Law enforcement across the country fears the environmental thriller How to blow up a pipeline will inspire real attacks on fossil fuel infrastructure.
Twenty-three different state and federal agencies sent out at least 35 missives about the film, According to government documents obtained by rolling stone.
“The film has the potential to inspire threat actors to target oil and gas infrastructure with explosives or other destructive devices,” reads an April 6 bulletin from the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate of the United States. FBI.
“The consensus between law enforcement and the private oil industry is that this film may motivate attacks or disruptions to critical infrastructure throughout the country,” an ATF warning added.
Although the agencies did not warn of a specific threat, the content of the film, which depicts a group of young militants attempting to sabotage an oil pipeline in Texas, clearly alarmed them.
Daniel Goldhaber, who directed the film, told rolling stone the film is “a work of fiction that tackles one of the real world’s most pressing issues by telling the story of eight characters who believe destroying an oil pipeline is an act of self-defense. The fact that the public is so strongly connected to it only demonstrates the seriousness of the climate crisis and reinforces our urgent need to address it.
How to blow up a pipeline is loosely based on a 2021 book of the same name by Andreas Malm, a Swedish professor of human ecology and climate activist.
The book is not a literal set of instructions on attacking oil pipelines, but rather an argument that the urgency of the climate crisis requires direct sabotage of fossil fuel infrastructure because governments failed to hold heed peaceful grassroots calls for more climate action.
“To say that the signals fell on deaf ears from the ruling classes of this world would be an understatement. If those classes ever made sense, they lost them all,” he wrote in the book.
Infrastructure attacks have taken place in recent months.
Vandalism at four Washington state power plants knocked out power to thousands of people in December, while substations in North Carolina and Oregon were also attacked.
