Fire and Ice

Ecoterrorists strike Berlin again. Their target, and the consequences, were different this time.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” - Maya Angelou

For our money, there’s no better place to be on earth in October than the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada. The fall sun throwing shafts of early morning or evening light on harvested wheat and barley fields creates memorable colors in the crisp, clear air. The crunch of grain stubble underfoot, the sights and sounds and earthy smells of the prairie, and skies full of migrating waterfowl draw us back year after year.

But as much as we love that land and the people who live on that prairie, we do not want to be anywhere near there in January. Bitter cold and prairie winds commonly drive temperatures below zero. With January daytime highs averaging about 15°F (about -9°C), and nights around -2°F (about -19°C) – before factoring the wind chill temperature - if you’re going to farm or ranch there, you live with wicked cold.

Pride of Maple Creek, Saskatchewan | Quick Dick McDick on X

With the exception of its mountainous regions, most Americans probably don’t think of continental Europe as home to the kind of wicked cold we associate with Canada. But Berlin and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan are both at 52 degrees north latitude, and Berlin is actually a few minutes north (in latitude/longitude terms) of the capital of Canada’s resource-rich province.

Whether you’re on the prairies of rural Saskatchewan or in the metropolis of Berlin, losing electricity in January is suboptimal. People on the Canadian prairies are resourceful, hardy, and prepared for just about anything. But when parts of a suburban neighborhood in a large metropolitan city like Berlin lose power for 3-4 days in frigid temperatures, the situation becomes dangerous in a hurry.

Since 2011, the Berlin, Germany metro area has suffered nearly a dozen attacks by an elusive group of ecoterrorists using the name Vulkangruppe (“Volcano Group”) targeting transportation, telecommunications and, since 2018, power and utility infrastructure. In 2018, an arson attack on power lines in Charlottenburg caused a power outage for ~6,500 homes and 400 businesses. A 2021 attack on power lines cut electricity supply to the Tesla Gigafactory Berlin‑Brandenburg, construction site. German law enforcement authorities have never apprehended or prosecuted a single person for any of these crimes.

In May of 2023, we highlighted an independent film release timed for Earth Day in America the month prior. The movie “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is based on a book by Swedish Professor of Human Ecology and devout Eco-Marxist, Andreas Malm. The book’s title (emphasis ours) was How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning How to Fight in a World on Fire.

As we noted in Moral Hazards, Malm explicitly recommends destroying fossil fuel infrastructure by violent means. While the overwhelming majority of “environmentalists” globally do not engage in violence, Malm advocates for its use in no uncertain terms (emphasis added):

“So here is what this movement of millions should do, for a start: announce and enforce the prohibition (on new fossil fuel development). Damage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.”

The Volcano Group began attacking infrastructure before Malm published the book in 2021, but in 2024 the group turned their ecoterrorism toward public utilities. In March, their arson attack on a transmission tower conveying high voltage electric lines to the Tesla Gigafactory in Grünheide knocked out power to the plant. The four-day shutdown was costly for Tesla and put several thousand area residents in the dark in the process. Musk called Volcano Group “the dumbest ecoterrorists on earth.”

We published the full manifesto Volcano Group released after the 2024 attack in Moral Hazards. The environment and climate change are their principle motivations and justifications for resorting to violence.

In May 2025, they launched another arson attack on a radio mast and transformer station in Berlin-Grunewald, targeting a wealthy area. Afterward, the group commented that “we can no longer afford the rich.”

In the early morning hours on Saturday January 3^rd, Volcano Group struck again. Here’s how CNN described the attack:

Amid heavy snow in the German capital and temperatures plummeting to below freezing, nearly 100,000 people were left without power for several days after an alleged left-wing arson attack on Berlin’s power supply on Saturday caused a major blackout.

The activist group Vulkangruppe – or Volcano Group – claimed responsibility for the attack, citing the role that fossil fuels and AI play in accelerating the climate crisis.

Roughly 45,000 homes and more than 2,000 businesses in Berlin’s wealthy southwestern districts were affected by the outage, which lasted more than four days.

The outage is believed to be the longest in Berlin’s postwar history.

In public statements issued to German media on the day of the attack, and publicly on the internet the next, Volcano Group described their attack on the Lichterfelde natural gas power plant as follows:

“Our target was the high-voltage power lines, with the aim of causing significant damage to the company. We set fire to the cable bridge, which is not publicly documented and runs from the Lichterfelde power plant across the Teltow Canal, on the side facing the green space. We then short-circuited the charred cable strands with steel bars lying around.”

Lichterfelde power plant, cable bridge over Teltow canal | Google Earth

The ensuing power outage affected Berlin’s Steglitz-Zehlendorf district. It left nearly 100,000 residents without electricity or heat in freezing winter temperatures. Why that plant? It is a natural gas-fired power plant in an affluent part of Berlin.

Volcano Group’s ecoterrorists added to their malevolence by timing the attack to coincide with the weather. Data from the German Weather Service shows the temperature barely rose above freezing for a few hours the Saturday afternoon of the attack, while the next four mornings ranged from -7 to -10 degrees Celsius (19F to 14F), and afternoon highs remained below freezing.

