The Brooklyn Rail

We are now living wholly in the Anthropocene, the age of human-induced climate breakdown. The age when “drill, baby, drill” means “kill, baby, kill.” Carbon bombs launched in the past land in Los Angeles and victimize people who may have been just babies when those gigatons of CO₂ were added to the atmosphere resulting in the fires that burned their city.

In Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, aided by Marx’s analysis of capitalism (and with a nod to Freud’s insights into psychopathology) have succeeded in making some sense of the present era, when the human-caused disruption of the Earth’s climate system is on a path leading to a largely uninhabitable planet—Hothouse Earth. The trajectory is clear, the cause is well known, the solution obvious; and yet human society is unable or unwilling to take the steps necessary to avert disaster.

This collective unwillingness to face the real and present danger while continuing to engage in self-harm would meet the definition of clinical madness, but at the same time it is totally rational in terms of the logic of capitalism, where the maximization of profit and the expansion of value are the primary movers, and where business as usual presents itself as an immovable object. “Because of the way the economy was constituted, some immoral, clinical madness held the future of the planet in its hands.”¹ It is this untenable situation that Malm and Carton tackle, one that must be explained if we are ever to develop a strategy to change the trajectory from the one we’re on that leads to doom, and put ourselves on a path to a more sustainable future.

The cause of the climate breakdown is by this time well known. The science is clear: the ongoing extraction and combustion of fossil fuels and the resultant addition of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. In order to stop this accelerating carbon loading, humanity must transition to an energy system of zero emissions as quickly as possible, before a series of cascading tipping points are triggered and the earth system is thrown into a superheated state where human survival becomes questionable. The breakdown is already well underway; the remedy has yet to begin.

To say that ending the fossil economy is an enormous task is an understatement, but it must be stopped sooner rather than later, or the Earth itself will put an end to it along with the civilization that hatched it. It’s a project that seems utterly impossible even though the technology to make the transition is available and at hand. It appears impossible to so many because at this point not only is the entire human race dependent on the extraction, refining, and combustion of coal, oil, and gas for meeting daily energy needs, but fossil fuel production has become embedded into every facet of the economy, from the production of plastics, to the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, to the world financial edifice where fossil capital plays an unmatched role.

We are accustomed to thinking of this fossil-based economy as the natural outcome of human development and progress in which labor productivity and technical innovation have allowed the human race to flourish and multiply. Andreas Malm, in his earlier work, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, has related how it was far from inevitable that coal and steam power would replace the first “prime mover” in the emerging cotton industry in England, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was only over a thirty-year period that the free power of falling water was supplanted by the costly power of coal and steam engines. Although the world we live in emerged from this transition, we cannot credit the cause to the unforeseen outcome. At the time it was a hard sell to have capitalists invest in expensive steam power over free water power. As Malm has shown, it was the constraints of maintaining a cheap and pliable labor supply in the countryside as well as the difficulty of achieving the necessary cooperation among competing cotton mill owners in building water power infrastructure that eventually led to the adoption of steam engines and the moving of industry into the cities. Manufacturers then and ever since have extolled the advantages of machinery over the “annoying idiosyncrasies of human workers precisely by installing ever more machinery impelled by ever more powerful steam engines.”² It wasn’t that steam engines were more efficient or technically superior to the existing water mills. It was the greater control over labor that closed the deal. Although the water mills themselves were highly profitable, there was little profit to be made from the supply of water energy to mills—it was a “free gift of nature”— but once the transition to steam engines was made, there was an accelerating demand for the coal that supplied the emerging industrial revolution. It was the profitable mining of coal that powered the expansion of steam power into new areas of manufacturing and transportation and eventually the electrification of the world. Profit was to be had on both ends of this circuit, from the stock that fueled the engines to the commodities it produced.

The consequence of these developments was the loading of the Earth’s atmosphere with additional carbon dioxide, hidden and unnoticed in the clouds of black obnoxious smoke that blanketed the skies above Manchester and the other factory towns that sprang up throughout the world. This unintended consequence led to the slow build-up of greenhouse gases and the raising of the surface temperature of the Earth. The emissions and the temperature rise accelerated sharply beginning in the second half of the twentieth century and even more rapidly in the first three decades of the twenty-first.

