In Overshoot (Verso, Oct.), climate scholars Andreas Malm and Wim Carton debunk easy technical fixes and propose a forceful economic vision for how to stop global warming.
What inspired Overshoot?
Carton: Concern with the conversation that we’ve seen around carbon removal, but also around ideas like solar geo-engineering. We have high-flown ambitions from wealthy countries about how they’re going to solve climate change, this notion that “We’ll just deal with it through sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere”; but meanwhile, emissions and temperatures keep increasing.
Malm: We were originally going to write one book, but when we started considering the idea of overshoot as an economic condition, we realized we needed to split it into two volumes. So the project has ballooned, and we jokingly refer to it as our Marxist and readable IPCC report. It’s of course different from the real thing in a lot of regards; but it’s a similar attempt to understand the forces that are pushing us beyond 2 °C of warming, one that’s also based on extensive processing of peer-reviewed planet science.
How did you process such a huge amount of data?
Carton: This has been one of our main challenges. We just tried to cram as much as we could into the book.
Malm: We don’t have a systematic procedure like the IPCC, but Wim has hundreds of tabs open on his computer all the time! We try to keep as
up to date as possible with what’s been published. We’ve also done fieldwork interviews, particularly with startups and others doing CO2 removal. We’ve had research assistants. But there’s only two of us, and at a certain point, you realize that you can’t just go on reading articles forever.
You call for asset stranding, or “the politically induced destruction of [the] value” of fossil fuels. What are the challenges to what you’re proposing?
Malm: The fear is that once there is any kind of serious intervention into the fossil fuel economy, stock exchanges will crash and the financial system will melt down. It’s that vulnerability that constitutes the whole problem of asset stranding. Fossil fuels create an enormous amount of fragility in the economy.
You write that climate change models have massively discounted renewables in favor of carbon capture. Is there someone to blame for that?
Carton: It’s simplistic to argue that they’re directly being influenced by Shell or whomever. It happens through the ideological power of business-as-usual, which makes the large-scale stranding of assets seem totally inconceivable. It’s not that there’s a fossil fuel capitalist sitting there pulling on the strings. It’s just a lack of imagination.
