Overshoot

A scathing critique of proposals to geoengineer our way out of climate disaster by the bestselling author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline

It might soon be far too hot on this planet. What do we do then? In the era of "overshoot," schemes abound for turning down the heat–not now, but a few decades down the road. We’re being told that we can return to liveable temperatures by means of technologies for removing CO2 from the air or blocking incoming sunlight.If they even exist, such technologies are not safe.

They come with immense uncertainties and risks. Worse, like magical promises of future redemption, they might provide reasons for continuing to emit in the present. But do they also hold some potentials? In Overshoot two leading climate scholars subject the plans for saving the planet after it’s been wrecked to critical study. Carbon dioxide removal is already having effects, as an excuse for continuing business as usual, while geoengineering promises to bail out humanity if the heat reaches critical levels.

Both distract from the one urgent task: to slash emissions now. There can be no further delay. The climate revolution is long overdue, and in the end, no technology can absolve us of its tasks.Preface

i. THE LIMIT IS NOT A LIMIT
1. Chronicle of Three Years Out of Control
2. When Is It Too Late?
3. The Rise of Overshoot Ideology

ii. FOSSIL CAPITAL IS A DEMON
4. The Political Economy of Asset Stranding (or, Gore and Blood Come to Wall Street)
5. How to Kill a Spectre
6. We Are Going to Be Driven by Value

iii. INTO THE LONG HEAT
7. Ten Theses on the Overshoot Conjuncture
8. Induce the Panic
9. Chronicle of One More Year of Madness

Acknowledgements
Notes
Index"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."
—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

"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

"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 LausanneWim 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, most recently, 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.