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The Long Heat:Climate Politics When It’s Too Late
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Ebook
Sale price $19.99
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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Last year, the authors released Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown. The Long Heat details what might occur if capitalism based on fossil fuels cannot be overturned, in three sections with bleak views on adaptation, emissions and geo-engineering. Many will argue with their conclusions, but their impeccable research and clear-cut cause-and-effect scenarios might at least spur actionable change.
, Los Angeles Times
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Overshoot, which was published last year, proposed that we have entered a new era of climate politics — one defined by the idea that it’s possible to blow past global climate targets and use technology to bring down Earth’s temperature at a later date. The Long Heat elaborates on this ideology and explains how it has brought us the technological “climate solutions” being considered today. Their new book’s novelty is not in its specific criticisms of these solutions — volumes have been written about the often flawed math behind carbon removal and the hubris associated with geoengineering — but in the way it brings them under one roof, explaining how we got here and why it has been so hard, under capitalism, to accomplish what’s needed.
, Grist -
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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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.
, Lit Hub’s -
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 rallying cry to get global warming under control...Now that mitigation measures have fallen behind targets, Carton and Malm analyse three remaining options: adapting to rising temperatures; removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; and geoengineering to block incoming sunlight.
Nature -
A searing critique of the reckless techno-fantasies and false promises peddled in the face of climate catastrophe
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Wim Carton and Andreas Malm’s substantial social science text The Long Heat examines climate politics in the era of irrevocable temperature overshoot…a complex and insightful social science book that chronicles late-stage climate politics.
Foreword Reviews -
The bleak but enlightening follow-up to Overshoot…[Malm and Wim] urge an immediate end to the use of fossil fuels and encourage state-run carbon removal efforts. It’s a startling and persuasive call to action.
, Publishers Weekly -
Malm and Carton unfold a history of our catastrophic present, explaining the unbreakable bond between capital and fossil fuels. They also map out the technological fixes being rolled out as the planet continues to heat and demonstrate how schemes to adapt to or reverse global heating are likely to spawn even greater disasters and could lock in a future of mass unfreedom and suffering that only large-scale eco-socialist movements can forestall.
, In These Times -
A gripping read...At a time when fossil fuel consumption is still rising and rationalized optimism about the future is commonplace, Malm and Carton’s arguments seem especially pressing.
, Jacobin