Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown

by Andreas Malm, Wim Carton

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

Genres: Politics, Climate Change, Nonfiction, Environment, History, Ecology, Science

416 pages, Hardcover

Published October 1, 2024

About the author

Andreas Malm teaches Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author, with Shora Esmailian, of Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War and of Fossil Capital, which won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.

Reviews

[Darran Mclaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another masterpiece from Andreas Malm and Wim Calton. I am hosting a book launch for this at bookhaus this evening, which is why I read Fossil Capital and White Skin, Black Fuel over the past few months in preparation.

Fossil Capital is a work of materialist history that showed how interlinked the roots of Capitalism, manufacturing and fossil fuels are, and how they became inextricably linked through imperialism and class war. White Skin, Black Fuel is an explortion of the deep connections between far right and racist ideology and fossil fuels. A work of history exploring the recent past, it showed how and why politicians and companies have shifted from accepting the reality of climate change and offering greenwashed capitalist solutions to it a few years ago, to returning towards climate denial, because there really isn't any way of squaring the circle of maintaining Racial Capitalism and addressing the climate crisis. The book explores the psychology of the far right and climate denial, and has given me a lot of food for thought.

This book feels like a natural successor to the previous two books. It shows that the ruling class have decided that they would prefer to maintain business as usual and allow the temperature of the climate to rise by 3 degrees, or maybe more, and allow global devastation and a genocide of the poor to take place. This is so that profits can continue to flow into the pockets of the ruling elite. They are banking everything on the projected development, at some point in the decades to come, of carbon capture and storage technology which will be able to reverse the consequences of this temperature rise. By adopting an economic model from classical, bourgeois economics, they have decided that it is too expensive to address the climate crisis now, but that as the global economy will continue to grow exponentially in the future, it will be much cheaper for our descendants to deal with the problem with all the extra money at their disposal. This is absolute lunacy, and it is literally what the global elite have decided. As I read this book the Labour Party announced that, after abandoning the Green New Deal pledge in favour of investing £28 billion a year in climate mitigation during their five year term, then reducing that to £28 billion across the entire five years, they have now announced that the core of their climate policy would be investing £22 billion into carbon capture technology. Every climate commentator was furious about this, explaining that this is nothing more than a licence for fossil fuel companies to be able to continue business as usual without doing any of the work necessary to keep the world at a rise of 1.5 degrees or less. Instead of throwing money at insulating our housing, rolling out a first rate public transport network, a massive increase in renewable energy sources, and investment in developing new green technologies that could address the problem and enrich the public purse, they are giving billions of pounds of public money to the richest private corporations in the world. A month ago Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google, said in an interview that our climate goals will not be met and we should abandon them and let rip to develop AI technology, in the expectation that AI would find a way to solve the problem in the future.

Like White Skin, Black Fuel, this book explores the psychology of our insane status quo. I now feel like I need to dive into reading a lot more psychoanalytic works, because I am persuaded that our situation is so irrational. The authors conclude by showing that the only way out of this is a revolutionary solution. Green Capitalism is not going to work. Reformism isn't going to work. It is revolution or nothing.

[Kai · Rating 4 out of 5]

i thought this was going to be another book about 'denial', but it isn't. instead, this is a book about a very specific ideological fantasy of overshoot took hold -- the idea that we can go past 1.5 or 2 degrees (or whatever number) in planetary heating, and draw down the warming at some point afterwards. it's a dangerous idea because it basically gives governments and firms free reign to do whatever in the present. and it's not just a narrative -- Malm and Carton show how it emerges from climate models and scientific interpretations, then latching on because it provides this ideological cover. That's the first of the three parts of this book. The second concerns 'asset stranding.' again, this is a relatively unique contribution. it's a bit overstuffed, but the basic point that capital is not going to willingly debase the value of its machinery and oil reserves is obvious. The third part of the book offers a few chunks about what this means for politics, but it's just a little preview, i think. the blurb says this book is "A scathing critique of proposals to geoengineer our way out of climate disaster," but that is what the second book is about -- adaptation, carbon dioxide removal, and solar geoengineering. that's the one i'm more interested in, but this book does feel like a necessary precursor.

