By (Repeated) Request: Capital is So Good at Rebuilding Pipelines

People keep asking me to comment on the recent film How to Blow Up a Pipeline, but I can’t do that because I haven’t seen the film yet! However, I think what people really want me to comment on is environmental terrorism, so here you go.

I’m sure this will get me yelled at in the comments, but I’m not opposed to environmentalist terrorism in principle. In particular, I think if any issue is sufficiently pressing to motivate terrorism, global warming is it - climate change can’t kill off the human species, but it can radically change the conditions under which human beings rose up and thrived as the dominant species on our world. Those likely changes range from uncomfortable to deadly. Even if the more sensationalistic claims turn out to be false, the outcomes of a two or three degree increase in average global temperatures aren’t anything we’d want to experience, and politically-plausible policy approaches to the problem seem inadequate to the challenges. I’d always be in favor of avoiding civilian deaths, but the destruction of pipelines seems like it would be well-suited for that ideal, as any pipeline has portions that are far from population centers. The funny thing about environmentalism is that at its heart lies the most pragmatic and understandable impulses imaginable - the natural world is a beautiful gift that we’ve been tasked with stewarding, and if that doesn’t move you, we live in the environment - and yet environmentalists often provoke contempt even from left-leaning people. (I again shudder to look at the comments.)

However!