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The Long Heat:Climate Politics When It’s Too Late
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A scathing critique of proposals to geoengineer our way out of climate disaster, by the bestselling authors of Overshoot
The world is crossing the 1.5°C global warming limit, perhaps exceeding 2°C soon after. What is to be done when these boundaries, set by the Paris Agreement, have been passed? In the overshoot era, schemes proliferate for muscular adaptation or for new technologies to turn the heat down at a later date by removing CO2 from the air or blocking sunlight. Such technologies are by no means safe; they come with immense risks and provide an excuse for those who would prefer to avoid limiting emissions in the present. But do they also hold out some potential? Can the catastrophe be reversed, masked or simply adapted to once it is a fact? Or will any such roundabout measures simply make things worse?
The Long Heat maps the new front lines in the struggle for a liveable planet and insists on the climate revolution long overdue. In the end, no technology can absolve us of responsibility for our planet and each other.
Reviews
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The Long Heat is a vital corrective to the public conversation about technology, ideology and the climate. If you still believe or hope that climate catastrophe can be averted through technological rather than political change, I urge you to read this book.
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With some basic lessons in physics and scale, they show that much of what gets proposed now for coping with the climate crisis will not work. If we are to have any hope of getting human civilization into balance with the biosphere that sustains us, we’ll have to be more honest, work harder, and make some fundamental changes in our political economy. This book is part of that crucial cognitive mapping project.
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Don’t be fooled by talk of the green transition: fossil fuels haven’t gone anywhere. Andreas Malm and Wim Carton methodically identify fossil capital’s strategies for adapting to a warming world, from carbon removal to geoengineering, and relentlessly dismantle their logics. Pairing exhaustive research with controlled fury, The Long Heat is an indispensable guide to the grim future that lies in store if fossil capital continues to dominate our planet—and a powerful charge to defeat it.
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A sharp analysis of the dizzying catalogue of strange, sometimes promising, more often doomed technologies defining this next stage of ecological crisis and the forces behind them. Malm and Carton are essential guides through capital’s vision for the future, and the pathways for reclaiming it.
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In the showrooms of climate politics, speculative techno-fixes are moving centre stage, manifesting the fantasy that capitalism can coexist with a stable climate. Carton and Malm shoot them down, one by one. Each techno-fix will fail, and fail spectacularly in a cascading cataclysm that intensifies with the crossing of each earth-system tipping point. Nature is dialectical, climate processes can tip and jump, but The Long Heat also looks to a different dialectic: the leaps of human history. This is a book for the climate movement in an era of accelerating peril. It will help us find the emergency brake, and work out which climate technologies can fit anti-capitalist hands.
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A searing critique of the reckless techno-fantasies and false promises peddled in the face of climate catastrophe
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What do we do when those in power resign themselves to accepting climate change as an inevitability? I don’t know! I’m just one person! But I am hoping that reading The Long Heat will help me understand a little better.
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