Review | Overshoot: How the world surrendered to climate breakdown

Colin Wilson reviews Malm and Carton’s powerful new book, which exposes the failures of fossil capitalism and calls for revolutionary change to confront the escalating climate emergency.

The reality of the climate emergency is now undeniable. In October, 200 flood deaths in the Spanish state were widely reported, as were hundreds of deaths in the US after multiple hurricanes. We heard less about the impoverished people in the Global South most affected by the crisis – the 1,500 children made homeless by flooding in Afghanistan in July, the 14,000 people displaced by floods in Assam the previous month or the drought in Southern Africa, the worst in a century, which has wiped out most of the harvest and has left 20 million children malnourished.

Meanwhile, it’s increasingly clear that the official processes which claim to provide solutions are ineffective, corrupted by the influence of fossil fuel companies and certain petro-states. At the COP29 talks, the delegates of almost every country were outnumbered by oil and gas lobbyists – over 1,700 in total  – and the talks themselves ended with richer countries showing their contempt for the Global South. The preferred non-response of fossil capital to the crisis is ‘carbon capture’, technologies which remove carbon from emissions and the air. They are unproven and there are no examples of them working at the scale required, but the oil companies support them because they hope that carbon capture means we can keep on burning coal, oil and gas.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Starmer government is investing over £20 billion in carbon capture, when all three previous British carbon capture projects have failed. That decision followed cuts of £13 billion from previous climate plans, which included initiatives that we know work, such as insulating millions of homes. As Starmer made clear at COP29, he wants a climate solution which doesn’t involve ‘telling people how to live their lives’. Social change, disruption to neoliberal business-as-usual, is unthinkable – rather, we should entrust the planet’s future to fantasy techno fixes.

Malm and Carton provide a gripping and accessible account of how we got here and the issues we now face. In 2015, when the ‘Paris accords’ were agreed, there was a consensus that 2° of warming above pre-industrial levels was the necessary limit to heating. But Global South countries, headed by small island states more vulnerable to rising sea levels, pushed for a limit of 1.5°. And so rulers of the rich countries fell behind what has now become their consensus, the concept of ‘overshoot’. Global temperature rises would be limited to 1.5° at some point in the future. They would initially rise above that – above 2°, maybe above 3° – and then, in the future, we would bring them back down. Emissions would continue, but would be balanced by ‘mitigation’ such as carbon capture, which is what ‘net zero’ means. Future economic growth will ensure we have more resources for the task, and future technological developments will make feasible proposals which now seem wildly unpredictable, such as using sulphur dioxide aerosols in the stratosphere to partially block the sun’s rays and so cool the planet.

The key advantage of overshoot ideology for fossil capital is that business as usual can continue. Or not just business as usual, but a huge recent expansion. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, saw embargoes placed on Russian oil, which restrictions in supply led to rising prices and rocketing oil company profitability – in 2022, the top five companies reported the biggest profits in their histories. This deluge of money saw companies close their climate-friendly subsidiaries and abandon greenwashing PR strategies, such as the claim that BP now stood for ‘beyond petroleum’. At a time when a limit of 1.5° of warming meant no new exploitation of fossil fuels – summed up in the slogan ‘leave it in the ground’ – 119 oil pipelines were under development, along with 477 gas pipelines and 432 new mines. A hundred licences are set to be awarded in the British part of the North Sea.

All this requires billions in investment. The more so, because easily-accessed reserves are increasingly used up, so companies need to extract fossil carbon from locations – under the sea or from shale, for example – which require the use of advanced technology. That expensive tech is paid for with upfront investments which will only generate profits after ten or twenty years, so this infrastructure is typically designed to last for decades. There’s a further reason why, as long as capitalism continues, carbon emissions will never begin to fall, because of the central role played by fossil capital in the global economy. As soon as it becomes clear that the world is moving away from carbon, the future profitability of oil wells and coal mines is in doubt. Share prices – based on estimates of future profits – collapse. The billions’ worth of fossil infrastructure becomes worthless – what’s called ‘asset stranding’. The effects would go far beyond oil companies – 45 percent of seaborne trade carries fossil fuels, many steel plants rely on coke though electric alternatives are available, and oil is used to produce the plastics we all use every day. Fossil capital investment has been funded from bank loans – $5 trillion between 2016 and 2021 – which companies would now struggle to repay, on a scale which would mean crisis for global financial systems.

In the long run, then, as Malm and Carton put it, ‘there is… no path to a liveable planet that does not pass through the complete destruction of business as usual.’ Capitalism must end if we’re to have a planet where we can survive. We must be clear, then, that the situation of ‘a revolutionary in the 2020s and coming decades’ is that ‘we are alone in this. We have no reliable friends in the capitalist classes.’ And the problem is that we don’t just need revolutionary change, the scale of the climate crisis means we need it quickly.

Malm and Carton respond with a strategy which draws on two great revolutionaries of the early twentieth century – the Russian Leon Trotsky and the Polish Rosa Luxemburg. In this period, leftists typically distinguished between ‘minimum demands’ – reforms such as a 2% pay rise – and ‘maximum demands’ such as the end of capitalism. Trotsky argued in the 1930s that capitalism was in such a crisis that it could not even grant minimum demands. But this meant, Trotsky argued, that there existed certain, apparently moderate, demands – ‘transitional demands’ – which in fact threatened capitalism as a whole. Malm and Carton suggest that, in a context of climate crisis, ‘at 1.1°C or thereabouts’, a slogan like ‘1.5 to stay alive’ ‘sets in motion […] a series of transitional demands’. The problem with this strategy is that we are already past 1.1°C of heating – the scale of the emergency is widely acknowledged – but the wave of protest we need to see hasn’t happened so far. 

Malm and Carton raise the slogan ‘hail the meltdown’ and argue that ‘once the crash is underway’  – sparked by taxes on extraction, export restrictions or another benign-seeming reform, the explosion impossible to predict in advance  – then the mass movement ‘would have to push through the breach and enforce a conclusive expropriation’. Here they refer to Rosa Luxemburg’s point that history includes many examples of workers taking spontaneous and creative action. Unexpected and inspiring militancy and enormous creativity shown by workers in struggle do indeed happen. But enthusiastic and inexperienced activists taking spontaneous action may also do so in an uncoordinated way because they disagree on strategy. They may be led astray by empty promises of reforms, or by rulers scapegoating minorities. Those risks are reduced by building organisations which have agreed on a shared analysis and strategy. Yes, this takes time, and time is short – but the problem isn’t simply solved by relying on spontaneous upsurges of struggle.

If we need to do more work to develop a viable strategy for revolutionary change around climate, Malm and Carton also cite a database of nearly 400 cases of resistance to fossil fuel projects which provides some inspiration. People have marched, petitioned, sat in and blockaded – and 15 percent of pipeline projects were cancelled, suspended or had investment withdrawn, as were 26 percent of fracking projects and 18 percent of other oil and gas projects. The average is 25 percent. As Malm and Carton comment, ‘one in four is not… good enough’, but neither is it nothing. And when the people of Valencia were so angered last month by their government’s response to the floods that they pelted their king and queen with mud – and there will be many more Valencias – it’s clear that there is an audience here which can be won to ideas of revolutionary socialism, and undertake the task of ending the climate crisis.

Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown is published by Verso.