Review | The Long Heat

Frankie Jobson reviews the latest book by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, offering a sharp critique of elite efforts to use geoengineering as a quick fix for the climate crisis.

Over the past few years, climate politics is something that many people have taken a step back from, disengaged with or perhaps even lost faith in. With multiple tragedies occurring in real time – whether it’s the rising fascism and state brutality on our doorsteps or the genocides in Sudan, Congo, and Palestine – it can be overwhelming to sit with the reality in which we find ourselves and to know where on earth we direct our efforts to organise. It is even harder to do this when we are told that our planetary systems are beyond the point of no return. In The Long Heat Andreas Malm and Wim Carton discuss how the problem of approaching the earth’s tipping points is increasingly being tackled through technological means. Fertilising the ocean with whale poo, building self-producing robots that suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and injecting soot into the skies to mimic the effect of a volcanic eruption are some of the possibilities on the table for us to cool the earth down and to minimise the effects of the long heat. Or so we are told.

Last week the rs21 Greater Manchester branch had the pleasure of welcoming Malm and Carton to discuss the book. They give an exposé of the various technological proposals and startups that can, supposedly, reverse the devastation that fossil capital has inflicted upon our planet. Waking each morning to this book in the weeks leading up to the launch stirred an avalanche of emotions in me. Malm and Carton tempered my outrage with the humour threaded through their chapters, and their satire of the technocratic fools who so eagerly try to divide and rule our societies called to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s absurd portrait of the US in Breakfast of Champions.

Elaborating on their argument in the previous book Overshoot, where they detailed how the profit-driven nature of fossil capital under capitalism will undermine any transition away from oil and gas, the authors in this book uncover the complexities of carbon removal and geoengineering. They argue that ‘until emissions have ceased, talk of reversal has something futile and redundant about it’ because the longer greenhouse gases are emitted, the harder it becomes to reverse the damage already done by exceeding the agreed global temperature limit of 1.5 degrees. 

The authors themselves acknowledge that at over 500 pages, the book is long – but its length is not something to be put off by. It is accessible and engaging, making it a good entry point to understand the systemic dangers of playing with technology as a quick fix to a crisis that is centuries old and rooted in imperial interests, capital accumulation and profit maximisation. The themes of magic, dreams and technocratic utopia recur throughout the book – themes that mirror the irrationality that drives arguments for geoengineering: ‘if rationality had been a reasonable assumption about the way the world is run,’ they argue, ‘there would be no quest to pursue: geoengineering would be nowhere on the agenda’.

Throughout the book, the reader is exposed to a catalogue of innovative and entrepreneurial alternatives to mitigation that do no less than protect capital and uphold business-as-usual, something that has often been apparent in their creators’ endeavours. One ‘dream of bourgeois civilisation’ in the early 1980s was that of the engineer Klaus Lackner. Working at the laboratory where the atomic bomb was born, he suggested the groundbreaking idea that small robots called ‘auxons’ could be tasked with building solar panels and absorbing CO2 into a layer of marble half a metre thick. Cutting human labour out of the process completely, these auxons would self-replicate to spread across the US by using dirt and scraps found along their journeys. 

No auxons yet wander the earth, but Lackner has become a pioneer in carbon management, being one of the first scientists to write about the possibilities of Direct Air Capture (DAC). His motivations behind this were clear from the get-go – it would: 

… allow utilisation of the large known fossil-fuel reserves while avoiding build-up of atmospheric CO2 … at risk are investments on the order of a trillion dollars in power plants, mining and associated infrastructure.

Of course the masters of these tools are the same people corrupted by fossil capital, enamoured by the dream of endlessly extending the life of the very infrastructure that plunders the earth in the name of profit. Their dreams appear again in another line that stayed with me. It comes from a chapter that examines and debunks the fantasies of large-scale tree planting: ‘the coloniser’s eye scan(s) the globe for opportunities: behind the human face of removal, the spectre of the Great Dying.’ Drawing on the concept they call “bionecropower,” the authors build on the work of Achille Mbembe and Michel Foucault. They show how technologies such as Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) could come into being solely through the exercise of power over people. These are technologies concerned with managing death as much as life.

Even natural climate solutions like planting trees raise similar questions – if enough trees were planted to stay below 2 degrees globally, around 440 million people in the Global South would have to be displaced. As such, many of the so-called environmental solutions having billions of dollars pumped into their development directly undermine the agency of communities that have and continue to be exploited by private interests of the West.

The authors liken Lackner’s thinking to the logic of going to the toilet. Direct Air Capture treats carbon dioxide as a natural effluent with Lackner himself suggesting that climate change should be understood as a “waste management problem.” Emit fossil fuels, then flush the carbon out of the atmosphere with his technological holy grail. At first glance, the book’s recurring scatological metaphors might seem off-putting. But they serve as a constant reminder that we are up to our ears in shit, that the world is in a state of shit, that we are being sold solutions made of shit and that shitty research is being pumped out daily by people whose mouths are full of shit. As Corey Doctorow points out, we are in an era of ‘enshittification’ and not a truer word could be said about how the climate crisis is being dealt with today.