Malm and Carton trace the history of this build-up over the first quarter of this century, providing an account of the acceleration of fossil fuel development: exploration, extraction, expanded infrastructure, including more and bigger offshore platforms, pipe lines, refineries, petrochemical plants, coal and gas fired power plants, and increased shipping with larger ships and new and bigger terminals. Then a strange thing happened in 2020. CO₂ emissions fell—not from climate policies, but from measures taken to control the spread of the coronavirus. It happened, they note, at the time when the climate movement was at its peak, “the fastest growing social movement in history." The bottom fell out of the oil and gas industry as planes were grounded, cars were idled, workplaces emptied out. Panic ensued in the industry as it briefly appeared that oil was dying. This could have become the launching pad for the transition away from fossil fuel but emissions rebounded as soon as the lockdowns ended. Oil came roaring back. The year 2021 produced record profits for fossil fuels as emissions rose, adding an additional two gigatonnes to the atmosphere.

Malm and Carton show how at a time when no more oil or gas pipelines could be added and investment in new fossil fuel development had to be halted if the world had any chance of keeping the temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level, just the opposite happened. Investment in new oil, gas, and coal projects skyrocketed and so did profits for the world’s super-majors. Profits grew even higher after Russia invaded Ukraine and Russian oil and gas were embargoed, causing prices to soar. The five largest oil companies all reported the biggest profits in their histories. What did they do with all this lucre? After dispersing payouts to the owners, they immediately reinvested it in expanded production. The year 2022 saw fossil fuel investment run amuck as new oil and gas pipelines, coal mines, and offshore oil platforms were planned, financed, and built. New territories were opened for oil exploration on the land and in the sea. Malm and Carton conclude that, given the recent worldwide disasters attributed to climate change and the concurring exponential increase in fossil fuel investment, one can only assume that the world has gone mad! Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the UN had said as much in 2022, “High emitting governments and corporations are not just turning a blind eye they are adding fuel to the flames. They are choking our planet, based on their vested interest” He called it “moral and economic madness.” The authors take this further. “Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure in the third decade of the millennium represented not merely moral madness: it was madness without qualifier; madness in the original, clinical sense of the term.”

Past objections to wind and solar, that the cost of their generation of electricity was prohibitive, have been made moot by rapid cost reductions over the last decade. Malm and Carton reference the work of Mark Jacobson and his team at Stanford, who have shown that it is now technically possible to convert the whole world to a zero emissions energy system. They have been developing scenarios since 2009 for totally transitioning to wind and solar power. They began by figuring out how this would be possible for individual cities and later expanded their research to entire countries and regions.³ They saw the transition progressing in stages, from the most obvious and easiest, converting all electricity generation to renewables, then electrifying all use of energy, including internal combustion engines, and replacing blast furnaces by using electric arcs to melt iron ore. All thermal energy used to heat buildings would be replaced by solar and wind.

If the transition is technologically feasible, the cost of building the infrastructure is cheaper than for fossil fuels, and the cost of producing electricity is lower, why, while renewable energy is growing, is it not happening fast enough to replace fossil energy?

Why is non-renewable energy growing at a faster rate? Wouldn't the lower cost and the free energy it provides once it's up and running make it more favorable for investors? Wouldn’t the market dictate a transition to the cheaper energy generator? Brett Christophers has written a book devoted to answering this question. In The Price is Wrong he examines the electrical generation systems and the factors that affect the profitability of wind and solar, and have made it far less profitable than coal, oil and gas.⁴ It’s not the price or the cost that matters to investors but the profitability. In this case, the cost of generating electricity is not equated directly to the profit. Other costs, “those not related to generation, may simultaneously be high: what is more, the revenue-generating potential may not be the same.” It is the particular institutional arrangements for the production and delivery of electricity that have “built, organized and transformed electricity systems in such a way that the substitution of cheaper and cleaner generation for dirty and relatively expensive generation, is not guaranteed at all.”

The intricate and convoluted system for marketing electricity results in some weird phenomena, including negative prices that impact renewables more than non-renewable generation. It is partially the structure of the market and the pricing system that puts solar and wind at a disadvantage and partially the economic and political power of the fossil fuel industry itself. There are also a host of bureaucratic barriers including permitting and grid connections that can seriously delay planned wind and solar projects, sometimes taking as much as ten years to secure the necessary permissions. This contributes to the unpredictability of profit potential which affects the availability and cost of financing new projects. Securing financing is a problem that the old and wealthy fossil fuel enterprises do not have to cope with.