[Arya Harsono · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disillusioned with stagnant COP negotiations, I was taken initially by Malm and Carton's criticisms of the somewhat arbitrary targets set by the Paris Agreement. Particularly, the scrutiny on IAMs and Nordhaus' perceived errors was comprehensive and articulated more than I could on my own personal grievances with these climate/economic models (and the very ones I work with). This reaffirms my view that the emphasis on distant emission reduction targets central to these international agreements enables an approach in which the ends justify the means. Much of what Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown explores are those very means and the global conversations around their feasibility, and how disagreements around them tend to create postponement of action, thereby fostering the "overshoot conjecture". Overshoot is defined as "the period when officially declared limits to global warming are exceeded", driven by the resignation of being able to address the climate crisis from the dominant classes responsible for the excess.

On the surface, Malm and Carton appear staunchly against technical solutions to address the climate crisis, such as through their lambasting of carbon removal technologies and initiatives. However, they offer that the technical and ethical debates distract from addressing the crux of the issues, which stem from upstream sources. The crux of their criticism lies in how climate politics has evolved akin to the growth of capitalistic structures that have rooted themselves in our global economic systems, rather than disparaging the solutions themselves. The authors "blame" politics as a driver for mainstreaming the overshoot logic that prevents global leaders from implementing effective action. A common element in the discourse, which is also given significant space in this book, is that the technology and solutions for addressing the climate crisis already exist, but there is a lack of political willingness to scale them up. "The overshoot conjecture emerged for reasons unrelated to technological feasibility." Malm and Carton argue that this is because political forces are geared toward protecting existing capital and future value, and this notion is central to perpetuating "overshoot". "The sum of viable mitigation should not be equated to that of the existing productive forces. The latter would rather grow with the former." In this view, the nature of a capitalist economy views all capital as having limited durability. More efficient and productive technologies replace existing ones, but once new innovations no longer serve their intended purpose, they lose their value and become waste. The generation of value comes with the assumption that it will eventually have to be destroyed, thereby facilitating an economy that "endogenously generates a financial structure which is susceptible to a financial crisis." This somewhat ignores the potential of a circular economy, though similarly, recycling has its drawbacks as well.

The authors also make a poignant point about stranded assets not being market-driven as much of the development research has implied but coming as an abrupt policy shock (i.e., framing asset stranding as political destruction of fossil capital), which has disastrous implications for global economies that are embedded in fossil fuels not only as an energy source but as a trading commodity. This idea also helps explain the reluctance of many countries to make radical shifts away from fossil fuels. On the other hand, the development of renewables and electric vehicles can be seen as just more capitalist processes of creating industry and value that will eventually be replaced with new capital, as the design of such innovations is limited to their intended purpose. Electric vehicles somewhat bypass this by featuring batteries that not only power the vehicle but also can act as electric supply to the grid.

Though I have not read much of either author's other work, I know that Malm has a reputation for relatively radical leftist views on climate. Reviews of his previous books and interviews with him showcasing his seemingly blind faith in Marxism had originally put me off to How to Blow Up a Pipeline . And though his political leanings are drenched in his takes on climate politics in this book, I did resonate with much of what was presented. Yet Overshoot appears to cater to readers who are already familiar with Malm and Canton's work and agree wholeheartedly with the authors' views. This is evident by the frequent use of Marxist terminology (e.g., base and superstructure) to describe capital structures and explain the lock-in politics of fossil fuels but are presented without definition or clarification, thereby assuming the potential reader is already aware of them.

In contrast, the authors add definitions or explanations of certain economic terms, such as Schumpeterian growth, which may be ideas outside their target audience's presumed tacit knowledge. Though I personally should probably be aware of the Marxist / political jargon integrated into this book, selective defining implies non-objectivity that sets a dangerous precedent for ignoring certain variables to craft a perfect narrative while also perpetuating cognitive dissonance and echo chambers in the discourse. Moreover, theory-based arguments assign the identity of ideas to a school of thought, which can be much more easily dismissed ad hominem than would concrete, empirical evidence. Theory tends to be contradiction-free, but reality is much more nuanced and filled with chaotic contradictions that make theoretical explanations appear limited.

The authors leave much of the responsibility and effort to make sense of the claims to the reader, evident by a heavy reliance on endnotes and references that make up about a quarter of the overall text. The dependence on more on theoretical academic papers than empirical evidence (i.e., real-world data and trends), which makes several claims in the book appear weak with seemingly leaping conclusions. One glaring example is this sentence: "It is the absence of reason, the denial of reality that pushes the world towards [a disorderly transition]." (p. 163), in which the citation is a Tooze (2019) paper on Central Banks. I would have to find and read this separate document to comprehend why not only was this the reference piece to the claim, but even to understand why the claim is being made in the first place.