Extreme cold kills nearly ten times as many people as extreme heat each year across the globe. An 83-year-old woman died after she was reportedly found near death in her flat by a relative and transported by ambulance to a local hospital. Berlin police did not provide details about her cause of death. Video from German media outlet Die Welt showed a 97-year-old woman on a cot in a shelter, chased from her home by the cold.

Train services and mobile phone connectivity in the area were disrupted. Five area hospitals were required to switch to emergency generators. It took Berlin’s electric grid operator, Stromnetz Berlin, four days to fully restore power to residents after the attack.

Berlin’s Mayor called the action “a terrorist attack by a left-wing extremist organization.” Berlin police began investigating the event as a terrorist attack, but German Federal investigators quickly took over what they are now describing as a “far-left militant act under federal terrorism investigation.” (Better late than never.)

Volcano Group’s nearly 5,000-word manifesto, wandering and at times tangential, provides clarity about how the violent left-wing ecoterrorists view the world, and who they blame. The choice of the target and who would be most affected were deliberate, with specific political motivations. Legacy media has conveniently and unsurprisingly provided limited details.

Hanlon’s Razor is the adage which states “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,” and defaulting to that reasoning when either ignorance or malevolence could explain an action or event is always wise. But when a political terror group’s violence shows you over and over again who they are, and they leave behind manifestos to make sure you get it – Hanlon’s Razor no longer applies. It is malevolence.

This was not a prank pulled out of the innocence of youth or ignorance. Nor was it vandalism.

This was politically motivated terrorism, with a specific green, anti-capitalist, anarchist flavor. It was ecoterrorism, and the perpetrators are ecoterrorists. It was malevolent, not ignorant.

Who is the Volcano Group? What did their latest manifesto say about why they committed this act of ecoterrorism? Who and what are these attacks attempting to harm?

Dennis Prager has argued that people often deny the existence of evil not because it is too dark to see, but when it is so bright, open, and obvious that acknowledging evil creates a moral obligation to fight it. While mainstream media will not publish the full manifesto, we will. We believe the world needs to see and understand the raw, unfiltered philosophy of those who would commit such acts, understand it, and fight it.

We begin with a brief overview of what is known about the Volcano Group (VG). Politically, VG is a far-left anarchist faction with radical environmental and anti-capitalist roots. Based in Germany and seemingly centered around Berlin-Brandenburg, its signatures are anonymity and violence-oriented direct action, and arson is its weapon of choice. Its targets to date have included rail facilities, data infrastructure and high-profile corporations like Tesla and digital communications technology organizations like the Heinrich Hertz Institute.

The Lichterfelde natural gas plant was the group’s first attempt to target a fossil fuel powered electricity generating station. It would be wise to assume Lichterfelde will not be the last.

Early attacks invoked the names of Icelandic volcanoes before the group officially adopted Vulkangruppe in the early twenty-teens. As noted earlier, no member has ever been identified, arrested, or charged with any crime in connection with about a dozen attacks to German infrastructure and commercial buildings since 2011.

“Climate change” and “resistance” to fossil fuels, capitalist “greed for energy,” oligarchs, the ruling class and “elites” are central themes in the manifestos left by VG activists after each attack. All are recurring subjects in the group’s online communications posted on independent media websites.

How would we describe the Volcano Group? The European and western Left are not “left” enough, its feeble actions milquetoast against the environmental crises facing the planet, and violence is both necessary and justified. Burn down capitalism, especially Big Business and Big Technology with their gargantuan appetite for energy and resources. Take from “the rich.” Torch the present iteration of The State, and replace it with a “sustainably” powered, low environmental impact, egalitarian utopia.

It is not obvious to us that Volcano Group has adequately considered how their sustainably powered egalitarian society stays warm and fully functions in their 52-degree north latitude Berlin utopia in January. But the impacts they caused last week on the southwest side of town are highly instructive and should be thoroughly contemplated by Germans and other Europeans residents tempted to sign up to the group’s views.

A blackout in Spain in April is one thing. In Berlin in January or February it is an entirely different kettle of fish. Frozen fish.

The afternoon after the attack, Volcano Group published a five-paragraph statement to the public on the German website de.indymedia.org. It included a similar statement released to several German legacy media outlets (which it named) the day of the attack, along with a “detailed explanation” we’ll refer to as their manifesto, noting:

“Due to political calculations, our statement has not been made public to this day, except for a brief broadcast on Radio Eins at 5:30 a.m. After that, all quotes disappeared following our intervention… The media outlets contacted are acting accordingly, in order to prevent any substantive discussion.”

If German media are reluctant to publish the manifesto, it is not “in order to prevent substantive discussion,” but rather to avoid shining sunlight on the dark, festering, violent corners of an ideology it embraced and carried enthusiastically on its platforms for two decades or more. Better to simply report a few verses of the manifesto as “extreme left-wing ideology” than to admit its source is the same religious hymnal from which you’ve been singing.

