It was a cold, wet night in the City of London, the heart of the global financial system. Two young men, dressed in high-visibility vests with their faces hidden beneath hoods, navigated the rain-slicked streets under the gaze of countless surveillance cameras. Despite the near-empty roads, they felt watched. Reaching Lime Street, they stopped beside a maintenance hole, ensuring no one was watching. One pried open the cover, revealing a bundle of black cables, and began cutting. Hours later, news outlets received an email: “Internet cut off to hundreds of insurers in climate-motivated sabotage.”
A Shift from Traditional Activism
Five years ago, climate activists from Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the global school strikes believed in mass protests as a means of compelling governments and corporations to take meaningful action against the climate crisis. Later, groups such as Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil (JSO) escalated their tactics, staging road blockades and direct disruptions to critical infrastructure, hoping to force action.
READ MORE: World’s Oldest Impact Crater Found, Rewriting Earth’s Ancient History
Now, faced with intensifying climate breakdown and ever-rising fossil fuel emissions, some activists are adopting a different approach—clandestine sabotage. Rather than relying on mass mobilization or civil disobedience, groups like Shut the System (STS) argue that direct action against fossil fuel infrastructure and financial institutions is the next logical step.
STS, which claimed responsibility for the London cable sabotage in January, declared in a manifesto published on the WordPress blogging platform: “We vow to wage a campaign of sabotage targeting the tools, property, and machinery of those most responsible for global warming, escalating until they accept our demands for an end to all support for fossil fuel expansion.”
Why the Shift Toward Sabotage?
The Guardian spoke with an STS activist via the encrypted messaging service Signal. Remaining anonymous, he outlined why sabotage has become increasingly attractive. He cited tougher legal crackdowns on traditional protests, which have resulted in severe penalties for activists engaging in civil disobedience. In one widely publicized case, members of JSO received prison sentences of four and five years for blocking roads on the M25. While their sentences were recently reduced on appeal, the message was clear: authorities were determined to deter disruptive protest.
“If you want to do anything disruptive, the penalty is massive now,” the STS activist said. “You can’t just keep doing that … The actual number of people who are committed to risk jail time to do this is pretty small.”
STS is not the first group to engage in covert attacks on fossil fuel targets. In 2022, unknown activists targeted a pipeline being built to transport jet fuel from Southampton to West London, cutting holes in the pipe and severing hydraulic cables on construction vehicles. This month, another group claimed responsibility for drilling holes in the tires of more than 100 SUVs at Land Rover dealerships in Cornwall, mirroring a similar action from the previous year. The Tyre Extinguishers, a campaign urging autonomous acts of sabotage against SUVs, have targeted hundreds of vehicles globally.
Limited Impact, But a Growing Movement
The January sabotage in London had only a minimal effect. A cybersecurity expert noted a “significant slowdown of internet speed” in the affected area, but the network remained operational. The STS activist admitted that their success varied across different cities, with claimed actions in Birmingham, Sheffield, and Leeds producing mixed results.
“We did our research as best as we could,” he explained. “We planned what sort of cables to be looking for, how they might be laid out, and we taught ourselves about opening up these manholes.” He acknowledged that in some cases, activists verified their impact only by calling affected businesses the next day.
While the impact of these actions remains limited, more disruptive sabotage has been seen elsewhere. In Germany last year, climate activists staged attacks on gas pipelines and escalated a campaign against concrete production with arson attacks on a Cemex plant in Berlin. In France, sabotage tactics have ranged from activists filling golf course holes with cement to large-scale riots targeting a controversial agricultural reservoir in the drought-stricken south.
The Influence of French Activism
“France really is the one case in recent years where you’ve had a radical mass movement that has actually been quite successful,” said Andreas Malm, a Swedish social ecologist and associate professor at Lund University. “And this is the only movement that has also deployed sabotage consistently as a tactic.”
Malm’s 2021 book How to Blow Up a Pipeline became a set text among climate activists, exploring the historical use of sabotage in social movements and arguing for its necessity in the climate fight. The book’s influence extended to popular culture, inspiring a 2022 film adaptation.
Despite the book’s impact, Malm believes that international crises—such as Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the energy crisis caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine—have diverted activist energy away from climate issues. The latter, he says, has also made it easier for critics to portray fossil fuel saboteurs as “stooges of Putin” for opposing domestic fuel extraction.
Nevertheless, Malm remains convinced that clandestine direct action is the most viable path forward. He criticized Just Stop Oil’s strategy of waiting for arrest after their actions, saying, “If you want to actually escalate and do real material damage to fossil fuel property, you cannot stick to this idea. You have to do this without offering yourself as a kind of virtue sacrifice.”
The Future of Climate Sabotage
STS maintains that their methods are not significantly different from previous activist campaigns—except that they avoid immediate arrest. “The only difference is that they stayed around to be arrested,” the activist told The Guardian.
If current trends continue, climate activism may increasingly move underground. While sabotage remains controversial, history suggests that governments and corporations rarely concede to demands without sustained and escalating pressure. Whether such actions will be effective in forcing climate action remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: the era of peaceful protest as the primary form of climate activism may be coming to an end.
