Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown

by Andreas Malm, Wim Carton

Overview

A scathing critique of proposals to geoengineer our way out of climate disaster by the bestselling author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline

It might soon be far too hot on this planet. What do we do then? In the era of "overshoot," schemes abound for turning down the heat–not now, but a few decades down the road. We’re being told that we can return to liveable temperatures by means of technologies for removing CO2 from the air or blocking incoming sunlight.If they even exist, such technologies are not safe.

They come with immense uncertainties and risks. Worse, like magical promises of future redemption, they might provide reasons for continuing to emit in the present. But do they also hold some potentials? In Overshoot two leading climate scholars subject the plans for saving the planet after it’s been wrecked to critical study. Carbon dioxide removal is already having effects, as an excuse for continuing business as usual, while geoengineering promises to bail out humanity if the heat reaches critical levels.

Both distract from the one urgent task: to slash emissions now. There can be no further delay. The climate revolution is long overdue, and in the end, no technology can absolve us of its tasks.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781804294000
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	10/22/2024
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	818 KB

About the Author

Wim Carton is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, Sweden. He's the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics. His work has appeared in top journals such as Nature Climate Change, WIRES Climate Change and Antipode.

Andreas Malm is Associate Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of several acclaimed books, most recently, with the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. His book How to Blow Up a Pipeline is an international bestseller and has been turned into a feature film.

Table of Contents

Preface

i. THE LIMIT IS NOT A LIMIT
1. Chronicle of Three Years Out of Control
2. When Is It Too Late?
3. The Rise of Overshoot Ideology

ii. FOSSIL CAPITAL IS A DEMON
4. The Political Economy of Asset Stranding (or, Gore and Blood Come to Wall Street)
5. How to Kill a Spectre
6. We Are Going to Be Driven by Value

iii. INTO THE LONG HEAT
7. Ten Theses on the Overshoot Conjuncture
8. Induce the Panic
9. Chronicle of One More Year of Madness

Acknowledgements
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/12/2024

The world is blithely blowing past agreed upon global warming “limits,” duped by unprovable assurances that eventually new technologies will be invented to remove the excess carbon from the atmosphere, according to this eye-opening and dire account. Climate scholars Malm (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and Carton delve into the recent history of the climate crisis to explain how this irrationally nonchalant attitude toward “overshoot” emerged (“What spell been cast on this world...?”). Over the course of a robust economic analysis of how the fossil fuel industry functions—especially focusing on its post-Covid lockdown boom, when fossil fuel companies used record profits to invest in record amounts of new fossil fuel infrastructure—the authors come to the startling conclusion that the only thing stopping the world from solving global warming is fossil fuel companies’ fear of “asset stranding.” The inside secret, the authors argue, is that there is no comparable profit to be made in renewables; fossil fuel companies thus have nothing to invest in that will give them the same rate of return. In a rousing conclusion, Malm and Carton survey potential economic solutions and come down in favor of a “mercilessly confrontational” approach: scrubbing the fossil fuel industry’s “assets” fully off the books, the same way enslavers were not “compensated” in the postbellum South. Readers will be overwhelmed but galvanized. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"The world has surrendered to climate breakdown. But that failure does not require us to continue surrendering to the power of fossil capital. In this brilliant and urgent analysis, Malm and Carton show how the failure came about, explore moments when it might have been resisted, explode the myth of "overshoot" that sustains business-as-usual, and lay out the challenge that a revolutionary climate politics must take on."
—Timothy Mitchell, author of Carbon Democracy

"Malm and Carton expose how the harsh reality of the financial and physical infrastructures of fossil fuels, in partnership with unrealistic models reliant on ‘negative’ emissions, continue to trap us on the highway to hellish warming."
—Julia Steinberger, Professor of Societal Challenges of Climate Change at the University of Lausanne

"A brilliant and impassioned book, which explains why greenhouse gas reduction targets are repeatedly missed–and why they will never be met until the demon of fossil capital is laid to rest."
—Nancy Fraser, author of Cannibal Capitalism

"The world we called unliveable and unforgivable just five years ago is now an imminent reality. There is no better map of that world, which we now must navigate, or our journey to it, through acquiescence and normalization, or the brutal path forward, intolerable but necessary, than this book. Please read it."
—David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth

"The world is blithely blowing past agreed upon global warming “limits,” duped by unprovable assurances that eventually new technologies will be invented to remove the excess carbon from the atmosphere, according to this eye-opening and dire account. Climate scholars Malm (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and Carton delve into the recent history of the climate crisis to explain how this irrationally nonchalant attitude toward “overshoot” emerged... In a rousing conclusion, Malm and Carton survey potential economic solutions and come down in favor of a “mercilessly confrontational” approach: scrubbing the fossil fuel industry’s “assets” fully off the books, the same way enslavers were not “compensated” in the postbellum South. Readers will be overwhelmed but galvanized."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"As the crisis careens out of control, Carton and Malm have done the world a great service. Their book is required reading to understand how the people who are supposed to be planning for a better future are failing us and failing the planet."
—Christopher Ketcham, The Fern

"A relentless history of climate collapse. Compiling all the dates and names future humans might seek out to understand how their lives were forfeited by past generations, Malm and Carton detail a history of capital, land, and discourse, naming the profiteers and alarmists along the way. It’s a history so contemporary to read it written in past tense feels like seeing our own coffins."
—Autumn Wright, Unwinnable

"Malm and Carton warn that the world has been seduced by the false promise of "overshoot"-the notion that blowing past carbon emissions goals is no big deal because technology will come along in the future to fix it. They marshal extensive evidence to prove that this strain of tech utopianism is a dangerous, unfounded belief promoted by oil companies. It's a galvanizing wake-up call for a world grown complacent."
—Best Books of 2024, Publishers Weekly

"In Overshoot we get a clear picture of where we, as a globe, are at regarding Climate Change policy. What we knew, when we knew it, and what we are doing about the crisis that definitely has Doom as a consequence of limited or non-action."
—John Kendall Hawkins, Counterpunch

From the Publisher