The public statement apologizes for the “inconvenience” caused “to the less affluent and vulnerable members of the population” who were affected (as it damn well should). The opposite is expressed for the “the owners of the many villas, the real estate companies, the embassies, and other elite wealthy individuals” in the area (all emphasis in below added):

“The rich and their self-centered, antisocial lifestyle are currently destroying the planet.”

And what justifies eco-terrorism that leaves nearly 100,000 area residents with no heat in the middle of winter? The idea that German authorities dare use natural gas to keep the power on:

“The sabotage of the gas-fired power plant is, among other things, a necessary measure against the expansion of fossil gas power plants in Germany.”

In that public statement, VG claims credit, providing details only the perpetrators would theoretically know:

For further authentication: Under the cable bridge, there were about 64 pipes, most of which were occupied with high-voltage cables. We connected these with four construction site spikes to ensure a short circuit.

Take a bow, Andreas Malm. Your 2021 book is clearly having the intended effect in Europe.

What follows are portions of the statement released to German media the day of the attack, along with excerpts from the lengthy manifesto.

INTRODUCTION

Volcanic group: Cut off the power of those in power

NEW YEAR GREETINGS 2026. HAVE COURAGE!

We can no longer afford the rich.

We can initiate the end of the imperial lifestyle.

We can stop the plundering of the Earth.

In the greed for energy, the earth is being drained, sucked dry, burned, ravaged, razed, raped, and destroyed. Entire regions are rendered uninhabitable by the heat. They simply burn up. Or habitats disappear beneath the waves during floods or due to rising sea levels.

VG takes responsibility for the attack and makes the target clear:

Last night, we successfully sabotaged the gas-fired power plant in Berlin-Lichterfelde. This caused power outages in the wealthier districts of Wannsee, Zehlendorf, and Nikolassee. Power outages were not the goal of the action; the fossil fuel industry was.

Volcano Group admonishes us that destroying the means of human survival in winter in the name of saving the planet is not ecoterrorism. Rather, it is a courageous, virtuous act that benefits society.

“Our public-benefit action is socially beneficial… The attack on the gas-fired power plant is an act of self-defense and international solidarity with all those who protect the Earth and life.”

The manifesto begins with a regurgitation of well-worn climate change tropes. Floods and rising sea levels, climate refugees, record-breaking atmospheric CO2 levels, the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, etc.

It calls out Big Tech’s “gigantic, energy-devouring computing and server centers. Which also drink our drinking water..” And notes other very real social consequences of the addiction to technology that plagues most in the advanced world, the fact that our gadgets:

“…bombard us on our screens with a lot of useless, supposedly important spam until we have unlearned to look our neighbor in the eyes. … We sit together with our friends while the feeds eat us up and sink into the devices instead of talking live.”

Volcano Group admits that they have no answers, other than to stop the planet’s destruction… by means of destruction. Of the existing systems, institutions, and the planet-killing infrastructure:

“We do not say we know the way out. But we know we must interrupt this destruction.”

Existing political parties and structures are not up to the tasks required according to the group. And the free market is the poison that only compounds the problems. The manifesto positions the group’s radical environmental ideology to the left of Europe’s existing parties (think about that):

“Please don’t come to us with the parties. Please don’t come to us with the brown alternatives in pinstripe suits and costumes. And not with the Greens or the Left either. Don’t come to us with the economy, whose free market will regulate the problem.”

All of the advanced nations of the global north, and all their political and economic systems, are part of the problem. Interestingly China, whose communist system would seemingly closely align with the central planning required to achieve VG’s objectives, is one of the culprits, leveraging the critical minerals required by “green” energy and technology:

“The countries of the global North, and soon also China among others, decide over the lives of all. China, as a communist, racist, and patriarchal dictatorship, can blackmail countries that are not in line with “rare earths” and thus gradually weave countries, cultures, political systems into the cocoon of the new dictatorial world power.”

The manifesto identifies rich elites as the core of the problem. Two tech titans get called out by name:

“And it is the rich who are the problem. It is the super-rich who are setting the world on fire… about 300 super-rich emit more CO² than the 110 poorest countries in the world. These criminals know about it. They don’t care… Zuckerberg wants more “masculine energy.” Musk “produces” children on an assembly line so that his clan survives.”

The manifesto decries the global North’s “imperial lifestyle” and its consequences on the planet, how German Social Democrat Party (SPD) economic liberals are part of the problem, and provides other attempts to justify for its violent actions. It provides details about the power plant and the attack the group conducted.

Importantly, Volcano Group’s manifesto serves as a call to action we would strongly advise western “leaders” to take seriously. Imploring violent direct-action from similar radical environmentalists in many other countries, their ecoterrorism anarchist message is clear:

“Sabotage the fossil infrastructure, the power grids, the plunder of the earth, the server centers, the chip industry and their suppliers, destroy the prerequisites for the automotive industry and the arms industry, for air traffic, the villas, the yachts, the spaceships, and the golf courses. Destroy the police centers, which are the guarantor for patriarchal property relations, because the earth belongs to itself and all beings and not to humans, or to men alone, and not to the richest among them.”

