The Point, However, Is to Change It

In advance of Andreas Malm and Wim Carton’s forthcoming book “The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late,” Genevieve Guenther revisits the authors’ 2024 title “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.”

By Genevieve GuentherSeptember 13, 2025

• Environment

• Politics

• Economics and Finance

THE TRUMP REGIME is happily laying waste to the planet: systematically erasing climate science, destroying the clean energy industry, dismantling governmental capacity to act to halt global heating. The administration has ordered that the words “climate change” be deleted from federal documents, and it has barred American scientists from working on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has eviscerated the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Republicans in Congress have effectively repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 law that made historic investments in clean-energy manufacturing and deployment. The EPA has announced its plans to rescind the “endangerment finding,” which underpins US authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide as a climate pollutant. And Trump himself has signed executive orders to boost coal, the most climate-harming fossil fuel, and to override limits on oil and gas extraction so as to rapidly expand—rather than transition away from—the fossil-fuel economy.

Meanwhile, 2024 was the hottest year on record. Before that, 2023 was. Climate scientists now project that a long-term global average temperature of 1.5°C will be breached in roughly the next five years. They also warn that heating the planet over 1.5°C significantly increases the risk of setting off “tipping points”—collapsing the massive circulatory currents in the Atlantic Ocean, for instance, and thereby rearranging the Southeast Asian monsoons and plunging Europe into winters whose temperatures could reach -50°C in Scandinavia—rendering parts of the world largely uninhabitable.

The current American administration may seem like the worst manifestation of right-wing climate denial imaginable. Horrific as it is, this is hardly a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. But what if something shocking were also true? What if Trump’s policies were, in essence, not much worse than those sanctioned by the UN’s own IPCC itself?

The possibility may seem as absurd as it is disturbing. Yet it is a question raised by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton’s book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, published last October by Verso. Malm and Carton, both professors of ecology and sustainability science at Lund University in Sweden, have written two books on what they call “the overshoot conjuncture,” the moment in human history when officially declared limits to global warming are exceeded while the ruling classes nevertheless assemble ideological formations to sustain the fossil-fuel economy. Their second book in the series, The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, will be released this October. Drawing on deep research, Overshoot argues that, after the 2015 Paris Agreement, where 195 nations promised to work together to halt global heating as close to 1.5°C as possible, the voice of international climate science actually supported the expansion of the fossil-fuel economy. It did so by implicitly promising that the world could “overshoot” the Paris target yet ultimately meet it anyway—thanks to inevitable technological innovation enabled by economic growth.

In thereby creating what Malm and Carton call “overshoot ideology,” IPCC scientists acted not to ensure that the world would never cross the threshold of 1.5°C; rather, they acted to protect the trillions of dollars in assets, including big banks’ upstream investments in fossil energy that would be utterly devalued if the world halted global heating (a feat that would require phasing out coal, oil, and methane almost entirely). Far from being “woke,” Malm and Carton argue, IPCC scientists are essentially the handmaidens of capital, serving to protect business as usual rather than insisting on the radical action needed to secure a livable future.

I’m not sure the book’s account of these scientists is entirely convincing, for reasons I’ll explain. But Malm and Carton’s elucidation of the scale and ubiquity of the assets threatened by fossil-fuel phaseout is revelatory. Do you want to know why, aside from some emissions reductions picked off like low-hanging fruit in the energy sector, the world is not really making progress on climate change? Do you want to know why governments continue to support oil and gas development even though the price of solar, for example, is lower than fossil fuels almost everywhere—a price differential that, capitalist economists have assured us, should drive the transition to clean energy? Read Overshoot—it will tell you.

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Here is the history that grounds Carton and Malm’s analysis. After the international meeting that produced the Paris Agreement, the signatories formally requested that the IPCC produce a special report on two key questions: first, the differences between the harms of 1.5°C and 2°C of heating; and, second, the “mitigation scenarios” (or policy pathways) that could reduce emissions to halt heating at 1.5°C. The report, which came out in 2018, found that the impacts of even 0.5°C heating were large. For example, at 1.5°C, coral reefs—the source of food and livelihood for nearly a billion people—would be able to hang on; at 2°C, they would die out entirely. The report’s clear elucidation of these kinds of differences helped inspire a wave of global climate alarm. For a brief, almost hopeful period, this led to corporations and governments around the world making historic climate pledges—Google’s pledge to achieve “net-zero emissions” in its operations by 2030, for instance—which are, in turn, being swept away by the current wave of petro-authoritarian backlash and neoliberal retrenchment.