I also feel that some aspects of the discussion that could have been worthwhile additions were missing (though the authors do mention a sequel is in the works). In line with Scott Barrett's research, the non-binding legal nature of the Paris Agreement is a piece that is often not discussed (and potentially a crucial aspect of surrender to a climate breakdown). Though it is mentioned several times in this book, it is not a significant part. While I appreciate that the authors take a more world view on climate-related events, citing more developments from "the South" than I'd seen in other recent (Western-published) climate-related books (though not other media), the arguments do not decipher the regional differences in capitalistic trends. Do all countries, regardless of developed or developing status, succumb to the overshoot conjecture? What of countries that do not inherently adopt capitalistic cultures, such as China, Russia, and Vietnam? Or do the authors suggest that capitalism is so deeply embedded in our global economic systems that the overshoot conjecture cannot be escaped?

Overall, the content of this book could have been way tighter, really honing in on making the arguments clear and without many of the seemingly irrelevant anecdotes and analogies. While I was able to glean the authors' intent and main arguments, this was only achieved through more careful and effortful reading, as much of the writing was incoherent and tended to shift into long, repetitive tangents. That said, I still found it to be an engaging read, one that made me want to scrutinize the text more deeply. I was open to many of the ideas presented by Malm and Carton - for the most part, they articulate a lot of my grievances with climate development - but I did not find the method of presentation to be very effective.

TL;DR: Malm and Carton present some insightful views behind the obstacles of effective climate action that deserve to be conveyed more coherently.

[Kevin Tole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where on earth to start with this?
Malm is a zealot... in the best sense of that word. People should be hearing and taking note and acting on what amounts to climate catastrophe and species extinction on the backs of good-for-the-few. Climate change is always somebody else's problem, in particular it is the Southern Hemisphere's problem. This is the most polemic of Malm's books I have read - and rightly so

But wait a minute! The vultures are coming home to roost. If you can't see the effects of climate change now wherever you are then you must be blind, deaf or dead... or soon might be. So many COP conferences (there have been 29 so far, annually since 1995) and little has come out of them other than vast, expensive talking shops designed to ease the consciences of producers, adding a lot of hot air to the increasing volumes of CO2 discharged into the atmosphere. The only period there has been a decline was during COVID. And in fact the rate of discharge has INCREASED over the last two years. Rather than mitigate, COP has done everything it can to support Business-As-Usual.

There is no hiding from this. 1.5 degrees C is dead and buried. Overshoot is a strategy of 'Jam Tomorrow'. There is no guarantee that the technologies espoused will deliver. Mitigation should have started years ago. Instead we have been fed the latest desecration of 'The Limit is not the Limit'. The consequences of global climate change are visible for all to see yet fossil fuel infrastructure is still growing. We need to accept 'resource stranding' - that is, keeping it in the ground. And on top of that we need to accept changes in lifestyle. DEMAND LESS. We must embrace the growing disparity and inequality and DO something about it. This is a moral as well as an existential decision. We cannot continue as we have.
That way lies extinction.

[Vuk Trifkovic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading.

[Aaron Cantú · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely phenomenal. The authors explore the reasons why, at this late hour as the climate crisis bears down on the world, nations and industries not only continue burning fossil fuels but are doubling down.

I learned so much from their excavation of the political-sociological roots of Integrated Assessment Models, and their use of Marxist theory to understand them as the “superstructure upon the base” justifying all sorts of problematic assumptions embedded within 21st century climate forecasts, such as underestimating the price drops of solar/wind, drawing up scenarios with fictitious technologies like bioenergy with carbon capture, and promoting the general idea that we can blow past temperature limits before, somehow, paring it back, the damage of overshoot notwithstanding.

As the authors point out, the longer we let this situation continue, the harder it becomes to reverse. And that's not just because emissions are cumulative across time, increasing levels of damage, wiping out peoples in the Global South and pulverizing societies' abilities to recover. Fossil capital digs in more deeply the longer it is allowed to flourish without any kind of state intervention. That's partially a product of where global reserves are at now: The easy oil is long gone, requiring expensive and sophisticated forms of fixed capital to hunt it out - drones, horizontal drilling, shale-breaking instruments, etc. Fossil fuels themselves are not renewable and, by definition, they are commodities that must constantly be found, produced, transported, and burned. All across this supply chain there are opportunities for all kinds of profit making enterprises: Financing of the capital to recover the fuels, grease their global transportation in tankers circling the seas, investment in refineries etc...as the authors write, the labor embedded in these processes creates the surplus value (profit) which keeps the whole thing running.

