Stop losing our struggles: from war of usury to cascading failure

We are reproducing this excellent text originally published by the group Stop Fossil Fuels and translated into French on the site Green Resistance. To illustrate the point, we have chosen the action taken by various groups of activists against the megabassines of the agro-industrial complex. While the media success of the action is undeniable, its effectiveness is almost zero in putting the agro-industrial complex in serious difficulty. Our camp will never have enough resources to counter all the destructive projects launched at the same time by the enemy. This strategy of usury has no chance of leading to a victory in the face of an enemy much better equipped with economic, human and technological resources.

This article is part of the series “For the end of fossil fuels”, which consists of the following articles:

1. Why it is really urgent to act^[1]

2. The false solutions^[2].

3. Stop losing our struggles: from war of usury to cascading failure^[3]

The consequences of thermo-industrial society are already terrible.^[4], for humans and non-humans alike, and they are getting worse. We've known that for a long time. However, nothing is changing. Our society has had decades to voluntarily get out of its addiction to fossil fuels. For decades the dangers have been known, but it is too dependent to give up.

Since 1990, global fossil fuel consumption has declined for only one year. In 2009. Not willingly, but as a result of the global recession. Unless constrained, the economy burns more and more oil every year.

Numerous indirect, overused solutions have shown their ineffectiveness: mass voluntary transformation, government action, green technology, energy efficiency^[5]. Once you let go of them, it frees up what's possible. Once we understand that our only objective, as an ecologist, is to stop civilization, to facilitate its collapse before that of our ecosystems, our thinking must focus on the most effective methods to achieve this goal.

THE FAILURE OF THE WAR OF ATTRITION

THE STRATEGY OF WEAR AND TEAR: A SLOW AND PROLONGED STRUGGLE

The environmental movement is pursuing a strategy of war of usury. What is a war of usury? It is a slow and prolonged struggle, aimed at weakening the enemy until it collapses itself.

We are opposed to one destructive project at a time. This strategy is failing.

In our context, this results in a defensive reaction to attacks from the industrial system: we are opposed to one destructive project at a time. This strategy is failing. Our occasional victories — like Notre Dame des Landes or Sivens — do not really weaken the institutions that develop industrialism; at best, we only slow down the speed at which it is strengthening. To win them, we mobilize almost all of our forces so that dozens of similar projects are being built in parallel and have little or no opposition.

Tactically too, we rely on wear and tear : we file lawsuits, boycott businesses, block infrastructure, and hang our bodies on construction machines. In other words, we are trying to increase the costs of projects, in order to make them unprofitable. But once again, our resources are very weak compared to those of our opponents. The State or multinationals can easily allocate funds worth several billion euros to overcome these obstacles, not to mention the fact that firms and governments can predict our tactics and therefore avoid them.

A STRATEGY DOOMED TO FAILURE

To start winning our war of usury, we would not only need to block all industrial expansion, which we are far from succeeding; but we would also have to force the closure of existing infrastructures: pipelines, power plants, and oil fields. In reality, even if we succeeded, a very optimistic hypothesis, our strategy would remain a failure.

The war of wear and tear only works if one defeats the adversary while limiting one's own losses. Our losses are anything but limited.

Indeed, the war of wear and tear only works if one defeats the adversary while limiting one's own losses. They must be maintained at acceptable levels over long periods of time., since the opponent's wear and tear must be faster than ours. But there is nothing acceptable about the current increase in CO2 emissions, or in the decrease in biodiversity. Disaster is imminent. Even if we had the resources to wage a war of usury, which we don't, we certainly don't have the time.

The war of usury is an absurd strategy in our position. We have neither the resources to deal with our adversary nor the time to run out of steam over time. Our situation is the very definition of asymmetric struggle: two opposing parties using highly unequal means. As individuals and as a movement, we need to look beyond a fragmented war of usury.

TOWARDS A CASCADING FAILURE STRATEGY

The war against the planet, against the majority of human beings and against future generations, is based on fossil fuels. To go beyond a strategy of wear and tear, we need to think about systems, flows, nodes and especially bottlenecks. We need to understand how oil, coal, and gas are extracted, transported, processed, distributed, and burned. We need to understand where the system is weak and where we can intervene for maximum impact.

Concretely, we do not need to dismantle all the factories, to destroy all the bulldozers, to demolish all the roads. We just need to cripple what allows them to function: their infrastructure.

Industrial systems withstand the loss of one or two components without suffering additional damage and quickly solve the problems caused. But these systems are designed for efficiency (producing a lot and quickly), not resilience (resisting shocks). When a sufficient number of critical parts fail simultaneously, the failures ripple through the system, like a series of dominoes, and cause more and more components to stop working. The impacts are increasing exponentially, the longest disruptions persist. Under the right circumstances, a cascading failure can bring the whole system to a standstill.^[6]. With repeated actions, it may never restart.

FOR A BETTER SELECTION OF TARGETS

Unlike the current situation, where activists select the project to block based on symbolic considerations or based on the immediate damage caused by it, the cascading failure strategy requires a precise choice of targets.

Exactly (!) , the United States Special Operations Forces developed the CARVER matrix for better target selection:

Criticality : How important is the element for the system?

Accessibility : Is it easy to reach the item?

Recoverability : How quickly and easily can the system resume its functionality after damaging the element?

Vulnerability : Is it easy to damage the element with the available tactics and weapons?

Effect : What are the unwanted side effects that can be caused?

Recognizability : Is it easy to identify the target under adverse conditions, such as a dark and rainy night?

Most environmental activists, legal and illegal, have so far chosen accessible and vulnerable targets. But they are not critical or difficult to replace. Activists, eager to be effective, should think according to the criteria of the CARVER matrix in order to trigger a cascade of failure. So they would understand that it is best to attack the electrical network.^[7] It's just another big useless project. They would understand that some weak spots^[8] are not necessarily where you think they are. Finally, they would understand that it is possible to change the course of history.

Stop Fossil Fuels

Translation: Resistance Green