With respect to the scenarios that might halt heating at 1.5°C, the IPCC said something startling. They began by reporting that the world needs not merely to “reduce” its carbon dioxide emissions but to achieve “net-zero” emissions entirely. This would require bringing emissions as close to real zero as possible, while removing any residual, truly unavoidable pollution (from agriculture, say, or the fabrication of medical plastics) with machines that would suck carbon out of the air. The technical term for such machines is “carbon dioxide removal,” or CDR. At the same time (and here’s the really shocking part), the IPCC said, essentially, that the world could continue using fossil fuels and let global temperatures heat up over 1.5°C, thereby overshooting the Paris limit—and then, later this century, deploy CDR not only to help create net-zero emissions but also to draw enough carbon out of the atmosphere to cool the planet back down to the 1.5°C limit by 2100. Now it’s crucial to understand this: at the time of its making, this claim was almost entirely speculative.

The kind of CDR in the scenarios that drove the IPCC’s message is called “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage,” or BECCS. The idea behind BECCS is to use plant appetites to remove carbon dioxide: to cultivate millions of acres of grasses or quick-growing trees that would “eat” carbon; then to harvest and burn this so-called “bioenergy” for power generation, capturing the carbon dioxide released in the combustion; and then, finally, to send the captured carbon dioxide through a network of pipelines to reservoirs where it could be stored. So long as more carbon is stored than emitted, this system of carbon removal should reduce the overall concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and thereby reduce planetary temperatures.

To be fair, BECCS did exist, in physical form, when it was included in these IPCC scenarios. As of the end of 2018, BECCS was capturing around two million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year—which sounds, on the face of it, impressive. In reality, that amount is less than 30 minutes of a full year’s global emissions. The technology would need to be scaled by a factor of 5,000 to remove the roughly 10 gigatonnes of annual emissions that could be left over even after we’ve decarbonized our systems as much as possible—quite aside from reducing the overall concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and thereby cooling the planet by some degree.

Assuming scaling of that degree is even feasible, all evidence suggests that building a planet-spanning system of BECCS would be massively destructive to both planetary and human systems. According to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, removing 10 billion tonnes of CO2 a year from the atmosphere would mean planting bioenergy on a land area about one-and-a-half times the size of India—nearly half the land area on which the entire world grows food. Obviously, using arable land to grow bioenergy would spike the price of staple crops (by as much as seven times, in one estimate), causing widespread famine; and extracting this land from forest would, of course, have additional deleterious effects on the climate. Furthermore, growing horizon-to-horizon acres of bioenergy, in addition to the crops we would need for food, would simply multiply the environmental harms of industrial-scale agriculture, leading to (according to one study) “terrestrial acidification, eutrophication, terrestrial ecotoxicity, ionizing radiation and ozone depletion.” If that weren’t enough, the National Academies point out that, “because remaining biodiversity is already threatened by habitat loss exacerbated by climate change […], devoting a substantial amount of nonagricultural land to land-hungry [CDR] would likely cause a substantial increase in extinction.” All this is why a landmark 2016 expert survey concluded that the expectation BECCS could remove significant amounts of carbon was “unrealistic.” In Overshoot, Malm and Carton cut to the chase, dismissing BECCS as “a force of fictional quality.”

Implicitly acknowledging its fictional force, academic and entrepreneurial technologists are currently working to develop other forms of CDR. The “direct air capture” of carbon dioxide (DAC) has recently emerged as the most promising technology under development. But DAC is no magic bullet either. The world’s biggest DAC plant, Climeworks’ “Mammoth” in Iceland, captured only 100 tonnes in 2024, less than enough to cover its own operational footprint. Of course, the technology could be improved and scaled over time; even if that comes to pass, however, it will likely remain stubbornly expensive. Some researchers argue that thermodynamic considerations alone rule out estimates of costs below $500 per tonne of CO2. If capturing a tonne of carbon dioxide would cost $500, then capturing 10 billion tonnes would total five trillion dollars, roughly 20 percent of annual US GDP. And unless more emissions are directly curtailed, we would need to spend that every year just to have a “net-zero” global economy—quite aside from the “negative emissions” that, in the IPCC’s scenarios, are necessary for cooling the planet back down. Contrary to the optimism conveyed by the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC, it seems like CDR might not preserve fossil capital after all. Reversing entropy, it turns out, is hard.

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What does all of this mean? Are IPCC scientists liars, or snake oil salesmen? Are they in fact the courtiers, rather than the counselors, of global decision-makers—whom Malm and Carton call “the dominant classes”?