The technologies of solar and wind cannot ever offer capitalists similar surplus value. You can't load solar and wind onto a barge, and by dint of their renewable quality, they cannot ever be subjects of a scarcity crisis. Any kind of lithium or minerals shortage couldn't approach the immediacy and scale of an oil crisis spurred, for example, by OPEC cutting output or a global war disrupting supplies. Instead solar and wind and the energy they provide via electricity will only continue losing value as they become more widespread and cheaper. There is no Brent benchmark for bottled sunlight. And you don’t need many workers at all once the panels and the turbines are running, thus no labor to create surplus value. These are qualities that make wind and solar irresistible for a society that sees energy as a public good, but which make them uncommodifiable. Thus the authors declare that it is capitalism or the planet.

The implications of this analysis are quite grave. After eviscerating Obama-era "stubborn optimism" of the 2010s that hoped these companies would just do the right thing and abandon coal and hydrocarbons, the authors also critically interrogate non-violent activist campaigns of that era that implored investors to ditch from fossil fuels, lest they face catastrophic losses due to stranded assets. But the assumption that the assets could be stranded in some kind of voluntary process where investors suddenly became enlightened and nobly turn away from their investments worth trillions of dollars, overlooked the intransigence of the forces aligned behind them.

Indeed, to understand the actual implications of such a change, the authors draw parallels to "Lincoln and Lenin"; The former who stripped Southern elites of their assets in the form of enslaved people, the latter who ruthlessly expropriated property from the bourgeoisie. The process of actually stranding assets would be somewhere in between the two, but on a far larger scale, and in the face of extreme reaction and fallout. The authors acknowledge that the crash of such a swift change (a la Gramsci's "war of maneuver") would exceed 2008 and even 1929-1933 because of how deeply embedded financial institutions are within fossil capital.

I shuddered reading these passages. Yet the alternatives are not good. Worse case: global climate collapse with human species extinction. Middle scenario: Similar to that shown in the film Elysium, where the rich live ensconced in a glitzy climate controlled pod hovering in the atmosphere, served by AI and a lucky few human servants, while the wretched survivors of the climate wars scour the dying Earth for water and food, ruled by the digital systems controlled remotely from the sky. Best scenario: A coarser version of our current fortressed world, with death and disease and war ravaging Africa, the Middle East and tropical nations, while in the US and Europe people try piling into areas like Michigan, where rising temperatures render previously cold places much warmer, perhaps pleasantly so -- if you can ignore the wildfires, sea level rises, constant deluges, and the likely inability of the political system to adapt our infrastructure in a just and efficient manner. In the latter two, today's authoritarian trends find fertile ground to expand and entrench. That is, if the rich world's governments aren't wiped out by wars accelerated by climate-fueled political tensions.

Perhaps if we'd commenced an "orderly transition" 20 years ago, these kinds of futures could be avoided. Now they cannot, at least not without a very painful, world-shaking political confrontation without any precedent in human history.

[Arno · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yet another great Marxist analysis by Malm (and Carton, whom I didn't know before this). They don't shy away from confronting the dire situation and don't offer optimism - for which I'm grateful, we have enough of those tracts already and they have had zero results.

It's built around three parts:
1. Where and how the idea of overshoot came to be, and how it became hegemonic in contemporary neoliberal political discourse. They posit this as an 'anti-revolution': a move to cut off an as-of-yet non existent radical move to stop emissions.
2. What it would mean to stop emissions, and thus the fossil industry itself. What the impact of massive asset stranding would do (hint: the collapse of much of capitalism itself).
They also explain how, on the one side, a energy transition is technically feasible, but economically improbable since prices and profits tend to collapse from a certain point on. The logic of capital dictates that it will seek those profits, and those are to be found in the fossil industry. And the more capital is sunk into it (which is necessary anyway to drive up extraction and access the more difficult sources), the less likely it is that fossil capital will divest itself from it.
3. A preliminary 'what is to be done?': why the situation demands forceful, radical action, why compromising with capital won't work, and a frontal attack on fossil assets is needed.
The two options are: collapse of (fossil) capitalism, or civilizational collapse.

