Disclaimer: This article contains mild spoilers for “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.”
Why haven’t you blown up a pipeline? If you need a how-to guide, director Daniel Goldhaber has you covered with his 2023 film aptly titled “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.”
The film, of course, does not actually provide a wikiHow guide to blowing up a pipeline, but it does explore the idea of radical climate action as a form of collective self-defense against the fossil fuel industry.
The film is a dramatized thriller based on a non-fiction manifesto of the same name released in 2021 by climate activist Andreas Malm. Described by one Letterboxd user as “Ocean’s 11 but made by the Safdie brothers,” the film chronicles the efforts of a crew of activists in their mission to, well, blow up an oil pipeline.
Suffering from grief and anger at the loss of her mother during an unexpected heatwave, the group’s leader, a radical activist named Xochitl, grows frustrated with the lack of actionable success in her college oil divestment group and drops out of college. She enlists an unlikely coalition: her classmate, Shawn; her childhood friend, Theo; her girlfriend, Alisha; Indigenous bomb-maker, Michael; rebellious Bonnie-and-Clyde-style couple, Rowan and Logan; and Dwayne, a local Texan whose land and family have been directly harmed by eminent domain and oil contamination.
Each joins the group for different reasons; whether through campus climate organizing, illness, dispossession, environmental contamination, anti-establishment anger, or a sheer appetite for risk, they all converge on the same objective. The group assembles in an abandoned house in West Texas, where they build two bombs meant to sever the pipeline at separate points and cut off the flow of oil. Their goal: to drive up crude oil prices and inspire others to embrace sabotage as a form of climate activism.
You may not have heard of the film, but the federal government did. According to Rolling Stone, 35 security bulletins were issued by more than 23 federal and state agencies in 2023. According to Goldhaber, that number has since risen to 42, which he claims is the most since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. Goldhaber said initial pushback from “the far-right media machine” abruptly ceased, remarking that “someone must have made a phone call and that was it.” But in 2024, the controversy was re-dredged by United States Senator and notorious Twitter pundit Ted Cruz, who took to X to accuse Harvard Law School of promoting domestic ecoterrorism for screening the film with a director Q&A. Later in 2024, Cruz went on to directly cite the film as justification for introducing anti-eco-terrorist legislation.
So, imagine my excitement when the Bryn Mawr Film Institute announced hosting a 35mm screening of “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” on September 28, including a Q&A with Daniel Goldhaber.
As the lights came back up after our screening and the applause fizzled out, Goldhaber took the stage. One audience member asked him directly, “Why haven’t you blown up a pipeline yet?” The audience laughed. Goldhaber paused, collected his thoughts, and replied earnestly with one word: “Cowardice.”
Why, then, would a self-described “coward” write and direct a film in which its protagonists detonate improvised explosives to disrupt a West Texas oil basin, drive up crude oil prices, and amplify their message to the masses? Goldhaber conceded he is not fully convinced by this particular form of praxis, but shared he was partly inspired by the disillusionment that followed the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. The protesters had clear demands that went unmet and, according to him, were later used as a pretext for increased police budgets nationwide.
This disillusionment did not, however, lead Goldhaber to embrace the escalation from divestment to criminal sabotage. He pointed out that corporations could seize on oil-price disruptions as a convenient pretext to ratchet up prices beyond actual inflation, with consumers left paying increases that never fully recede. The contradiction in Goldhaber’s position is hard to miss. “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” turns to sabotage because conventional activism appears insufficient, yet Goldhaber himself remains unconvinced that sabotage can produce meaningful change.
His skepticism extends beyond the act itself, meaning the film shook his faith in his own medium. “I got even more disenchanted with the notion of storytelling as a form of social change in this era,” Goldhaber said, “because there’s so much media, so much content, [and] so many things that we see every day telling us what to think, what to feel, how to be.” He argued that audiences have grown weary of stories that tell them exactly what to think, finding more value in ambiguity, while the “hyper-moralist” approach to film that gained traction in the early 2010s ultimately narrowed artists’ ability to grapple with the messiness of human experience.
What, then, was Goldhaber doing with the appearance of TikTok and Twitter in the film, particularly in the ending and epilogue? The film treats both platforms less as solutions to effective activism than as complications and hindrances to it. Social media can turn a spill into a spark and a spark into a flame, but the film questions what happens once activism becomes something to scroll past, share, and consume. The TikTok posted in the film’s final moments forces a central question to the surface: does visibility generate enough pressure to move people toward action, or does it simply dissipate into another form of engagement?
My question is not confined to the social movement reflected in the film — at Swarthmore, the struggle to turn student activism into institutional change has been playing out for decades. Our campus helped launch a modern student movement for fossil-fuel divestment more than a decade ago. Mountain Justice’s campaign grew from petitions and meetings into referenda, faculty resolutions, and, in 2015, a 32-day sit-in, yet the Board of Managers repeatedly declined to divest.
Our history with divestment stretches back even further. After an anti-apartheid divestment campaign began in 1978, the Board agreed in 1986 to proceed toward total divestment from companies tied to South Africa, a process Swarthmore completed in 1990. Just a year later, the Board adopted a 1991 investment policy prioritizing financial returns over social objectives, a policy that has since been reaffirmed. Our history now echoes in renewed calls for the college to cut ties with Cisco.
It seems Swarthmore’s history of political activism begs similar questions to “How to Blow Up a Pipeline”: must activism become radical to become effective? A sit-in can be ignored; a bomb on a pipeline cannot — yet I do not think this is the correct path, and Goldhaber’s own skepticism reflects why. Being impossible to ignore does not guarantee meaningful change, and escalation can carry consequences without achieving its intended goal. So if divestment campaigns can persist for years without having their demands met, while more radical tactics can result in arrest, discipline, or harm to oneself or others without guaranteeing change either, what is the effective middle ground for activism?
Between comparisons to the film “Armageddon” (1998) and discussions of current geopolitical events, Goldhaber actually offered a fairly clear answer. He described his film as an “aspirational” heist story, built around people with wildly different backgrounds, beliefs, and motivations who nevertheless found enough common interest to act together. He traced that creative choice to his frustration with political infighting on the left, which he felt hindered broad coalition-building and, in turn, meaningful change. Xochitl, Dwayne, Michael, Shawn, and the rest of the crew did not arrive at the pipeline through ideological uniformity; they came together because their shared objective outweighed the differences between them.
A similar idea recently coalesced in one of my classes — fear can make the promise of security feel worth almost any sacrifice, while genuine safety is more likely to emerge from strong, resilient communities and coalitions. Research on social-movement coalitions points in a similar direction, finding that coalitions can help movements mobilize the numbers necessary for success, while trust and commitment can give them staying power. Research on diverse coalitions further suggests that movements can draw strength from bringing different networks, resources, and experiences into collective action. Perhaps, then, the most radical thing about “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is not the explosion but the unlikely coalition that managed to blow it up together.
For us as students, I am not sure there is a tidy answer, and the film does not hand us one either. What it offers instead is a reminder that movements depend on people’s willingness to show up for one another, even when they do not agree on everything. The goal may not be to find the exact middle ground between conventional activism and radicalism, but to create enough trust, strategy, and shared purpose that being heard does not require burning down the very ground you hope to stand on.
You do not have to blow up a pipeline — and you probably should not. But you should find the people willing to stand beside you, build something durable together, and make yourselves impossible to ignore without sacrificing the principles or community you set out to defend.