Well, not exactly. Yes, scenario modelers—researchers who try to find the so-called “economically optimal” pathways to net zero—are by and large good subjects of their economic training and its capitalist techno-optimism, or what Malm and Carton call bourgeois “rationalism-optimism.” And so of course their scenarios perform a quasi-religious faith in the salvific power of technology, which remains ever intact despite the lack of empirical evidence for their beliefs. Indeed, one of the most scandalous facts about these “overshoot scenarios” is that they never priced in the possibility that CDR might fail. It was never even considered!

Still, it is not quite fair to suggest that these modelers practiced to deceive. After all, the IPCC was asked to provide pathways to 1.5°C. And provide them they did. But the hour was already very late: arguably even in 2018, the political economy of halting warming directly at 1.5°C would have been impossible given that the carbon budget was even then largely depleted. Yet, as Malm and Carton acknowledge, some of the scenarios did game out “large, immediate, and unprecedented” emissions reductions, which would have kept heating at or below 1.5°C without overshoot. To be sure, these were a tiny minority of the 400 scenarios assessed for the report—a minority, predictably, ignored by global policymakers—but they were there. IPCC scientists are not a monolith; they are a collection of individual agents volunteering their time to produce reports that are institutionally mediated. Every word of the top-line summaries of every IPCC report must be signed off on by every government—including outright petrostates like Saudi Arabia—which is party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

In short, the reports offer the truth, as much as any science can, but that truth is conveyed in language manipulated to disguise it. What the Special Report said about its own overshoot models was that “CDR deployed at scale is unproven, and reliance on such technology is a major risk in the ability to limit warming to 1.5°C.” The content of that statement tells policymakers that overshoot is likely a fantasy. But the rhetoric of the statement works against such content. In capitalist discourse, “risk” implies not a prohibition, nor even a warning, but an opportunity. Imagine if the IPCC had added: “So instead of relying on such technology, the world should immediately begin the phaseout of fossil fuels and strand whatever assets are thereby entailed.” Now that would have been a crisis—at least for the ruling classes.

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But would it really threaten the global ruling class if the world phased out fossil fuels? The answer to this question—Malm and Carton’s exegesis of the wealth lost if we stopped using coal, oil, and gas—lies at the core of Overshoot. Insofar as people think of “stranded assets” in relation to global decarbonization, they often assume those assets just include oil wells or coal mines, and maybe coal or “natural gas”–fired power plants. But Malm and Carton show that the term signifies a truly staggering amount of fixed and liquid capital: all the world’s infrastructure for extraction, including offshore drilling platforms worth roughly one billion dollars each; all the world’s storage tanks and refineries; millions of miles of pipeline; half of all supertankers crossing the oceans and global ports to receive those ships, plus storage facilities to hold the coal and “liquid natural gas” they carry; international railroads and long-haul trucks to get the fuel around on land; and all the sites and machines of combustion, including household goods like fossil-fuel stoves and boilers—which, together, encompass the largest network of infrastructure ever built by humanity, reflecting tens of trillions of dollars.

Malm and Carton go on to argue that stranding these assets would cause cascades of devaluation rippling into fossil-fuel-adjacent industries like steel and cement production, in turn shocking manufacturing and construction. Forty percent of maritime trade is in coal, methane, and crude petroleum; this would also cease if we phased out fossil fuels. So global trade would contract, perhaps collapse. Then there are the airports and all the hotels and tourist circuits built around them—all the liquid capital in those circuits would evaporate too.

Even more radically, much of the capital circulating through the financial system via investment and credit would also disappear. As Malm and Carton point out, the price of equities in fossil-fuel companies, and all the companies involved in the production and distribution of fossil fuels, depends on expectations of return—which is to say, the expectation that claimed fossil-fuel “reserves” will be extracted, refined, and sold in the coming decades. If governments began to work together to phase out fossil fuels, those expectations would no longer pertain—collapsing the energy sector, a pillar of the stock market, and likely destroying the value of most 401(k)s, since asset managers and index and pension funds hold massive shareholder positions in the fossil-fuel majors. (As of 2023, Vanguard was one of the largest institutional investors into coal.)