To these problems, Malm and Carton add a more intrinsic cause of the relatively low profitability of renewables. Wind and solar, what Malm has always referred to as “the flow,” is free energy—like water in the eighteenth century—once the means to capture it is built, while fossil fuel or “the stock,” is a commodity that can be bought and sold. It requires constant replenishing, needing labor to produce it, creating value for the providers, the owners of the fuel. This is an essential difference: the flow from the wind and the sun are “free gifts of nature” that resist commodification. According to Marx, value is derived from the socially necessary labor embodied in a commodity, expressed as its exchange value, the basis on which a price is established. Once the labor for capturing the wind or the sun is expended, the energy is produced free of further labor. Therefore, as Malm and Carton say, “the flow is not profitable … because it cannot fit into the procrustean bed of the commodity form.” It would be more akin to the “fictitious commodities” that Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi theorized: goods that are treated as commodities in the market but are not created for the market.⁵ They also would conform to “non-rivalrous goods,” the authors tell us, what economist Paul Samuelson called “collective consumption goods,” which can be consumed without being depleted. The point is that goods of this sort are by nature public. “Even in terms of bourgeois economics, then, solar and wind power would appear to end up in the category of public goods, which will be underprovided by profit seeking enterprises.”⁶

If the market cannot work to move investment away from dirty energy what can? What about the international response to the climate crisis? What of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the United Nations Climate Change Conferences—the Conferences of the Parties (COP), that have met annually since 1995 to negotiate climate treaties and assess the progress in combating climate change? Every year we get a report. One would assume these negotiations are making progress. The authors take us through this history, which began as an apparently serious effort at dealing with the danger posed by continued greenhouse gas emissions. The idea was to support further scientific research and provide international cooperation to reduce emissions by limiting how much each nation would be allowed to emit. From the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, when treaties were signed and goals were set, through COP15 in Copenhagen, when the 1.5 degrees limit over the preindustrial temperature was first raised, emissions worldwide continued to climb. The setting of a tolerable limit at 1.5 degrees would be a victory for the climate activists and for the most vulnerable island nations in the Pacific, which considered that beyond that limit they would be condemned to oblivion in the rising seas. The nations in the Global South that had pushed for the 1.5 degrees limit finally got it in Paris at COP 21 in 2015, when pressure from climate advocates, NGOs, and protests in the streets caused the resistance from the developed north to cave, but it was made ineffectual when Obama “presented the world with a draft text that disposed of commitments: henceforth, it said, it should be up to each country to do what it wanted, without duties or risk of punishment.” The limit for warming was tightened to 1.5 degrees, but the concept of limits was hollowed out. The fossil fuel corporations would be allowed to continue to increase their production and reap their enormous profits despite the disasters they were creating.

COP21 did mandate that the IPCC compile a special report on the impacts of 1.5 degrees. It answered the question of what risks would be avoided if the warming was held to 1.5 degrees rather than 2 degrees or higher when issued in 2018. “The Panel found markedly lower risks: destructive downpours, protracted droughts, crop failures, water scarcity—all would be less frequent and devastating.”⁷ Lethal heat waves, pushing against the limits of human survivability, would roll through the tropics at 1.5℃, though this temperature has already been recorded in the Persian Gulf and the Indus valley, and these “killer heatwaves would begin to last three or four days.” The Special Report sparked a wave of activism in 2018, from Greta Thunberg to the Sunrise Movement, from Extinction Rebellion to the Green New Deal. Scientists grew more outspoken and active too as they absorbed the new data coming out of multiple reports and research papers. But by 2023 all this had gone nowhere. Emissions continued to climb and the hope of staying below 1.5 faded. The contradiction between the booming profits and surging stock values, and the climate breakdown they engendered now became manifest. The Malm and Carton quote Inger Anderson, chair of the United Nations Environmental Program: “We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over. Only a root and branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster.” Official reports from the IPCC spoke of the need for systems transitions of an unprecedented scale. There was now a growing consensus that current policies were not enough to slow climate change and that 1.5 was dead because those unprecedented transformations were unfeasible, yet at the same time there was an increasing awareness of the revolutionary implications. This is where the Overshoot comes in.

