Somewhere between the cartoon polar bear, a story of melting ice caps and the first-year reading list, a generation was put under a spell. Climate hypnosis --the steady drip of doom that tells young people the planet is dying and the world is ending because of carbon -- has now produced its most revealing artifact yet. First-year students at the London School of Economics are pointed toward a book of essays that treats direct action and sabotage against critical infrastructure as moral duty. Its editor has called destruction, sabotage and occupation “acts of love.” When frightened people are told that violence is virtue, the biggest winner is rarely the protester. The winner is the political party and the government that arrives to restore order on its own terms.
Key points:
- A compulsory first-year London School of Economics course description lists Property Will Cost Us the Earth, a collection on direct climate action and sabotage introduced by Andreas Malm.
- Malm’s earlier book urges the destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure. A Daily Wire investigation found at least 16 universities promoting it.
- Prominent commentators, including George Monbiot, have flirted with the idea of sabotage as a climate tactic.
- Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals offers a template for mobilizing the desperate against a common enemy, and crisis-driven unrest tends to expand government power.
- Money from climate philanthropy and a lifetime of alarmist messaging help prepare the audience to act out.
Higher education gives way to malicious brainwashing
The volume at the center of the controversy is Property Will Cost Us the Earth: Direct Action and the Future of the Global Climate Movement, edited by Jessie Kindig with an introduction by Swedish academic Andreas Malm. Chris Morrison, environment editor of the Daily Sceptic, reported Nov. 4 that the book sits on the reading list for a compulsory first-year course at the London School of Economics.
Malm is best known for How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which urges activists to wreck fossil fuel infrastructure instead of relying on lobbying and peaceful protest. According to a Daily Wire investigation, that book tells readers: “Demolish them, burn them, blow them up.”
Kindig, who also edited the pipeline book, has described destruction, sabotage and occupation as “acts of love.” Her publisher, Verso Books, says the new collection has sparked debate on the Left over direct action and violence, and has revived old fears of eco-terrorism coming from radical environmentalists.
The trance begins in the nursery
Morrison traces the conditioning to the kindergarten playroom. He points to children’s programming on Sky Kids and CBeebies that links climate change to cow farts and starving polar bears, a narrative that eventually gets worked in to school syllabuses, and finally to campuses where debate on environmental issues is limited to climate change hysteria and net zero carbon, before giving way to social action to rectify "climate injustices." By the time a student reaches a lecture hall, the message is that the world is racing toward ruin. A mind marinated in climate dread for a lifetime reads a sabotage manual not as preposterous, but as as a higher calling. When academics recommend it, this represents permission to act out.
The course also draws on the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, whose input Morrison says is noted for the module. The institute was founded in 2008 with money from investor Jeremy Grantham and his wife, Hannelore, through their Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. An LSE announcement says the foundation’s support continues through 2035. Inside Philanthropy reports that Grantham committed 98 percent of a roughly $1 billion fortune to climate causes in 2019. Between private money, vapid public persuasion and a captive audience of first-year students: the situation is ripe for mass hysteria to turn into violence and eventually to acts of sabotage against critical infrastructure.
And prominent adults have been willing to flirt with this idea of sabotage for some time now. In April 2023, Guardian columnist George Monbiot called Malm’s case for a campaign of attacks on industrial infrastructure “compelling,” though he said he would not blow up a pipeline himself. Broadcaster Chris Packham, who discussed eco-sabotage with Malm on Channel 4, has not endorsed it, according to Morrison, but he called non-violent law-breaking “the ethically responsible thing to do.” Meanwhile, the Daily Wire reported in 2024 that universities across the country were promoting Malm’s pipeline book, including UC Berkeley, where it was required in a geography and biology course.
Alinsky’s playbook with a green label
To understand why this matters, go back to 1971. Saul Alinsky, the Chicago community organizer widely regarded as the father of modern community organizing, published Rules for Radicals a year before his death. He framed it against Machiavelli, who wrote for the Haves. “Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away,” Alinsky said. His method rested on finding aggrieved people, naming a common enemy and escalating conflict until the target gave way. Alinsky said he never considered joining the Communist Party, and he emphasized nonviolent pressure. But the template he left behind is portable. It works for any cause that can convince desperate people they have nothing to lose.
Now apply the template to a generation told the planet is doomed. Fear supplies the desperation. A manufactured villain, whether an oil company, a pipeline or the owner of private property, supplies the common enemy. Sabotage becomes duty in this situation and the response is predictable. When a pipeline burns or a power line is cut, governments do not shrink. They write emergency statutes, widen terrorism definitions, and declare energy systems critical infrastructure, as several American states did after the Dakota Access pipeline protests. History offers a preview in the Earth Liberation Front’s 1998 arson at Vail, Colorado, which caused millions of dollars in damage and set off a years-long federal domestic terrorism investigation.
The pattern should bother readers on every side. Idealistic students end up with criminal records. Workers in targeted industries lose paychecks, and consumers pay more for energy. The institutions that primed the trance, and the funders behind them, keep their endowments and their influence. Meanwhile, the state emerges as the indispensable savior of a crisis the movement itself helped inflame.
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