World map with battery level indicator (2022) | WrukolakasPhotography/ Shutterstock
Andres Malm and Wim Carton’s new book, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Verso, 2024), is a thorough and unsparing account of the recent history and politics of the attempt to mitigate fossil fuels, and the reasons for its significant failure.
Both authors teach at Lund University in Sweden. Malm is the well-known author of six books on climate, including Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016) and How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (2021), and many book chapters and articles. Carton, the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics, specializes in the politics of climate change mitigation and negative emissions.
“Overshoot,” they write, is the predominant concept in climate discourse: confronted with the near certainty of exceeding global warming temperature thresholds, advocates of “overshoot” propose that temperatures can subsequently be brought back down via the “negative emissions” strategies of carbon capture and geoengineering.
For Malm and Carton, the very act of framing the climate problem primarily in relation to temperature thresholds has had the effect of directing and limiting strategic thinking about climate solutions toward mechanisms for removing carbon emissions after they have been released, when what is urgently needed, according to scientists unanimously worldwide, is drastically mitigating them in the first place. Such “programmatic overshoot” has had the effect of displacing demands to regulate or restrict fossil fuel extraction and production—a redirection amenable to fossil fuel interests for obvious reasons.
The Paris Agreement, for Malm and Carton, represents an important inflection point. It locked in two seemingly contradictory developments: an official pledge by 195 nations and the European Union to limit global warming to no more than 2°C, preferably 1.5°C, and the novel proviso that no nation could be compelled to comply. Such terms, the authors write, marked a bending of international climate governance to the will of the private and public corporations. In the years since, state and international governing bodies have acquiesced to incremental, voluntary, and market-based strategies, which have proven not only ineffective in launching a transition to a decarbonized economy, but have afforded, as Malm and Carton enumerate in detail, fossil fuel expansion globally.
In his 1991 paper “To Slow or Not to Slow: The Economics of the Greenhouse Effect,” the neoclassical economist William Nordhaus weighed the relative monetary benefits of greenhouse gas reductions (“crop yields, land lost to ocean, and so forth”) against its cost—a conceptual aggregate of the financial “pain” that a too drastic, sudden transition would impose. Rushing headlong to restrict fossil fuel production would cause more harm than the small percentage of reductions was worth, Nordhaus argued; moreover, the miracle of perpetual economic growth meant that future generations could be expected to more easily afford the extensive infrastructure and technology needed to reduce emissions.
Despite criticism that his model failed to incorporate data from the burgeoning field of climate modeling, Nordhaus won the Nobel prize for economics in 2018, and his position came to replace climate denialism as the prevailing argument against delaying the phase out of fossil fuels. “Programmatic overshoot” had been unleashed.
Malm and Carton also use “overshoot” to capture the dark vibe of our present climate “conjuncture”—an agglomeration of collective delusion, wishful thinking, blown opportunities, and busted thresholds. The “overshoot conjuncture” contains the “passive capital protection” by which overshoot strategies serve to mask, deflect, and delay even the most modest attempts to reduce fossil fuel use as well as the capitulation of international governance to fossil fuel interests.
In all, we are a society “completely, infernally, demoniacally out of control.” Our present conjuncture, Malm and Carton write, is characterized by “a dissociation… between the reality of climate breakdown and the interior drives of accumulation.” Rife with contradiction, our response to the climate crisis combines frantic activity with sclerotic inaction; commitments to drastic transformation are matched only by our failure to disrupt business-as-usual in any significant way.
The responsibility for such aggregate failure, they demonstrate, sits squarely on the shoulders of “the classes ruling the planet” who seem not only constitutionally unable to “rein in the drivers of global warming to even the most minimal degree—much less shut them down,” but seem “bent on burning the planet down as fast as physically possible.”
From its inception, climate modeling incorporated the concept of negative emissions. This represented the natural capability of oceans, forests, and soil to absorb CO2. Early adaptation strategies sought to actively build upon such natural absorption. Most promisingly, “Bio-Energy Carbon Capture and Storage” (BECCS) entailed harvesting vegetal plantations for biofuel. The smokestacks of generators burning these biofuels for energy would be fitted with filters, the carbon emission from which would be compressed, and sequestered underground.
