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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.
Reviews
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.'
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.
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.
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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.
, 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.
, 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.
, 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.
, 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
, Counterpunch -
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."
, Counterpunch -
Overshoot exposes the socioeconomic and scientific underpinnings for why we should be acting boldly and decisively, and it brims with crucial ancillary facts.
, Earth Island Journal