Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown

The world is blithely blowing past agreed upon global warming “limits,” duped by unprovable assurances that eventually new technologies will be invented to remove the excess carbon from the atmosphere, according to this eye-opening and dire account. Climate scholars Malm (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and Carton delve into the recent history of the climate crisis to explain how this irrationally nonchalant attitude toward “overshoot” emerged (“What spell [has] been cast on this world...?”). Over the course of a robust economic analysis of how the fossil fuel industry functions—especially focusing on its post-Covid lockdown boom, when fossil fuel companies used record profits to invest in record amounts of new fossil fuel infrastructure—the authors come to the startling conclusion that the only thing stopping the world from solving global warming is fossil fuel companies’ fear of “asset stranding.” The inside secret, the authors argue, is that there is no comparable profit to be made in renewables; fossil fuel companies thus have nothing to invest in that will give them the same rate of return. In a rousing conclusion, Malm and Carton survey potential economic solutions and come down in favor of a “mercilessly confrontational” approach: scrubbing the fossil fuel industry’s “assets” fully off the books, the same way enslavers were not “compensated” in the postbellum South. Readers will be overwhelmed but galvanized. (Oct.)