This chapter (titled "Breaking the Spell") is the heart of the book, directly making case that ultimately it is strategic at this stage in the climate struggle for the movement to have organised militant arms, similar to PFLP to the PLO, IRA to Sinn Fein, Black Liberation Army to the Panthers, etc, and that the degree of action required depends on the degree to which it may aid in pushing the movement forward without alienating it from regular people. The discussion takes place in the context of a global North whose activists seem categorically unwilling to adopt or even discuss options of escalation of tactics that he argues is wildly disproportionate to the severity of the problem, especially since the true victims of the crisis are spatially separated from the primary causes of the crisis - this inertia is the "spell" he aims to break.

I think the strongest part of this section is his forcing of a logical ratchet later in the chapter - he asks the reader to imagine a world that has already enjoyed a 6C increase in temperature, and suggests at that point we should assume that targeting fossil infrastructure for sabotage would be supported by almost everybody. If we accept this premise, we must also accept the logical conclusion that it would be too little, too late. That is, the temporal nature of the crisis is such that if we ever get to a place where the increase in temperature is too great, the correct time to have taken up force against it is in the past not in the present. Through this lens, knowing people are already dying in the global South (and North) from climate change and that the ruling class of the global North shows no interest of curbing emissions but rather expanding fossil infrastructure further, one is forced to engage with the question of "if not now, when?"

His pivot from SUV deflation pranks into discussing personal luxury emissions. He makes a very strong outline of what it is precisely about being rich that means you emit far more than the rest - with all this money you live a fantasy life where you can do whatever you want, meaning owning (and heating) a giant home, having a huge family, flying around the planet whenever and wherever you want, buy giant personal vehicles, own personal jets and yachts, etc. That principally it is these behaviors that add up to make a major difference. The paper he cites about 300 superyachts emitting more carbon in a year than the 10 million people in Burundi is a good one, and I share it with my classes every year. As he does in the first chapter, he focuses the reader on the center of the problem - the ownership class - but here he furthers the argument because it is not just they who build and maintain both fossil infrastructure and the hegemony that supports them, but also that with the wealth they enjoy they end up emitting an obscene and highly significant amount of CO2.

That being said, I think he does confuse things a little when he brings this back to SUVs. Maybe it is true in some countries in Europe that an SUV a symbol of membership to the 1%, but that is not really true where I live at all. He is a little vague and playful about whether SUVs should be targeted as apparently they were in France last week, but they shouldn't be confused with private jets or yachts. That being said I was surprised to read that the IEA says SUV adoption has been the second-greatest driver of climate change since 2010 - I'm not saying they're blameless but if he argues we need to make sure we're targeting the ownership class, there simply isn't enough ownership class to own all these SUVs.

I have more to say but looking up I already have a huge block of text no one is going to read. I'll leave off by just adding that I really like that he takes care to cite his sources well, I end up using these sources in discussions of climate change and they're almost always good sources.