Andreas Malm

Andreas Malm (born 1977) is a Swedish journalist and academic, who holds an associate professorship in human ecology at Lund University. He is a member of the editorial board of the scholarly journal Historical Materialism and has been described as a Marxist.

Naomi Klein, who quoted Malm in her book This Changes Everything, has called him "one of the most original thinkers on the subject" of climate change.

Malm initially worked as a journalist. As part of his association with the Central Organisation of Swedish Workers (SAC), he was active in the Swedish Anarcho-Syndicalist Youth Federation (SUF) around 2000 and wrote for the press organ of SAC, Arbetaren, for a number of years. Having attended a summer camp of the Swedish Socialist Party in 1997, he joined it in 2010.

In 2014, Malm obtained a PhD in social and economic geography from Lund University with a thesis on Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power in the British Cotton Industry, c. 1825–1848, and the Roots of Global Warming, supervised by Alf Hornborg [sv] and examined by Timothy Mitchell. He released a reworked version of his thesis as Fossil Capital, published by Verso Books.

During a conference at Stockholm University in December 2023 on Palestinian resistance, Malm celebrated the "heroic armed resistance in Gaza". He thus expressed his “astonishment” and his “tears of joy” following the Hamas attacks against Israel on 7 October 2023.

Malm has authored several books and is a contributor to the magazine Jacobin. In his book How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, published in 2021, he argued that sabotage and property damage are logical components of the movement against human-caused climate change. The book was adapted into the 2022 narrative film How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

     On the far right, you see this aggressive defense of cars and fossil fuels that verges on a desire for destruction, ... Denial is as central to the development of the climate crisis as the greenhouse effect.

In The Guardian, the geographer Brett Christophers wrote that Malm's research suggests that manufacturers during the Industrial Revolution switched from water power to steam not because steam was cheaper but because it was more profitable. In particular, steam allowed prime movers to be near cheap labor rather than bound to suitable waterways.