Integrated Assessment Models, or IAMs, were the computer models most favored by policy makers from the EU and other signatories to the Kyoto Protocols back in the late 1990s. The IAMs, as Malm and Carton explain, were attempts to include economic processes along with the processes that produce greenhouse gases in one “integrated’” model. These differed from climate models that charted the physical processes involved in global warming. The problem is that, while the physical effects of greenhouse gases follow from the laws of chemistry, thermodynamics, and physics—laws of nature of proven mathematical accuracy—the abstractions used in economic models are quite different. They are based on neoclassical economics and assume fully functioning competitive markets, and rational-choice subjects rather than the messy and often divisive social relations of actually existing capitalism. The equations entered into the computer models were based on only those things that are considered measurable in the prevailing economic theory, which came down to cost and price, leaving out, in the words of William Nordhaus, the self-described father of IAMs, those things that can’t be measured: “human health, biological diversity, amenity values of everyday life and leisure, and environmental quality.”⁸ The IAMs were constructed to be able to calculate the least cost for avoiding costly damage and geared to produce the optimal climate policy. They were rife with unproven assumptions, such as that carbon pricing would reduce emissions over time, while it has continually proven to be politically unpalatable. They take it for granted that costs would fall over time, so that expensive mitigation could be put off to a future date when it would become more affordable. Because they were based on neoclassical economics, the immediate deep cuts called for in many of the reports were ruled out. The IAMs were a prescription for delaying mitigation, because it would be too painful for the fossil fuel industry and too great a hit to GDP. They were blind to the immorality of burdening future generations with worsening climate conditions in order to avoid economic pain in the here and now. The models were asked to come up with a scenario that would hold warming to 2 degrees. The EU found one model that could do it, known as IMAGE from a Dutch research group. By running the model in reverse and choosing the year 2100 for the terminus they figured that it would be safe to exceed the limit for a time if a way could be found to lower it back to a safe level by that future date. They proposed using Bio-Energy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) as a means of sucking the carbon out of the air by planting huge fields of fast-growing plants that naturally absorb carbon dioxide from the air, then burning them to produce energy while capturing the released carbon at the chimney and pumping it underground into depleted oil wells. While other models came in at 3 degrees or higher by 2100, IMAGE came up with Overshoot.

The overshoot conjuncture is now. It’s a time in which mitigation has been abandoned as too costly, so the transition to renewable energy will be postponed to some future date. The idea of overshoot is that the 1.5° degrees Celsius limit first proposed at the Paris climate conference can be surpassed—overshot—and through the unproven processes of geoengineering and carbon capture, it is supposed that the Earth’s temperature can eventually be lowered back down to a safe limit once again. Meanwhile, fossil fuel combustion will continue. Investment in exploration, extraction, increased infrastructure, and the profits they generate, grow as unburned oil and gas in the ground accumulate, counted as valuable assets for the owners.

Carbon dioxide buildup is accumulative, however, so the longer emissions continue the more carbon would have to be captured and sequestered. The Overshoot idea is based on the false assumption that greenhouse gas buildup is a linear process, while in reality the Earth System functions as a non-linear complex process involving feedback loops that can intensify the increase in temperature, activating additional tipping points in a domino-like cascade leading to changes of state that cannot be reversed on a human timescale. It reveals, as the book's subtitle declares, a surrender to climate breakdown.

“Emissions are out of control and we have no project for bringing them under control and so we must try different ventures than classical mitigation.” This Malm and Carton call the core doctrine of overshoot ideology. Flailing around for a way out of abandoning fossil energy, avoiding the loss of billions and retaining mega-profits, while the carbon budget rapidly declined, fossil capital embraced BECCS and overshoot as its savior. BECCS however, has proven to be a fictitious entity, a unicorn, as the authors call it. After years of promises no one has produced a functioning project. This will leave the frightening, fantastic proposal of solar geoengineering as a substitute for continuing the overshoot policy, a scenario in which sunlight is blocked by injecting sulfates into the atmosphere. This would induce global dimming and lower temperatures but greenhouse gases would continue to accumulate in the atmosphere. Once begun, if the process is ever stopped the resulting sudden increase in temperature could generate a possible mass extinction event. Jacob Blumenfeld describes this as “a capitalist scam to continue burning fossil fuels so as to save the investments buried in the earth. Using technology to release solar aerosols to block the effects of warming, instead of shutting down the cause, is very tempting since it does not strand trillions of assets under the earth.”⁹

The big oil corporations and their financial backers have been reinvesting their massive profits from 2022 on into further exploration and development of oil, gas, and coal fields, plants, and infrastructure projects with productive life expectancies of many decades. Malm and Carton list a few of the many projects underway, investments that will take years or decades to break even and then provide a source of huge profits into the foreseeable future. They ask, “What would it take to stay below 1.5 degrees in a world where the primitive accumulation of fossil capital proceeds apace in this fashion—or 2 degrees, or 3…? It would require that investors suffer the blow they dread the most: installations just funded, or just finalized, or just inaugurated, or just about to break even or starting to yield profit, would have to be sealed and locked up for good.” In other words, stranded assets.

That is, “assets that suffer from anticipated or premature write-offs, downward revaluation or conversion to liabilities.” In the case of fossil fuels, stranded assets began to be discussed and argued about in the second decade of the twenty-first century. First raised by climate activists and the most vulnerable communities and nations, this named the threat that mitigation could create for investors. Stranded assets have been a regular phenomenon in capitalist development since the dawn of the industrial age, as technologies become obsolete and are replaced by more efficient means of production. For fossil fuels, however, there is no reason to become economically obsolete. Their cheapness and their integration into nearly every aspect of world production allows them to expand continuously and produce extraordinary profits in spite of their obsolescence as regards a sustainable energy source. Therefore, stranding fossil fuel assets would necessarily have to be a political as opposed to an economic decision. “Asset stranding would occur through a transition away from fossil fuels enforced by political actors, be they governments or movements or some combination thereof.”