Traffic on social media appeared to suggest the possibility of a split between the original Volcano Group’s founders and the faction conducting this latest attack. Whether that turns out to have merit or not, it is clear that one some VG activists are prepared to carry out attacks on rail transportation and power and utility infrastructure, even at the risk of residents freezing in the dark in winter without heat in the midst of life-threatening cold weather.

In Moral Hazards, we wrote:

But in the post-modern world, where the internet and social media exist simultaneously as a powerful tool for human interaction and as a political weapon, the spread of ideological rot is a force multiplier for violence, fear, and terrorism. Add in a twisted moral justification for nihilism and direct it at foundations of modern living – energy – and the radicals at both ends of the political spectrum are playing a new game that has no precedent in modern Western history.

It would be unwise to underestimate the potential consequences that violence by disaffected, angry, nihilistic radicals on both sides of the political debate could have on western civilization if they turn their “moral” outrage on energy infrastructure.

Driven by an anarchist, violent form of ecoterrorism, this latest attack on a natural gas fired power plant in Berlin, Volcano Group, combined with its calls for more of the same by other activists, make it clear that the green shoots of the seeds Andrea Malm planted in his 2021 book are sprouting. We fear they are likely to become more widespread and dangerous.

As EcoLeftist groups in Europe and America become increasingly frustrated by the climate policy backsliding that began in the U.S. and will likely spread out of necessity (cost, keeping industry, and the lights on), attacks targeting energy infrastructure increase in likelihood. Given the content of the manifesto, we could envision an attack on a natural gas pipeline at a project where Big Tech brings natural gas to power plants behind the meter next to data centers. Ecoterrorists destroying a pipeline that feeds a gas-fired power plant sending electricity to hyperscaler’s data centers would be a logical call combining Andreas Malm’s demented green ideology and Volcano Group’s ecoterrorism actions.

We close by noting that Volcano Group’s actions and its latest manifesto allow us to confidently dispense with the benefit of the doubt Hanlon’s Razor cautions. Ecoterrorism is not ignorance – though it is likely partly born from it. It is unequivocal malevolence.

When malevolent people have repeatedly demonstrated their violence with fire and destruction, this leaving tens of thousands in the dark without electricity or heat in the dead of winter, we’d best not miss the chance to follow Maya Angelou’s advice this time.

Believe them now.

(At the time of publication, German authorities have provided no new information about the suspects. We will update readers via Notes as new information becomes available.)

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If you would like to read the full public statements issued by Volcano Group since the attack, translated to English by Grok, they can be found below.

(All bold emphasis is added.) A link to the original statements in German can be found here.

Volcano Group Manifesto, January 4, 2026.

Title: Shutting down fossil power plants is manual work. Have courage. Militant New Year’s greetings 2026. Statement and supplement. 4.1.2026

Date: 4.1.2026

Body of the Text:

From: Volcano Group: Cutting off the juice to the rulers on: 04.01.2026 - 14:01

Topics:

Worldwide (/worldwide)

The statement below was sent by us yesterday, 3.1.2026, to Spiegel, taz, RBB24, RBB Television, and Radio Eins. Our statement has not been made public until today due to political calculation, or only briefly at 5:30 on Radio Eins. After that, all quotes disappeared due to intervention. This is not in the interest of the political officials at Stromnetz Berlin, the city of Berlin, the economy, the police, and other political forces. The addressed media act in this sense to prevent a substantive debate. Stromnetz Berlin initially downplayed the damage from the fire on the cable bridge. Although Stromnetz Berlin managed to compensate for the sabotage of the power plant in about 50,000 households, presumably by purchasing expensive electricity. Why this did not succeed in about 40,000 households in Nikolassee, Wannsee, Zehlendorf, and parts of Lichterfelde is the question that Stromnetz owes to the public. The ball is in Stromnetz Berlin’s court. We would like to expressly apologize once again for the inconveniences to the non-wealthy part of the population that relies on help. They were not the target of the action. We ask the population for mutual solidarity help. In particular, we ask for support for people in need of care and their relatives, the penniless people in these districts, and the withdrawn people overwhelmed by the situation.

For the owners of the many villas, for the real estate companies, the embassies, and other elite rich in the area, our sympathy is limited as already mentioned. The rich and their egocentric, unsocial way of life are currently destroying the planet. The sabotage of the gas power plant is, among other things, a necessary measure against the expansion of fossil gas power plants in Germany. In our statement, we explain the connections between wealth, imperial lifestyle, and the destruction of our basis of life, which we all must oppose. We ask the residents of Bremer Street for discretion. For further authentication: Under the cable bridge, there were about 64 pipes, most of which were occupied with high-voltage cables. We connected these with four construction site spikes to ensure a short circuit.

INTRODUCTION

Volcano Group: Cutting off the juice to the rulers

NEW YEAR’S GREETINGS 2026. HAVE COURAGE!

We can no longer afford the rich.

We can initiate the end of the imperial lifestyle.