By 2004, optimism about using “carbon capture utilization and storage” as a negative emissions strategy had extended to the autonomous International Energy Agency, whose own modeling arrived at the astounding conclusion that carbon capture would allow “the total use of fossil fuels [to] almost double between 2000 and 2050.” G8 nations soon announced ambitious trial projects.
The hopeful promises of BECCS soon proved illusory due to the vast amount of land it would require—what amounted to much of the earth’s forests and arable land. Nevertheless, fossil fuel interests continued to promote speculative negative emissions technology as a replacement for mitigation. Direct Air Capture (DAC), marketing teams proclaimed, would filter and sequester carbon directly, bypassing the land use problems encountered by BECCS.
In 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that achieving the Paris Agreement’s goal of zero emissions by 2050 would require, first and foremost, drastically reducing the sources of emissions. But additional measures would be needed to sop up emissions from industrial sectors difficult to convert to electrical power, including heavy construction, agriculture, shipping, and aviation; novel technologies still currently in development, such as DAC, might be employed at that stage. The report framed the use of DAC as highly delimited, temporary, and to be implemented in the last instance, after, and supplemental to the primary and most urgent first step of drastically.
This cracked-open door was enough however for fossil fuel PR teams to rush in. DAC now reigns supreme. The Biden administration recently allocated up to $1.2 billion for new DAC facilities in Texas and Louisiana, on top of a projected $13.5 billion in IRA and DOE (combined) already committed.
In the years since the 2015 Paris Agreement, the extensive network of fossil fuel funding and infrastructure has grown and expanded into new territory, becoming even more deeply entrenched and widely diffused across the global economy. The problem isn’t access to renewables or infrastructural challenges, Malm and Carton write: “The problem is the massive amount of capital wrapped up in the fossil fuel industry, directly and indirectly, and dependent upon the realization of what otherwise would be stranded assets.”
“Between 2016 and 2021,” Malm and Carton observe, “the world’s sixty largest banks poured nearly 5 trillion dollars into fossil fuel projects.” Institutional investors and retail brokerages followed suit. This expanded entanglement between industry and shareholders means that restrictions or moratoria on fossil fuels now pose the danger of stranded financial assets not just to principals and their private investors but throughout what Malm and Carton, following Marx, term ‘the entirety of the “common capital of the bourgeois class.’”
Moreover, because such assets include not only fuel not yet extracted from the ground, but the increasing sunk cost of equipment, infrastructure, and know-how, the effect of restrictions would ripple out, increasingly affecting the general economy. The cost of such a shock? According to economists, Malm and Carton state, fossil fuel divestiture could set off a cascade of write-offs throughout the material economy amounting to as much between $4 and a staggering $185 trillion.
The tragic effect is that divestment and decommissioning has become ever more complicated, disruptive, costly, and more broadly resisted by a wider range of stakeholders. Commonsense mitigation of any kind becomes more radical-appearing while implausible Hail Mary schemes, such as geoengineering and DAC, fill the gap, taking the place of serious strategic planning.
Proponents of fossil fuel–friendly, market-based projections failed to foresee one crucial development. The first decade of the 2000s saw prices for solar photovoltaic panels (PVs) fall rapidly due to a combination of increased module efficiency and a burst of new factory production in China. By 2022, the global weighted production cost of electricity from PVs had dropped to $0.049 per kilowatt-hour—undercutting the cost of the cheapest fossil fuel by almost a third; offshore wind dropped to $0.033, less than half the cost of the cheapest fossil fuel–fired option.
According to classical economics, the lower cost of renewables, coupled with the promise of government subsidization, should have spurred investors to rush from fossil fuels to wind and solar markets, initiating a virtuous cycle of growing markets, production capacity, and know-how that would catalyze the development of a decarbonized global economy. What happened instead is that while the renewables industry began to show increased growth—although nowhere near the scale needed—it was accompanied by growth, albeit slowed, in the fossil fuel industry; in 2022, the authors report, fossil fuels accounted for 82 percent of global energy consumption, “the same proportion they had claimed for decades.”
Investors have questioned the technological feasibility of wind and solar. But early obstacles such as intermittence, storage, and electrical infrastructure capability are increasingly seen as surmountable, particularly thanks to enormous government investment in infrastructure and storage tech via programs such as President Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). It seems unlikely these hurdles have been the defining factor for investors’ recalcitrance to invest in renewables.