Some ideas, of course, look far less troubling at first glance. How could a startup with the name Stardust Solutions be anything other than magical? Malm and Carton unveil to us its promises to offer ‘a safe, measurable, adjustable, and fully reversible system to stabilise Earth’s temperature’ by dispersing ‘particles made from naturally occurring, human-safe materials’ to reflect solar radiation back into space. Just recently, Stardust Solutions announced that it had raised $60 million to advance tests of this sun-reflecting technology. Its appeal lies in the claim that such interventions offer the single quickest way to cool the planet in a moment of unforeseen crisis.

Those seeking a bit of transparency might turn to the company’s website, hoping to find details about its funders, the progress of its research, the origins of the startup, or even an office address to contact. They might also expect some acknowledgement that it is a joint Israeli-American venture. Unfortunately, none of this information is available. I am, however, grateful to Malm and Carton for doing the legwork. From their investigation, we learn that the chief executive, Yanai Yedvab, was formerly deputy chief scientist of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission and that his former boss was a co-founder. The company’s capital comes from Awz Ventures, a firm focused on:

Discovering and creating the next generation of technologies that can help Israel and the righteous side of the world. We are partnering with security and intelligence agencies and developing, from inception, companies to help solve the problems for which we don’t yet have solutions – which will protect democracies and nations. 

Founded in Israel in 2023, the first experiments undertaken by Stardust Solutions began at the same time as the genocide unfolded in Palestine, using military jets to do so. Conducted in secret, as the authors uncover, they highlight how the material practice of geoengineering is inherently tied to the defence sector and its private interests. Perhaps is not so surprising when the history of technocratic fantasies are considered. Geoengineering has its roots in the manipulation of rainfall patterns during the Vietnam War, when the US government weaponised the weather in an effort to worsen ground conditions for the guerrilla resistance in what became known as Operation Popeye. The atmosphere, it seems, has long been treated as a playground for war-mongering maniacs.

On top of this, the risks of geoengineering are vast. No international law ensures adequate oversight and questions linger around decision-making frameworks. The prospect of a ‘termination shock’, which could occur if a geoengineering measure had to be rapidly halted due to serious side effects, could be truly catastrophic. Malm and Carton routinely return to the topic, describing what a termination shock might entail following the rollout of carbon management technologies. They note that ‘every negative side effect from geoengineering will worsen the longer it goes on and the larger the quantities of sulphates injected.’ The authors compare this to standing ‘with (our) face pressed to the glass door of an oven, inside which a fire is roaring and raging: and suddenly the glass shatter(s) and the flames leap out’. It is worth noting that the metaphors woven throughout the book were one reason I found it such a pleasure to read, the authors made complex scientific concepts accessible to someone who finds analogies easier to grasp than equations.

How then do we resist a violent empire of the stratosphere, when states like Israel are free to act with impunity, plundering the communities, land, seas, and skies of Palestine? And how do we move towards a world in which fossil capital is stranded, where emissions are ceased? Malm and Carton conclude with a chain of priorities set out before us. Namely, that global emissions must be ceased before any type of negative emission technology is rolled out en masse and that this technology must be a collective good. And one that is ‘publicly funded’, ‘democratically governed’, ‘snatched from the jaws of value… and primitive fossil capital in particular’. They caution the reader not to be blindsided by the promises of adaptation. 

While they make it clear that there is not one solution, that action will be contextual depending on the where and the who and that no pipelines may have to be blown up, we must at the very least be preparing for the next disaster. We must have a plan in place to target the perpetrators in question and in doing so make attempts to understand – from the personal level to the global scale – how those currently in charge of climate technologies are making decisions that are harmful to our communities now and to future generations. 

Who is the ‘we’ that I refer to here? It is all of us who are being undermined and exploited by fossil capital, whether it is through the air we breath, the bills we pay, the food we increasingly cannot afford or the obscene allocation of state funding that goes to the sectors that prey on oil, gas and military endeavours rather than housing, healthcare, and education. Maybe even more blatantly, it is all of us whose freedom to protest against the powers fuelling genocidal and environmental disaster is being attacked more brutally than ever. This crackdown shows that fear is rising among today’s oil-glugging, military-loving politicians, lobbyists and corporations as they witness more and more people waking up to the fact that capitalism’s self-destructive logic is driving us ever closer to the abyss. Consider, the pro-Palestine activists held in prison for over a year under terrorism legislation after taking direct action and allegedly dismantling weapons at Elbit Systems (Israeli state’s largest weapons manufacturer) or the climate activists who are increasingly treated as extremists.

The climate movement as we knew it has risen and faded, but when it returns, what shape must it take? We do not have time for another wave of protest that misses the roots of the crisis. Instead, we need to build alternative structures within existing workplaces and grassroots movements – ones that centre not only anti-imperialist and anti-fascist politics, but eco-socialism too – that will rip those roots to shreds when the next window of opportunity emerges. The Long Heat gives no easy answers but provokes the reader to think about how we can start organising together and supporting each other, in whatever capacity we can, to be able to strike back and resist the dangerous dreams of the powers that be. In these turbulent times, one thing alone is certain: we have no time to lose. 

The Long Heat by Wim Carton and Andreas Malm is published by Verso.