Overshoot

In Overshoot, a rageful, radical and timely new history of the ecological present, the activist scholars Wim Carton and Andreas Malm ask how it is - how it could be - that the world seems to be surrendering to climate breakdown. 'What do we do when catastrophic climate chaos is a fact?' they ask. The apparent answer is 'Let it continue for the time being.' * The New York Times * Malm and Carton warn that the world has been seduced by the false promise of "overshoot"-the notion that blowing past carbon emissions goals is no big deal because technology will come along in the future to fix it. They marshal extensive evidence to prove that this strain of tech utopianism is a dangerous, unfounded belief promoted by oil companies. It's a galvanizing wake-up call for a world grown complacent. -- Best Books of 2024 * Publishers Weekly * Carton and Malm's book, the first installment in a two-part series, is at once a detailed historiography, recounting the origins and development of the overshoot ideology, and a sweeping treatise on the political economy of late capitalism, using Marxist theory to argue that the very nature of the global economic system prizes fossil fuels over renewables...The power of [Overshoot] lies in its ability to name, at times with startling detail, the features of a logic that has affected all who work on climate change, from policy makers to journalists to academics to clean energy funders. -- Lylla Younes * Grist * 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. -- Martin Weiner * Public Seminar * 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 * A relentless history of climate collapse. Compiling all the dates and names future humans might seek out to understand how their lives were forfeited by past generations, Malm and Carton detail a history of capital, land, and discourse, naming the profiteers and alarmists along the way. It's a history so contemporary to read it written in past tense feels like seeing our own coffins. -- Autumn Wright * Unwinnable * Malm and Carton dig deep into the way in which the capitalist and state fossil-fuel industries have propagandised, spreading disinformation and lies across every media outlet they can buy off or manipulate. -- Tim Barton * Hastings Independent * 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 <i>Carbon Democracy</i> 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 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 <i>Cannibal Capitalism</i> 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, intoler

Wim 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.

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