The reason, as Malm and Carton explain (relying substantially on the work climate economist Brett Christophers), is simply that investors evaluate opportunities not on the basis of cost, but on the expectation of profit.
At first it seems these go hand in hand: Doesn’t lower cost allow for higher profit? No, explain Malm and Carton, and their reasoning should be the primary takeaway from Overshoot for leftist activists and policy workers. It’s also the book’s strongest rejoinder to those who maintain that decarbonization rests on the success of governments to incentivize private capital.
For Malm and Carton, renewables are ultimately unprofitable due to the fundamental nature of value creation under the capitalist mode of production: fossil fuels constitute economic stocks (measured as an existing quantity at a given point of time) whereas renewable energy constitute flows (a rate of activity over time).
Simply put, coal, oil, and natural gas are quantities of material stuff. They need to be dredged from the ground, cleaned up a good bit, distributed, stored—all of which is to say that producing them requires labor. “Nature’s free gifts,” in Marx’s parlance, include not only such unprocessed materials, but “goods” such as wind and sunlight, which “are by nature public”: readily available and limitless. Renewables, in short, can be consumed “without being depleted.”
That should be a good thing. The reason it is not is that the unprocessed energy provided by nature cannot itself provide a profit for the capitalist because it requires no labor to produce—and without labor, there can be no commodity, and no wage relation from which surplus value can be extracted. No company, Malm and Carton point out, “has ever been seen delivering wind qua fuel on a barge or truck.”
In the absence of government provision, the authors argue, a capitalist economy would produce renewable goods and services “in relatively small quantities or, perhaps, not at all, irrespective of how much social value they provide.’” This tracks, considering the principal role the government has taken when it comes to building projects at the scale now needed, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Bonneville Power Administration, the Hoover Dam, and major nuclear plants—the kind of enormously capital-intensive, long-term projects on which government formerly took the lead.
Fossil fuels companies had already found this out for themselves. As early as the 1970s, certain oil and gas supermajors (ExxonMobile, BP, Chevron) developed their own wind and solar development programs, only to abruptly abandon them, one by one, due to the unprofitability induced by the crashing cost of renewables. Low-cost renewable energy, -however, turned out to be profitable when kept on the “expenses” side of the ledger books. Accordingly, these companies continued to use renewable energy for their own operations—to power the pumps and illuminate the platforms (and possibly to support sustainability claims), all the while ramping up hydrocarbon production.
As Malm has earlier argued in Fossil Capital, fossil fuels occupy a special category of commodity. Having expanded and infiltrated into ever-more granular facets of production, consumption, and reproduction, fossil fuels have become “a necessary material substratum,” integral to every sector of the global economy: fundamental, rather than incidental, to the creation of surplus value under capitalism.
Such fundamental rootedness of fossil fuel within global markets suggests that its demise requires nothing short of overthrowing the value form, root and branch. For Malm and Carton, activists should look to hasten petro-capitalism’s demise by destabilizing its lifeblood, namely, investors’ confidence in the industry’s ability to realize sunken assets. Some hope here can be gleaned from the significant, although limited, success of place-based resistance (“people marching, petitioning, litigating, divesting, sitting in, blockading and engaging in other direct actions”), which has proved fossil fuel development “by no means invincible.”
Unnerving investors, however, only works in market economies. As Adam Tooze has recently pointed out, China, long wedded to coal, is the world’s overshooter par excellence. Its emissions have skyrocketed since 2006, amounting to those of the next six highest emitting countries combined, even as it has established dominance in nuclear and green energy development. Unbeholden to private investors, the leaders of its planned economy are unlikely to be swayed by direct action.
What does the overshoot conjuncture portend for the future? Malm and Carton remind us that the 200-year era of fossil fuels will end, whatever mix of factors ultimately drives it: whether active (direct action, policy gains, the hard work of politics and movement building and worker insurrection, Chinese industrial planning) or passive (business-as-usual, socio-economic breakdown). Inevitable too is that, gradual or rapid, measured or chaotic, for untold numbers of people, its demise will come too late.
