Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown

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A devastating critique of the forces propelling us beyond critical temperature limits, by the bestselling author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline The world is on the cusp of one and a half degrees of warming – just the rise it has committed itself to avoiding. Heat at such levels would be intolerable. Even before one and a half, seasons of climate disaster have struck with ever more devastating force, and yet a notion has taken hold that the cause is now lost: the intolerable has become unavoidable. The limit will be overshot – perhaps two degrees as well – and the best we can do is cool down the Earth at some later point, towards the end of the century, by means of technologies not yet proven.How did this happen? How could the idea of overshoot gain such traction? What forces are driving us into a climate that people – particularly poor people in the global South – won’t be able to cope with? In Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton present a history of the present phase of the crisis, likely to extend decades into the future, as the fossil fuel industry swims in the largest profits ever made. Money continues to flow into the construction of pipelines, platforms, terminals, mines – assets that will have to be destroyed for the planet to remain liveable. Too much heat has become officially acceptable because such revolutionary destruction is not. But should the rest of us abide by that priority?Unflinchingly critical of business-as-usual and the calls for surrender to it, sweeping in scope, stirring and sobering, Overshoot lays out the stakes for the climate struggle in the years ahead. About the Authors 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, such as, 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. What People Are Saying "In Overshoot, a rageful, radical and timely new history of the ecological present, the activist scholars Wim Carton and Andreas Malm ask how it is - how it could be - that the world seems to be surrendering to climate breakdown. 'What do we do when catastrophic climate chaos is a fact?' they ask. The apparent answer is 'Let it continue for the time being.'" The New York Times "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 "Carton and Malm's book, the first installment in a two-part series, is at once a detailed historiography, recounting the origins and development of the overshoot ideology, and a sweeping treatise on the political economy of late capitalism, using Marxist theory to argue that the very nature of the global economic system prizes fossil fuels over renewables...The power of [Overshoot] lies in its ability to name, at times with startling detail, the features of a logic that has affected all who work on climate change, from policy makers to journalists to academics to clean energy funders." Lylla Younes, Grist "A thorough and unsparing account of the recent history and politics of the attempt to mitigate fossil fuels, and the reasons for its significant failure." Martin Weiner, Public Seminar "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 dig deep into the way in which the capitalist and state fossil-fuel industries have propagandised, spreading disinformation and lies across every media outlet they can buy off or manipulate." Tim Barton, Hastings Independent "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 "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 "Overshoot exposes the socioeconomic and scientific underpinnings for why we should be acting boldly and decisively, and it brims with crucial ancillary facts." Michael Engelhard, Earth Island Journal "A gripping read throughout, and is accompanied by extensive, very useful end notes and references." Jan Lee, Earth.org "A tour de force of political ecology." Leonardo Lisi, Johns Hopkins' The Hub "Overshoot offers one of the most detailed explorations to date of how overshoot technologies like solar radiation management, geoengineering, and carbon removal came to be so dominant in scientific models...Overshoot leaves us with important strategic questions and conversations to have amongst global climate activists, workers, and academics, none more important than building out the revolutionary arm of the global climate and environmental movement." Andrew Ahern, Spectre "Brilliant." Peter Somerville, Ecologist "A clear-eyed analysis of the last half-decade or so of climate horrors ... Malm and Carton give a stark account of the fossil fuel industry’s resistance to stranding, and the alacrity with which it continues to fashion and exploit opportunities to convert reserves into productive assets." Brett Christophers, London Review of Books "Carton and Malm argue persuasively that such an upheaval is structurally necessary. Revolution may be both extremely messy and tremendously unlikely, but it will be no messier than accelerating climate collapse and no less likely than its alternatives: the failed liberal climate regime or technologically baseless ‘overshoot’." Chris Saltmarsh, Resurgence & Ecologist "Andreas Malm and Wim Carton have provided a penetrating analysis of the dire situation we are all in." Peter St. Clair, Brooklyn Rail "As any actual reader will know, Malm’s work is dangerous not because it provides detailed Anarchist Cookbook-style instructions for how to dismantle fossil fuel infrastructure, but because of its masterful deployment of the weapon of criticism: the meticulous and unforgiving analysis of the workings of fossil capital and its world-consuming consequences." Bernardo Jurema and Elias König, Protean Magazine "The mood of Abundance is that of a chirpy regional sales manager giving a PowerPoint; Overshoot’s is a wild-eyed buccaneer swinging onto a burning frigate with a cutlass in his teeth. Klein and Thompson blame liberals and liberalism for the decline of an abundant future; Malm and Carton blame fossil capital for planetary destruction, and they do not hesitate to analogize oil executives to Nazis, slave owners, serial murderers, and arsonists. Klein and Thompson believe that we live in a post-material political world, one constituted by ideas, narratives, and verbal persuasion, where “policy is downstream of values” and “political movements succeed when they build a vision of the future that is imbued with the virtues of the past.” Malm and Carton believe we live in a world ruled by the profit imperatives of capital….For Malm and Carton, it is impossible to take the scientific consensus on climate change seriously and still reject revolutionary transformations of economic and political life." Trevor Jackson, New York Review of Books "Along with The Long Heat, which will turn to “adaptation” and solar geoengineering, Overshoot shows how the center of global climate politics serves to protect the interests of fossil capital...[Overshoot] opens the very earth under our colloquial understanding that preserving a livable climate “threatens profits” and means “ending business as usual,” revealing the depths of the catastrophe and what its resolution might truly entail. For that alone, it remains one of the most important books about climate change in the canon." Genevieve Guenther, The Los Angeles Review of Books Show more