We can stop the plunder of the earth. In the greed for energy, the earth is drained, sucked out, burned, tormented, burned down, raped, destroyed. Entire regions are made uninhabitable by the heat. They simply burn. Or habitats disappear under floods due to flooding or rising sea levels. Shutting down fossil power plants is manual work. Have courage.

We know we must interrupt this destruction. We know we are not alone. Do not give up hope for a world where life has a place and not the greed for money, power, and destruction.

Tonight, we successfully sabotaged the gas power plant in Berlin-Lichterfelde. There were power outages in the more affluent districts of Wannsee, Zehlendorf, and Nikolassee. Power outages were not the goal of the action, but the fossil energy industry. We apologize to the less affluent people in southwest Berlin. For the many villa owners in these districts, our sympathy is limited. We explain why in our contribution below.

Our community-oriented action is socially meaningful. We have also commented on this in more detail in our letter about the action. The attack on the gas power plant is an act of self-defense and international solidarity with all who protect the earth and life. The infrastructures that serve the “technological attack” and promote the destruction of the earth can be sabotaged. Fossil energy production can be stopped. Smart city metropolises, like Berlin is supposed to become, can be prevented. With Stromnetz Berlin, a building block of this catastrophic vision of a smart city has been hit.

For us, it is self-evident that we have excluded the endangerment of human lives at all times. Our detailed statement is attached to this information.

NEW YEAR’S GREETINGS 2026. HAVE COURAGE!

Greed for Power, Greed for Energy, Greed for Destruction

In the greed for energy, the earth is drained, sucked out, burned, tormented, burned down, raped, destroyed. Entire regions are made uninhabitable by the heat. They simply burn. Or habitats disappear under floods due to flooding or rising sea levels. Thus, several thousand inhabitants of Tuvalu in the Pacific are already seeking refuge in Australia.

In the past year, the CO² concentration in the atmosphere rose to 423.9 parts carbon dioxide per million. A value that trumps all previous ones again. At the same time, climate scientists agree that the huge transatlantic ocean currents will break off sooner or later due to global warming. This collapse of the ocean currents, which has so far provided the North with a mild climate, is only part of the catastrophe that awaits us. The extent of this devastation is simply blanked out, abstracted, and discussed in global climate conferences until the extent of the destruction has disappeared in tables and declarations of intent. But the hunger for energy is insatiable and eats through the earth’s crust and our lives, among other things, to feed artificial intelligence, which then spits out stereotypes, brain farts, and confuses, disorients, and/or manipulates us. While language, expression, and vitality are further reduced, mutilated, and limited with each new “learning” of the AI with the previous data.

We feed our data to the “cloudy” called “clouds,” which are nothing more than gigantic, energy-devouring computing and server centers. Which also drink our drinking water and excrete numbers that bombard us on our screens with a lot of useless, supposedly important spam until we have unlearned to look our neighbor in the eyes. Having become dependent on the small devices, we are always ready to send an emoji and feed the “big brother,” whose algorithm registers our norm deviations and answers our search queries before we have finished thinking the thought. We sit together with our friends while the feeds eat us up and sink into the devices instead of talking live. We operate our own surveillance, and it is total. The tech corporations are in the hands of men of power, whom we give to them. We devour the colorful images that the machines filter and set before us and starve at the screens from loneliness and alienation. We become swiping zombies who run each other over in traffic. We are prisoners in a digital system that increasingly denies us the right to exist if we do not submit to the rules of the game and do not move our lives to social media, chat, artificial realities. We get no money, can book or buy nothing in cash. Without access to the digital world, we are increasingly excluded, lose connection to what seems normal. We are afraid of what happens to us and bury ourselves even deeper in the screens instead of turning off the devices and taking away the power over us from those who track, follow, observe, and manipulate us. We make ourselves blind to the knowledge for whose dissemination Edward Snowden risked his life. We make ourselves deaf to the silent screams of the indigenous people, the farmers, who see the planet’s basis of life burn before their eyes. On the contrary, we feed the fire that encircles us with every post and lets the temperatures rise to a new record every year. One day, we will simply thirst and starve sitting in front of the glowing screens or the dead devices. It is no longer hard to imagine this. We do not say we know the way out. But we know we must interrupt this destruction. Hedonism can no longer capture us once we have smelled the fear sweat that spreads when there is no way out anymore. No forward and no back. Only the horror of where we as humanity have landed. When the question falls back on us, what did you actually do to prevent what is coming upon us? You saw it coming, the survivors ask us, the next generations. Please don’t come to us with the parties. Please don’t come to us with the brown alternatives in pinstripe suits and costumes. And not with the Greens or the Left either. Don’t come to us with the economy, whose free market will regulate the problem. Economy and politics deal daily with death. With dictatorships and butchers. Concerns go to zero when it comes to satisfying the hunger for energy, for example. Russia still delivers gas to Europe via Nord Stream 1. And the U.S.A. wants Venezuela’s oil. That’s why military attacks are happening now. And fracking gas comes by ship from all over the world. Currently 79% from the U.S.A.! Fracking in its production is extremely environmentally harmful. Already in extraction, 6 to 10 percent methane loss is assumed, which additionally heats the atmosphere.