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't love LOVE this book overall, but some of the sections were great. Most of the book is just covering how "Overshoot" was baked into our climate models because they took bourgeois or neo-classical economics as a given (i.e., the transition has to be slow, and profitable for oil and gas companies). So our modelling essentially allowed us to get to a point where we can surpass 1.5C of warming under the assumption that carbon capture etc. will save us at some later date.

In one chapter/section, the authors use Marx's labour theory of value to demonstrate why the rollout of renewable energy infrastructure hasn't proceeded as quickly as we expect (especially since it now produces significantly cheaper energy than fossil fuels). That's because once the fixed capital (i.e., infrastructure) for renewables has been built, there's no way to squeeze additional surplus labour out of workers in the energy production supply chain. Which means that the rate of profit falls dramatically with renewables (compared to fossil fuels). Renewables aren't being developed for the sole reason that they are not profitable to the owners of capital.

[Matthew Wilcox · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always appreciate the detail that Malm goes into in his books. Above everything else, Malm and Carlton do a great job synthesizing so many different case studies with so many different theories to find the greater truth that underlies our current climate situation. They explain it concisely and methodically, and you're left with the feeling that there's not really room for argument.

[Adam McKiernan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A couple months since I finished this book and like mostly all of Malm's work, it has burrowed itself into my brain. Writing history as it passes is always a difficult task but Malm and Carton are able to describe this moment as it relates to climate and fossil capital with immense clarity. Halting the extraction and burning of fossil fuels will require a challenge to business-as-usual and longer we wait, the larger the confrontation will have to be. Can't wait for the second volume, The Long Heat.

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Already would've been a hard, depressing read as this book details exactly the ways that capitalism at large has decided to throw humanity at large under the bus of global warming in favor of more profits. However, finishing this the night of the '24 election was a hell of an experience, and one I wouldn't necessary recommend recreating.

[Brenda Greene · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is divided into 3 sections. I gave up before finishing the first section.

The first section "the limit is not a limit" gives an overview of the politics around the Paris 2015 agreement, the debates about 1.5 or 2 degrees Celcius, the hope of enforceable targets quickly lost by USA's Obama administration and a block of countries dedicated to coal, which was excluded from CoP's remit.

The resulting "compromise" lead to polarised camps, defeatists believing 1.5 was long dead and voluntariasm believing any slowing of emissions was worth pursuing. The tensions between these political view points and between the Global north and south (maybe this means the Pacific nations?) is mulled over ad nauseum.

The CoP word fest did nothing except perhaps ignite placed based (read small scale) protest that delayed some new fossil fuel infrastructure. A couple of protests were briefly mentioned however these were largely ineffective and ignored by decision makers. A case is made for greater protest, such as during Greta Thunberg's leadership, but why this has subsided is not explored. Parallels were drawn with Marxism and societal protest but as climate action had few things in common with this unsuccesful movement it is unclear why this was discussed.

Overshoot is described as stemming from oversimplified economic models adopted by the EU and IPCC possibly around the 1990's. An imagined carbon capture system meant that in theory overshoot beyond 2 degrees was ok. A lot of the Paris 2015 politics from the prior chapters was reinterpreted, which was confusing. The carbon capture system was treated as if it were real and the IPCC concluded that carbon capture only worked if emissions were reduced by 2030. Subsequently, net zero goals by 2050 were adopted by many countries, but not China or India.

Some economist came up with earth's optimal temperature at 6 degrees above pre industrial. How or when that happened, who this was or why that mattered (did the UN agree?) is not explained. Nevertheless this unknown paper/report forms the basis of a whole chapter argument for it, then against it. Then Marxism is explored again. Then some theoretical philosophical argument is imagined based on hidden assumptions. What was the point of this?

The authors show time and again that current capitalist economics do not reflect reality and society's dedication to business as usual. What is real is the GDP/fossil fuel link. The lack of public discourse and media about climate change needs a chapter. This is a big gap.

The writing jumps about with no clear time frames. The fourth wall is repeatedly broken by references to aspects that are to be explored later. The authors opinions and musings on aspects of political decision making are profuse. Jarring incomplete and nonsensical sentences abound - here is an example from the start of a sub chapter on pg 79 " If these were several ethical objections and one historiographical, most damming for programmatic overshoot, however, might be a psychological observation."

