The boat is leaking. The captain lied.
The boat is leaking. The captain lied.
Review of Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, Verso).
by Bill Spence
Everybody with the slightest acquaintance with the facts knows that we are barrelling down the road to climate disaster. Everybody knows that to avoid this we are supposed to have no new oil and gas exploration and development; we are supposed to reduce fossil fuel use every year by more than happened during the pandemic; and we are supposed to pretty much wipe out the entire colossus that is the fossil fuel industry over the next few decades, along with all its infrastructure and investments, replacing it with a world-wide grid of renewables and energy storage.
And everybody knows that we are not allowed to continue expanding fossil fuel exploration and production in order to keep burning more. But as our recent report for the CCCCJ documents, that is exactly what is happening – all of the major oil companies are planning expansion, quite candidly explaining that the industry remains highly profitable, that they have sunk trillions into exploring and opening new fields and so need to exploit these, and what is more their shareholders demand the returns.
Why are we still carrying on with business as usual, in the face of the overwhelming evidence of real and worsening disaster? Why, after decades of international meetings, analysis, commitments and promised contributions, are we now breaking through the target of 1.5 degrees of warming, with 2 degrees appearing on the shortening horizon, and even more within the bounds of possibility? These are the questions addressed by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton in Overshoot.
For them, overshoot is the term for when official limits on global heating are exceeded and the dominant classes accept this. We are now in the period when those classes exhibit their inability to shut down the drivers of global warming as limits fast approach. The destruction of the fossil fuel industry entails the large-scale restructuring of the entire economy and society; but this is unthinkable and risks inflaming even more revolutionary demands, which, if met threaten the survival of capitalism itself.
Avoiding the fact that truly radical action is needed requires the propagation of magical thinking – the ‘overshoot ideology’ – or the acceptance that there isn’t that much of a problem really, and anyway if there is then we can just adapt to it or offset it, and that future technologies such as large-scale carbon capture and geoengineering will deal with the problem. Overshoot ideology is in essence the ideology of anti-revolution in a warming world.
At each stage of the unfolding climate catastrophe, the dominant classes responded to block any interference with fossil fuel profits. Early on this involved simple denial that climate change was happening. As the evidence, and the impacts, accumulated, the response was to create “pathways”, supposedly leading to certain limited levels of warming, that would still allow business as usual to continue. The troublesome emissions would be dealt with by capturing the carbon and storing it somewhere, or by offsetting the emissions, by planting trees for example. Capitalism would also come to the rescue – making emissions something you could trade, so you could continue polluting the atmosphere if you paid someone else to promise to stop doing so. Alongside this, if everyone reported their emissions, climate risk could be priced in and investors could choose the greener companies. Finally, with the cost of clean energy dropping rapidly, particularly for solar, market forces would enable a smooth transition to clean energy.
As Malm and Carton point out:
“In the Paris Agreement, there was no cap on emissions, no aggregate sum to be shrunk, and so there could be no fair distribution of the necessary cuts; without any common dates, quotas or other parameters, what remained was a free-for-all.” The Global South had “won the battle over targets but lost the war over commitments”.
What has happened in the last ten years is a dawning realisation that all these promises are nothing but smoke and mirrors. In 2021, Greta Thunberg summed up the procession of 25 years of annual COP meetings as “blah, blah, blah”. The final insult for many was the appointment of the head of one of the world’s largest oil companies, Sultan Al Jaber, as president of COP28 in 2023.
The ever-worsening effects of global warming are now in increasing tension with the clear unwillingness of the world’s dominant classes to address the causes. A radical change in the system is required, but a radical change in the system cannot be tolerated. The overshoot ideology is propagated – the conjuring of some powerful new technologies that will absorb the emissions, or re-engineer the world’s complex climate system. Alongside just requiring people to adapt – with most of the adaptive suffering happening elsewhere, in the Global South.
The final recourse is that of the populist right – arguing that climate change is not a real problem, and promoting further fossil fuel use. The alternatives are never mentioned – such as the nationalisation and rapid run-down of fossil fuel companies, alongside the shifting of subsidies to support a rapid growth of renewables. An ordered transition like this would take advantage of the rapidly dropping cost of renewables. You might think that because renewables are now cheap, they would displace fossil fuels by the operation of market forces. After all, oil and gas are becoming increasingly difficult, and expensive, to extract. But this logic fails to recognise that it is profit that drives investment, not cost. Renewables are nowhere near as profitable as oil and gas – the fossil fuel companies themselves quote the figures to explain why they are cutting most of their clean energy investments.
The other problem is the real and current threat to the funding that can enable the energy transition. Overshoot was written just prior to the election of Trump, a development the authors would recognise as the extreme end of the overshoot ideology – right-wing populism incorporating denial that global warming is a crisis. The Trump government started by immediately cutting funding for clean energy and increasing support for greater fossil fuel production, shutting down down agencies that monitor climate changes and forbidding all mention of the climate crisis by government departments. These actions by the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter will just accelerate climate damage, thereby shortening the timetable to rising prices, greater economic stress worldwide and increasing national and international tensions. Trump’s government, and copycat movements elsewhere like Reform in the UK and the AfD in Germany, are committed to unrestrained capitalism – the unfettered pursuit of profit, and the further enrichment of those at the very top. Their climate denial is an attempt to counter the increasing awareness that the climate crisis can only be avoided by radical changes to our society.
As the planet heats and temperature limits continue to be surpassed, we can expect more of the overshoot ideology – magical thinking that argues in essence that capitalism can solve the problem, attempting to forestall a time when everybody knows that capitalism is the problem.