95% of the burned gas in Germany is imported. At climate summits, only tactical lip service comes out because the oil-producing countries have no interest in climate protection but in money. Because the metropolitan countries align their politics with money and growth, the lobbyists in Europe are just being given the out from the combustion engine ban.

The German Economics Minister Katharina Reiche, for example, was State Secretary in the Federal Government’s Ministry of Transport, lobbyist at the Association of Municipal Companies (VKM), and manager at the E.ON subsidiary Westenergie. E.ON Minister Reiche poses as a supporter of hydrogen but mainly relies on natural gas. So she wants tenders for additional gas power plants with a capacity of 10 gigawatts, which are to go online by 2031, which corresponds to about 25 new power plants. 20 billion euros are earmarked for these new gas power plants.

Reiche would prefer to postpone Germany’s climate neutrality from 2045 to 2050 anyway. The main human causes of climate destruction are not those who suffer the most from it, who pay for it with their health and lives. The people of the global South are already paying the highest price. The countries of the global North, and soon also China among others, decide over the lives of all. China, as a communist, racist, and patriarchal dictatorship, can blackmail countries that are not in line with “rare earths” and thus gradually weave countries, cultures, political systems into the cocoon of the new dictatorial world power. Over 85% of the world’s refined “rare earths” come from China. And it is the rich who are the problem. It is the super-rich who are setting the world on fire. In the East, in the West, in the South, and in the North. 60 percent of the super-rich’s investments worldwide go into investments in gas and oil. And about 300 super-rich emit more CO² than the 110 poorest countries in the world. These criminals know about it. They don’t care. Their greed for even more wealth and power sets the standard that everyone follows. They are preparing their own “salvation” on secluded islands or in space when they have burned this earth. A few years ago, we would have laughed at these misogynistic weirdos, but they mean it deadly serious. Zuckerberg wants more “masculine energy.” Musk “produces” children on an assembly line so that his clan survives.

No one solves the “problem” from the perpetrators. And certainly not is the basic problem solved regionally. On the contrary – the whole world is arming up for the last great battle over raw materials, water, food, and access to strategically important regions to prevent or at least delay the exit of their own spheres of power as much as possible. So that the population can be offered participation for as long as possible. So that we in the global North, spun into a world of consumption and an imperial lifestyle, participate and confirm the power with its increasingly authoritarian concepts. Because it’s no longer about freedom for all, it’s only about security for some. The security promise is an exclusive right of those who can enforce it for themselves. We let the losers pay for our imperial lifestyle, those who are too weak to defend themselves against “us.” We reject the offers of participation in a burned world with our militant action. That’s why we carried out the action on the gas power plant in Lichterfelde.

We do not prevent our own entanglement in an imperial lifestyle at the expense of other lives, but we set a signal. Once again, as many people and groups do in different places in the world. As some groups here, such as volcano groups, have been doing steadily since 2011.

We know these words do not reach many people – they are so far removed from the idea of a world and a coexistence that is not based on destruction that these words reach them as little as the misery of the world, which is transported in high resolution over the screens daily. We can list facts for kilometers and find no hearing.

We are not the first and we will not be the last to try to reach people with words anyway. We are not the first and last to resort to sabotage, because we are playing for time. At the same time, we and others use the gained time to reverse the destruction of all forms of life. They call us eco-terrorists, yet we respect life. They call us irresponsible, yet we take responsibility to end this imperial, destructive lifestyle.

Our community-oriented action is socially meaningful. We try to interrupt the exploitation of the earth, prevent the CO² deaths, and stop the diseases associated with the climate catastrophe. We also try to put an end to species extinction and make the world more livable for all again. Those who call us “eco-terrorists” are themselves the true eco-terrorists, formulating this in the sense of selfish interests and power calculation.

We see the unconscious who think they are smart and consider climate change fake news. Who consider empathy wokeness and only have their own advantage in mind, without recognizing how the things around them are interconnected. Behind this spreading denial of facts, we see a system of those who invest in the destruction of the earth. It is the same ones who hold power over the tech corporations, allowing them to breed a species of human that applauds when people drown, thirst, starve, or otherwise perish in attempting to reach Europe or the USA. These manipulated welfare chauvinists and party supporters second Trump, Modi, Miley, Netanyahu, Merz, Weidel, Putin, Höcke, Orban, Vans, Xi, and whatever they are all called, in the “defense” of freedom. The freedom to decide who must die and who not. Who gets access to wealth and who not. Every refugee who died fleeing has its counterpart here in a deep depression. Every starved person makes us fatter and sicker here.

We people of the global North, of the rich metropolises, have no benefit from the misery of other people. Material wealth is no wealth in the sense of an idea that can delight in the life of all.

If only in every country a small part of the population says: “Enough now. Not with us anymore, not in my name. No one may die at our expense anymore.” If we refuse to function and play along, if we become sand in the gears of a machine that we have been co-feeding so far, then something moves, then we can develop the power to stop the causes once and for all.