A better structure for the book would be the history of the ozone hole agreement, what made it work, the genesis of the Kyoto agreement and the beginnings of the Paris Agreement, most of which is covered in Chapt 1. Further chapters should set the scene of geopolitical positions that underpin the Paris Agreement. There should be a chapter on the USA (north and south), Obama's position, Bidens and Trump's. A chapter on China and India is needed. Then one on island nations. This whole section should set the scene. The next section should be on political economic systems in relation to climate including a history from Marxism to neoliberalism. The 3rd section should be on the politics of the Paris agreement, including protests, without the authors opinions as readers can be trusted to form their own opinions. The last section should be on next steps.

So how did the world surrender to climate breakdown? Well, that was obvious from the start. No country legally committed to 1.5 to 2 degrees above pre industrial average land surface temperatures. It went all downhill from there. This book, like the intermidible CoPs, is, as Greta Thurnberg succinctly put it, "blah blah blah".

[Simon B · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Under capitalist property relations, the [renewable energy] flow hits a glass ceiling of sorts. It can grow to some extent, as an addition in the margins, but a transition propelled by agents seeking to maximise profit would be a self-defeating enterprise. The more developed the productive forces of the flow, the more proficient their capture of a kind of energy in which no labour can be objectified, the closer the price and the value and the profit all come to zero. Then investors will have to lose interest ... It follows, furthermore, that on this downward trajectory, the flow cannot offer anything like the three sources of super-profits in hydrocarbons."

A timely and radical intervention into climate politics. Its use of Marxist concepts to explain the hyper-resilience of fossil fuels, and the inability of far cheaper renewable energy alternatives to outcompete, is persuasive. The key difference is that the sun and wind contain no social labour, hence produce no surplus value for capital, and thus result in much less profit compared with fossil fuels. Despite appearances, Overshoot is similar to Climate Denial in that both are forms of capital protection. Emission reductions that can sustain life on Earth are equivalent to the political destruction of fossil capital and the wiping out of trillions of dollars of capitalist value. Hardly an easy ask, but a realistic line of march compared with the alternatives, which all inexorably lead to capital consuming the biosphere in an unquenchable drive for higher returns. I will look forward to the coming sequel with interest.

Poverty alleviation was not a concomitant or cause of overshoot and could be accomplished without it. It was not the masses of the global South that, suicidally, tipped the world into 1.5°C. In fact, not even the working classes of the North were party to the process: between 1990 and 2019, per capita emissions of the poorest half of the populations of the US and Europe dropped by nearly one third , due to ‘compressed wages and consumption’. The overshoot conjuncture was the creation of the rich, with which they capped their victory in the class struggle."

[Sue Lyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Today I finished the book and today I also took part in a campaign action to persuade the All Wales Pension fund to divest from fossil fuels. The book shows that this is just not going to happen. There is no investment that will produce greater returns than fossil fuels. Local councils would be failing in their fiduciary duty to their employees if they divest. I now understand the horrible truth of why share holders in oil companies don’t want them to transition to renewables. There is so little profit in it. Capitalism itself is the problem.
The book did leave me with some unanswered questions. Why is it that governments and all of us have allowed FF to be so profitable? Why can’t we hold them to account for the true cost of what they have done and continue to do? As the authors tell us, air pollution is the second biggest killer worldwide. the destruction of natural environments - particularly in rain forests and poor countries; the true cost of adaptation to flooding, drought, heat waves, hurricanes etc we are all facing. If we did their profits would plummet and share holders would call for different investments. Why don’t we hold these companies to account? Have they gained so much power in the world that it is impossible to make them pay for the damage they are causing?
I recently read the biography of Nenquimo Nemonte, leader of the fight to save Ecuador’s Amazonian rainforest and was delighted that this book flagged up this landmark victory over oil companies. “We Will Not be Saved” gave me hope that resistance can win. However, having just finished “Overshoot” I feel overwhelming anger, despair and sadness. 4.6 billion years of evolution of our planet and it ends like this. All my hope that things could change has vanished.

Nevertheless, I am grateful to the authors for their scholarship and insight. I realise it is a Marxist polemic, and seethat perhaps I am a closet Marxist without realising it. After 40 Years of activism against global capitalism and its extractiviist practices I now don’t know what to do. What is the best use of my voice in climate activism - I just don’t know.

