Wim Carton and Andreas Malm’s Overshoot is the first of two books reckoning with the unequivocally dire situation of the ever-worsening climate crisis. (The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late is forthcoming in 2025.) The excruciating contradictions dominate in the authors’ authoritative discussion of the present conjuncture and what is needed to avert catastrophe. With net zero deadlines looming, the 2020s were not supposed to be characterised by the renewed boom in fossil fuel extraction we’re currently experiencing. As such, Carton and Malm emphatically reject the status quo of market-based international climate governance. The liberal climate regime is irredeemable, but they also reject climate defeatism of both left- and right-wing varieties.
Given the considerable differences between degrees of warming, the more we feel that it might be ‘too late’, the greater our imperative to put a stop to what we can. Carton and Malm pre-sent two extraordinary scenarios: ‘overshoot’ and revolution. For them, revolution is not only desirable but is the necessary basis of mitigation. Decarbonisation requires a transformational confrontation with fossil capital to deliberately ‘strand’ fossil fuel assets. Conversely, ‘overshoot’ is characterised as the ruling class’s anti-revolutionary strategy to maintain profitability by shielding against the destruction of the fossil fuel industry.
The technological promise of carbon capture and storage (CCS) is the ideological basis of this strategy, supposedly allowing fossil fuel extraction to continue so that we ‘overshoot’ global average temperature limits before carbon is sucked back out of the atmosphere. The authors are by no means the first to highlight the delusions of such an approach. CCS has long been criticised for its basis in unproven technologies and its status as a lifeline for an industry that would otherwise be phased out. Carton and Malm’s contribution, however, is to counterpose this strategy against a revolutionary approach to climate mitigation.
The authors draw historical parallels between the current climate and the rise of fascism in the 1930s. In this vein, they reject any ‘popular front’ alliance between revolutionaries and (an imagined) green industry as being based in a mistaken belief that the progressive tendencies of capital can be meaningfully divorced from its ecologically regressive tendencies. The basic demands of survival are akin to a Trotskyist ‘transitional programme’ where reasonable asks (i.e. maintain a liveable biosphere) are understood as fundamentally incompatible with capitalist production relations.
If revolution is the imperative, the strategy to achieve it is less certain. Carton and Malm confess as much, highlighting that proponents of degrowth, Green New Deals and anything besides do not have enough to say about how to achieve this most monumental of tasks. Climate movement strategy has disproportionately emphasised the ‘positive’ dimension of decarbonisation: scaling up clean energy. Unfortunately, this is the (relatively) easy part. To correct this, the authors propose that strategic debates now pivot to the destructive elements of decarbonisation. How do we bring down fossil fuel capital in its totality?
Readers may be put off by the prospect of climate revolution, and/or simply find it implausible. The experience of socialism in the 20th century and its subsequent defeat may be strong reason for such reactions. However, 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’. The final alternative option, defeatism, means the intensification of climate chaos while capital reaps what profits it can, and that is no choice at all.
Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdownby Wim Carton and Andreas Malm. Verso Books, 2024. ISBN: 9781804293997