But we need an International of refusal of a progress that is based only on destruction, murder, and robbery. We call desperately, angrily, and determinedly at the same time and join the calls of others: Sabotage the fossil infrastructure, the power grids, the plunder of the earth, the server centers, the chip industry and their suppliers, destroy the prerequisites for the automotive industry and the arms industry, for air traffic, the villas, the yachts, the spaceships, and the golf courses. Destroy the police centers, which are the guarantor for patriarchal property relations, because the earth belongs to itself and all beings and not to humans, or to men alone, and not to the richest among them. This cry of despair is also a wake-up call, a cry of hope, and it has no local enclosure, it is global. We are talking about an International that does not invoke a patriarch, not the gallery of heads that the communists revere, but that starts from different premises. That is understood in China, in Europe, the USA, in India and Pakistan, in every corner of the earth where Starlink has its reception, in every country where the deadly drone seeks its target and needs electricity for it. In every country where without energy the warring forces are blind and people can leave the battlefields without anyone being able to give orders to kill them. In which the stock exchanges no longer function and the Bitcoins can no longer be called up.

We say it again, we have ideas but no final answers about the path. But about the goal. Every contribution counts. But trying everything within our reach to end this imperial lifestyle cannot be wrong. The progress of destruction is man-made, it can also be stopped by us. In the steps of resistance, in the echoes of diverse languages and cultures, in what others send to us, we will find and recognize each other. It’s about the earth. It’s about life. It’s against immature stupid men at the levers of power who act as if they were operating a toy excavator. There is no time for frustration regarding the resistance to man-made climate change and the growing number of deniers of this change. We must learn from defeats, not by going into parties or privatizing or settling into collapse, but by setting facts. Shutting down a gas power plant is one of these facts, but it can also be land, square, and forest occupations, destruction of golf courses and airports of the rich. Imagination is required and our determination. Switch off for the greed for energy, switch off for the digital management of life, switch off for the progress of destruction. Today we attacked the gas and steam turbine combined heat and power plant in Lichterfelde. The power plant produces a total electrical output of 300 MW on a natural gas basis. The target was the high-voltage lines to cause high damage to the company. We set fire to the cable bridge, which is not publicly registered and leads from the Lichterfelde power plant over the Teltow Canal, towards the green areas. We additionally short-circuited the charred cable strands with steel rods lying around.

The energy company will have to buy electricity on the free market in real time to fulfill the contractual obligations they have entered into with the delivery of electricity as soon as the failure of the delivery is noticed. We do not assume that we have disconnected 100,000 households from the grid, but that we have only disconnected them from the grid of the gas power plant. The multiply secured energy network will reconnect the households via other energy lines in the shortest time through the widely branched power grid. The short-term purchase of energy at market prices may be more expensive than at the time when the energy company bought the electricity on the Leipzig Electricity Exchange (EEX). To avoid high contractual penalties to the individual energy consumers, they have no other choice. We short-circuited over twenty 110 KV lines and did not include the district heating pipes in the attack. But we cannot rule out effects on district heating.

Our action differs in practice from the action in Adlershof on 9.9.2025 against the technology center. There it was a feeder line that neglected redundant security. In the case of the “Volcano Group Switch off Tesla,” which took Tesla off the grid by destroying a feeder line and affected about 5000 private households, the situation was similar. In our case, electricity is not cut off in front of an object like the technology park or the gigafactory so that this object goes into blackout, but the power plant with its wide branching of cables is disconnected from the grid. It still produces electricity but can no longer feed it into the grid and thus no longer deliver. However, the supply capability of private households via other power plants remains and is also intended by the authorities and energy giants. Nevertheless, it is not excluded that our action draws individual transformer stations into greater suffering.

The supply with district heating (thermal output around 690 MW) has not been interrupted by us. The individual households are not the target of the action. The goal of the action is to inflict high damage on the gas industry and the greed for energy.

If there are longer outages in private households, we want to make it clear here that they are not the target of the attack. And this effect was neither intended nor calculated by us. We have excluded the endangerment of human lives at all times.

Since we do not have one hundred percent certainty about what chain reactions, which are not in our area of responsibility, our shutdown of the gas plant could have, we have the following request to possibly affected households: Ring at your neighbors’ doors. Consider supplying older or needy people in case of a power outage. Supply yourself and other people by giving solidarity support. Inform each other. The combined heat and power plant in Lichterfelde was a one hundred percent subsidiary of the state-owned Swedish energy group Vattenfall AB with an annual turnover of 7.6 billion euros and the fourth largest electricity group after E.ON, RWE, EnBW.