What I found missing from the book was the absence of focus on the nature and ecological crisis, to me the outcome of our extractivist culture will mean there isn’t a planet on which we can survive as global capitalism drives irreversible ecological breakdown. Maybe they will address this in their second volume. If they don’t I feel they are only addressing half the picture. Our soils, our water, our biodiversity is the foundation of life. The corporations are driving the sixth mass extinction as Nemonte’s book shows - for those of you feeling as hopeless as me at this moment do read her book.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of those frustrating non-fiction books featuring ephemeral moments of insight buried within a mess of sniping and point-scoring. The authors are at their strongest when sticking to their purported topic of "overshoot" (ie the wilful exceeding of climate targets by governments and private enterprises in the hope of better tackling the problem in some nebulous future) or when their analysis narrows into specific deconstructions of how the logic of capitalism hampers or destroys the ability to move to a world without fossil fuels (eg their discussion on the problem of stranded assets or the shallowness of profit potential in renewable energy). But the more the analysis turns into generalised griping about "capital" or indulges in ridiculing or scoffing at out-of-touch or evil elites, the less persuasive it is.

There was also an almost comical double standard in the authors' approach to technology, where technological advances that would aid their argument (such as some frankly magical advances in batteries that will solve the intermittency problem vis-a-vis renewable energy) are accepted on the evidential basis of isolated examples of experimental success (or sometimes no evidence at all), whereas technologies they don't like for ideological reasons (such as geoengineering) are dismissed on the basis of one sub-strand of such technology (carbon capture in the geoengineering case) being not yet proven at scale.

In summary, this is a book that is ultimately hampered by the firmness of the authors' ideological convictions. Readers of the far left persuasion will no doubt find it an enjoyable and convincing polemic, but it's hard to see what the point of this book is beyond preaching to the converted.

[Jan Bloxham · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredibly relevant tooic for humankind. Deeply researched and intelligent.

I do, however, have two main criticisms:

1) The language enjoys a high lix number but does not flow at all. It’s not as painful as academic writing, but it’s quite rough reading, with semi-segues in the middle of paragraphs quite often.

2) At least twice do the authors state that renewables can sustain us forever, an utterly bizarre untruth to include for at least eight separate reason, but let’s just go with the fact that the rare earths needed are finite, so that’s that. But they write
“A producer of oil has something to sell that will be extinguished in the moment of use; a seller of solar-powered electricity offers a good that will last for another 4 or 5 billion years.”
.. as if renewables don’t go out of commission in 25 years!? Considering they deal extensively with the question of why fossil fuel capital abandoned solar panels right when they became the cheapest energy production available, right after the biggest price drop in energy tech modernity has ever seen, and considering 40% of the book is literally footnotes with references, I am completely flabbergastedly confused as to how the authors could possibly be unaware that PVs degrade over time and eventually die.

That this can be bungled gives great cause for concern regarding what else might’ve been bungled.

Apart from these two issues, the book is excellent.

For more on so-called renewables, read Bright Green Lies or my blogpost here https://open.substack.com/pub/gnug315...

[Burc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a fast read. However, not my fav Malm book (granted this one is a collab!). There is a lot of laying out of facts and recounting what has happened in since the pandemic in the first section. One interesting section about asset stranding - a theme that Malm has mentioned in other work like how to blow up a pipeline. It is interesting to think through the specifics of what asset stranding will entail! Last there is a rather underworked list of theses about what politics will look like in the overshoot conjuncture. I didn't mind any of this but didn't find it all that conceptually interesting either.

The peppering of psychoanalytic language throughout the book remained largely unconvincing - arguably the biggest failure of the book imo. I'm normally a sucker for this kind of analysis but honestly, this just felt superficial. Curious to read Long Heat which is supposed to be the second part of this.

[Sinan Eden · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a long article spanning a range of concepts sucking the content out of the climate debates. The authors tidy up the political-economic meaning of words like "1.5ºC warming with limited overshoot scenario", "emissions offsetting", "stranded assets" and "carbon bubbles". Widely used in technical jargon as well as in press releases (by corporations, governments and/or NGOs), these terms exist to fulfill a specific historical political function at the specific conjecture in which they were introduced.

This is not an introductory book. So if you are not somehow engaged in the climate discussions, you might not grasp the necessity of this intellectual intervention. But if you have been involved in climate stuff in any form, the book also does *not* assume any prior knowledge of any of the concepts or facts, and avoids technical language.

[Tom Booker · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read in recent times. For anyone that is interested in tackling climate change (hopefully everyone), you need to understand fossil capitalism, and to do that I'd recommend reading this book. Through Marx, Freud and Adorno, Malm delivers a scathing analysis of why it's so hard for us to transition away from fossil fuels. In fact, we haven't even begun the transition. He also uses the classic capitalist sources like energy company reports, The Economist, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, etc to elucidate the thinking of the capitalist class.

