the abolition of U.S. slavery, for labor rights, or for racial equality was the “direct threat they posed to capitalists through strikes, boycotts, and other mass disruption.”⁵⁷ For the climate movement, Young suggests, the path forward is not for climate-focused parties to win repeated large majorities, but rather for a sizable minority to apply “direct pressure on the elites who control energy-related investments.”⁵⁸ Could the plants where, say, GE Vernova makes scarce gas turbine equipment be the 2030s equivalent of General Motors’ auto body plants in the 1930s?⁵⁹

Where Are the Saboteurs?

Back in 2007, the writer John Lanchester commented that it was “strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism.”⁶⁰ Eighteen years later, with the climate crisis much deeper, the near absence of violence seems even stranger. It is far from clear whether climatage would achieve its desired ends. But it is clear that the climate crisis is threatening human flourishing, and that some activists might be willing to take a chance on violence in the face of what their leaders keep calling an existential threat.

In this series of articles, Carnegie scholars and contributors are analyzing varieties of climate activism from around the world, focusing on the intensification of activity both from the protesters themselves and from the authorities and forces who are the objects of their discontent.