From 2021, the power plant was “re-municipalized” and belongs to the city of Berlin. Thus, the power plant is also partially dismantled and converted to further capacities. This only sounds good at first glance. Stromnetz Berlin GmbH is currently making extensive investments in the expansion of Berlin’s grid infrastructure to meet the growing demands of the so-called energy transition. For this, the subsidiary of Stromnetz Berlin BEN (Berliner Energie und Netzholding GmbH) receives 380 million from the European Investment Bank - “to prepare for the advancing energy transition.” The “energy transition” is a smokescreen that conceals that it is about energy without transition and without ifs and buts. The main thing is energy, sustainable or not. So Stromnetz Berlin wants to double the capacities by early 2030. The goal is a “modern” digitized power grid. This means concretely hundreds of thousands of meters of new power cables and grid components as well as more digital services. We can imagine that this is not done out of neighborly love. Ostensibly, it is about the city’s supply security, but upon closer inspection, it is about a growth delusion in a government-forced competition. The battlefield is the city and our living conditions. The city is a commodity. The competitiveness with other major cities is to force the new settlement of more start-ups, more arms-researching and -producing companies, more digital service providers and tech companies that devour even more electricity than the millions of Berliners consume privately. It is also about e-mobility, which of course has no goal of promoting public transport, but more sheet metal rolling through the streets with lithium batteries, more AI-dominated systems that spit out self-driving private vehicles. This then runs under “expansion of infrastructure,” which will cost the state another 3 billion euros by 2029, after the A100 eats deeper into the city. Investments of up to 770 million euros are being made for the renewal of the power grid.

This all sounds more than boring, but it is of great importance for us as people in Berlin and Brandenburg, because it is our life, our land, our water, our future that is being negotiated here. For Giffey, the economic liberal of the SPD, the expansion of grid capacities and new power lines is a central prerequisite for Berlin as an investment location. These economic-liberal destroyers of a livable future think the city in numbers, sums of money, growth rates, and competitions with other cities. People do not count, or only as low-income or high-income quantities. The first part must be managed and contained somehow – also by means of police and repressive measures and thus walling in a park in Kreuzberg. And the other part is flattered, because its money boosts consumption. For this part, the city is made smart and pretty. Berlin is a brand and is traded as such.

For Giffey, the expansion of the grid corresponds to the rapid digitization of everyday life, as if it were a force of nature breaking over us. As if the TECH corporations and the tech fascists do not decide on the enforcement of AI, which will double global electricity consumption by 2030 according to the Federal Ministry of Economics. As if politics and economic liberals do not decide themselves when no cash payment is possible in BVG buses and people are forced to digital payments, whose tracking is also ensured, in a recalcitrant city where there is a tradition of militant movements that need to be controlled. As if politics does not decide when it gives the police and secret services the surveillance software Palantir, whose driving force is a fascist from the USA and whose software provides for a digital net to monitor people. Giffey advertises the expansion of the grid with “our” companies and the increasing electrification of mobility: “Out of love for Berlin, the most modern power grid for the climate-neutral capital.” And skilled in taking the edge off criticism, Stromnetz Berlin has involved “citizens’ councils” as fig leaves, which can exercise ridiculous participations in trivialities but have nothing to say about the direction of energy policy decisions and the design of the city. After Vattenfall and the city were forced by a broad citizens’ initiative to initiate a “re-municipalization,” a nationalization of the power grid and install BEN as owner, they continue business as usual and the madness continues unabated. The vision is clear: Smart City - Stromnetz Berlin says it: “Berlin is on the way to becoming one of the leading smart city metropolises. In all areas of urban life, this transformation process has already begun.” And: “intelligent infrastructures and especially the ‘smart grid’ (intelligent power grid) will form the foundation - as a networked operating system, it will become the backbone and catalyst of the energy transition.” Apart from the fact that we consider the term “energy transition” eyewash and would replace it with “technological attack on fellow-human relations,” we agree.

The concrete attacks on the Adlershof technology park, on Tesla’s gigafactory, on the infrastructure of the Vattenfall Reuter coal power plant, and on the Vodafone node in Adlershof are reference points of our action, as well as the many militant actions that set accents against the destruction of our earth. Even if these sabotage acts cause high financial losses, they cannot force a political change of direction as single (!) actions. But they point a way and a direction that we suggest to all metropolises. Paralyze the infrastructures that serve the “technological attack” and promote the destruction of the earth. The consensus on participation in the project of an imperial lifestyle is terminable. A social mass movement against the global destruction of the bases of life and against all wars and resource plundering goes hand in hand with the ability to sabotage the power grids and energy arteries.

The attack on the gas power plant is an act of international solidarity with all who protect the earth and life. Our resistance is diverse and often we still need too much time in the fog of disinformation, the different cultural accesses, the linguistic differences to recognize the commonalities. But we are confident that in the dark, the light is not far. If we place this action in the context of a worldwide resistance, whether in the USA, Latin America, Asia, China or Russia, in Europe or Australia, directed against all manifestations of dominance, rule, and destruction of the earth, we are confident that we will be heard, that these contributions will be translated, that translated contributions reach us, that on the winding paths of resistance a subversive communication takes place that recognizes each other. And intervenes. And this possibly without shedding blood, but determined to cut off the juice to the rulers.

Volcano Group: Cutting off the juice to the rulers

We can no longer afford the rich

Initiate the end of the imperial lifestyle

Shutting down fossil power plants is manual work

Stop the plunder of the earth.

Freedom for all antifas, climate activists, and all the other recalcitrant.

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