Malm is also one of the best prose writers I know. It is incredible that English isn't his native language. If you want to learn words like "hebdomadal" and "munificent" then I would recommend this book. He is hilarious and a joy to read, despite the heavy topic!

[l robin s · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rather terrifying read in 2025 as AI companies fire up their own liquified natural gas turbines in service of creating what they believe will be a machine god that might solve all of this for us. The turbines themselves fit all too neatly into overshoot ideology. They are simple cycle turbines, as opposed to combined cycle, thus are less efficient, burn dirtier and waste more heat in combustion. But most importantly they are built quicker (2-3 years vs 10). Does not matter if they are cheaper, what’s important is that they can start burning now. And we will burn tomorrow, if we haven’t drowned already.
Also fun to read in the midst of COP 30 which concluded with a document that makes no mention of fossil fuels. 😀👍

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5
-learned a lot about the economics behind fossil fuels
-i don’t like reading about climate change but I like reading malm bc I think he’s amazing
-slightly rebought into the idea of 100% renewable energy globally
-frustrated at the dismissal of the inhumane conditions that give us solar panel tech, as well as the lack of investigation into mitigation via reduced consumption (which malm has discussed previously so I guess was outside the scope of this book?)
-forget the lib concept that Western Europe is a beacon of the future… seems like the resilience and compassion of south/central America should be our model

[OneDimensionalMan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a relatively specific intervention against geoengineering and other technologies of mitigation. It’s great at that, but I am not sure I agree that this concept of overshoot is the one that is most generative. However as ever malm manages to cohere many narratives together in a readable and sometimes overly combative text. He can’t resist jabs at his intellectual opponents, even when they are masquerading as compliments.
This leads the text to feel more like a hyper specific intervention while it kind of purports to be much more general. Is this the book we need? I’m not so sure. Looking forward to part 2

[Philemon - · Rating 4 out of 5]

Documents the rebound in fossil fuels use / emissions after the COVID recession and concludes that reducing fossil fuel use to avoid 1.5 C rise in global temperature is now infeasible. Failure of international negotiations to lower fossil fuels use / emissions is now conclusive. The only hope is carbon capture technology and/or geoengineering to partially block sunshine. These will be examined more fully in an upcoming sequel. Each of these has major problems, to be discussed in the succeeding volume.

[Dávid L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Climate crisis from a “Marxist” perspective. I found this book optimistic even though it has no happy ending. Even though it’s criticising the “business as usual”, the solution it offers is to change everything to renewable and carry on business as usual.

I think marxism today is mostly just an intellectual game, or virtue signalling like wokeness. It’s a strategy of the credentialist elite to mask their class clueless and their conformism.

[Timothy Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sad but necessary read if you’d like to pierce the false optimism and/or ostrich in the sand attitude about climate change. Malm and Carton take a plain argument—avoiding climate change catastrophe requires limiting fossil emissions—and illustrate how leading nations and international groups (eg the IPCC) have instead given into an “irreal turn”, favoriting hypothetical technologies and placating oil executives over ecological reality.

[Weston Kiser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful book looking into why, after knowing about the cause and needed actions to stop the climate crisis for more than 30 years, humanity is now destined to overshoot 1.5C rise in temps.

The fact I will take away from this book & always remember is we HAVE to stop building new fossil fuel assets NOW. Once a FF company spends the capital and expects a rate of return they will do absolutely everything to ensure it does not become a stranded asset.

[Glen Hoos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overshoot effectively disabused me of what little hope I had remaining as far as our planet is concerned. Every impulse of our society is to run headlong in the wrong direction. Meticulously researched - fully two thirds of the page count consists of end notes. Despite the grim picture painted by the authors, I’m looking forward to the promised sequel. Glutton for punishment, I guess.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I confess I didn’t know that the concept of “asset stranding” existed, nor could I have guessed that it was so multifaceted until reading this.
Moreover, the nefarious and insidious way that the overshoot concept has been weaved into our theoretical response to climate change is diabolical. This book is eye-opening.
Looks like there’s a related book upcoming. Have already pre-ordered

[Alan Eyre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished. Masterful explanation of how ‘Fossil Capital,’ pursuing profits and fearful of stranded assets, uses adaptation, technical pseudo-solutions like BECCS, and conceptually flawed Integrated Assessment Models to prevent real mitigation. A very useful assessment.

[Kinsey Cantrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

everyone should read this book right this very second