And as in the stock market, so in the credit market. Worldwide banks have invested nearly seven trillion dollars in fossil-fuel development since the Paris Agreement was signed. In China, Overshoot points out, some 80 percent of investment in coal plants in 2020 came from state banks. If the fossil-fuel economy came to an end, these banks might never see their loans repaid, catalyzing a financial cataclysm that would make the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis look like a minor pothole. One study cited by Malm and Carton puts the sum of the monies to be stranded for halting warming at 2°C at four trillion dollars; another reaches a truly stunning $185 trillion. (In 2022, total world GDP was barely over $100 trillion.) The $185 trillion number is extreme, of course, but whatever the final amount lost, the bottom line is clear: global decarbonization requires a massive, fundamental reorganization of the economy.

Malm and Carton would probably scoff at the claim that asset stranding of this magnitude could be managed with a “reorg.” For them, global decarbonization would mean the end of capitalism as such—not just because the amount of wealth lost would equalize the classes but also (and more importantly) because ceasing all transactions based on fossil fuels would, by necessity, end oil and gas companies’ claim to what they say they own. Such an epochal shift would, they suggest, effectively end the foundations of private property itself. This, as much as any equalization in wealth due to stranded assets, is why, Overshoot argues, capping global heating at 1.5°C—or indeed at any temperature—would mandate a death blow to the capitalist mode of production. It would be, in essence, a revolution. And for the dominant classes, Malm and Carton say, “the apocalyptic magnitude of climate breakdown is mirrored by the apocalyptic magnitude of capitalist collapse.”

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Of course, the ruling classes (at least, the non-MAGA ruling classes) will not say out loud that they prefer to destroy a livable climate in order to keep their money. They may not even know that this is what they prefer. They may think they believe in climate change. Yet this is exactly why the ruling classes are so often techno-optimists, why they so often loathe environmentalists, and why they have irrationally, but with great self-interest, accepted carbon removal as a better bet than the phaseout of fossil fuels. Speculative technologies like CDR are not really innovations, Malm and Carton rightly hold. Rather, these speculative technologies are methods, even just ideologies, of “anti-revolution”—justification for business as usual as the climate breaks down around us.

That said, for a Marxist account of the political economy underlying the climate crisis (and for its ubiquitous use of the term “dominant classes”), Overshoot offers surprisingly little actual class analysis. There is one very helpful section toward the middle of the book in which Malm and Carton explain studies showing that the blow of fossil-fuel phaseout will fall on the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and, within those global-north countries, the pain would be further concentrated among the very rich. Within the United States, for example, 82 percent of the devaluation would hit the wealthiest 10 percent of households. To my mind, we need to turn the problem of stranded assets around and look at it upside down; then we might see that over 90 percent of the people on this planet would be better off if we phased out fossil fuels and halted global heating. This is especially true if we also account for recent studies showing that climate change is a much bigger threat to the economy than asset-stranding itself. One recent analysis from the UK Institute and Faculty of Actuaries warned that, worst-case, the global economy could contract by half in 40 to 50 years on our current emissions trajectory—and that projection leaves out all the misery and death that isn’t measured by GDP.

In short, there is a climate story to tell about class conflict and false consciousness—about climate denial and racism and anti-immigrant sentiment as additional social technologies of anti-revolution fomented by the ruling classes to prevent the global solidarity that could preserve a livable future. But Overshoot doesn’t develop this story—or even really allude to it, beyond a short account of climate action in the Global South. Granted, how to solve the climate crisis is not the book’s subject. Along with The Long Heat, which will turn to “adaptation” and solar geoengineering, Overshoot shows how the center of global climate politics serves to protect the interests of fossil capital. And that’s a huge—indeed, existentially—important topic on its own (Overshoot is over 250 pages long, to say nothing of its more than 100 pages of footnotes.)

Even so, and at the risk of being vulgar, I will confess that as I read this book, I couldn’t help but remember the conclusion of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” which is also the epitaph on Marx’s grave in London: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Nowhere does Marx’s dictum seem more important than with respect to the climate crisis. To write about the ways that fossil capital works to preserve itself at global scale without working on how to foment revolution—aside from individual acts of sabotage—might, ironically, be to reify the power of capital so fully that you end up upholding the status quo. And there is no time for that anymore. Pure critique is one of the luxuries that must be devalued as the world heats up around us.

To be clear, I am not asking for books that foster “hope” or “optimism,” which can be obfuscating capitalist affects that Malm and Carton (rightfully) deride. I want a battle plan. Yet if Overshoot lacks such a plan, it nonetheless fully describes the theater of war. It opens the very earth under our colloquial understanding that preserving a livable climate “threatens profits” and means “ending business as usual,” revealing the depths of the catastrophe and what its resolution might truly entail. For that alone, it remains one of the most important books about climate change in the canon.