The essential contradiction that the overshoot idea exposes and that Malm, Carton, and Brett Christophers have all highlighted, is that transitioning to a fossil-free energy system will not be profitable enough to attract sufficient investment, while fossil fuel investments will continue to reap huge profits and draw increasing investment even while ensuring the escalation of climate breakdown. It will not attract sufficient investment as long as “the actors who decide investment are guided by profit;” therefore for the transition to take place it must be driven by the state in a political move to make energy generation a public good. In other words, in a market-regulated system the transition to a non-destructive energy system will not be possible without some form of expropriation of the fossil fuel industry and its replacement with common ownership.

Overshoot emerged when the need for a revolutionary transformation was becoming obvious to scientists, policy makers, the most vulnerable populations in the global south and to the fossil capitalists themselves. Climate change is so clearly leading to ecological doom that the ruling classes intuitively understand the threat of revolution even where no revolutionary movement exists, because the only way to avoid the total collapse of the habitable climate is immediate and complete overhaul of the capitalist system. Seeing this as a non-feasible outcome, an impossibility, the only alternative is to put off dealing with it, to kick the can down the road; and the only way to justify this suicidal approach is to develop an illogical logic—overshoot—and an anti-revolutionary politics to head off the increasingly radical proposals coming from the climate scientists, activists, and victims in the global South. The super-rich billionaire owners and their wealthy stockholders, have been haunted by the threat of abandoning the fossil fuel-based energy system from the beginning of the climate movement. The logic of “leaving it in the ground” was a powerful presence lurking in the shadows even though a revolutionary movement of any consequence was non-existent.

Malm and Carton make a distinction between “counter revolution” and “anti-revolution.” The former is the response of a ruling regime to a popular uprising which seeks to overthrow the old order. “The essence of a revolutionary situation is that profound transformation, social or political, goes from being something that couldn't happen to something that very well might.”¹⁰

A revolutionary movement arising out of the climate crisis would mean a popular force threatening fossil capital to such a degree that its ability to maintain its rule was in doubt. But “While resistance was budding in a thousand places in the early millennium, no revolutionary situation was in sight, and so no counter-revolution was called for; but the logic inherent in the planetary situation was such that an anti-revolution had to be thought up” While a counter revolution mobilizes against an actual revolution, an anti-revolution mobilizes the ruling class against an imagined revolution.

This goes a long way to explaining the current rise of fascism in the US and other parts of the world. In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton makes the point that the only times fascists attained state power—in Italy and Germany—Hitler and Mussolini did not overthrow the existing regime. They were invited to govern by ruling classes fearful of Bolshevik-style revolutions. Although socialist and communist movements in both countries were a real presence, these were more of anti-revolutions, in Malm and Carton’s terms, than counter-revolutions against an actual uprising that led the ruling classes to welcome in the fascists with their popular backing, conservative allies and anti-Bolshevik rhetoric.¹¹

Is there an analogy here to the Trump phenomenon? He didn't rise to power on his own, propelled by his own talents or smarts. He didn't rise to power on the pent up frustrations of the white working class, either. Countless other equally buffoonish racist would-be-fuehrers were around. The capitalist entertainment industry brought him to prominence for the usual motive—profit. But his attraction as a right-wing reality show host gave him the idea of taking his shtick to the news side of the TV by running for president. He was doing this for the usual motive also, with no expectations of winning: it would make him not just money but fame, his drug of choice. He was backed by Rupert Murdoch and his team of hucksters at Fox News, always ready to make money by pandering to what they perceive as the dysfunctional culture of the white working class and small business owners. This turn of events led to the present political farce now being played out in Washington.¹²

The fossil fuel corporations and their financiers realized they could capture the Republican Party, and in turn, the government if they could get rid of their “elitist” disgust for Trump and join the band. They jumped aboard. But that raises the question: why would fossil capital feel the need to win more control of the government, when they already had so much influence, i.e., power?¹³ Answer: because a leading core of billionaires, multimillionaires, and their hired help are aware, even if some of them only semi-consciously, that their continued existence as profiteers is threatened by climate change. Not by the physical destruction of their biosphere, however. They feared that if what they knew were to be truly digested by the human population they would be expropriated, to be replaced by public ownership in a race to transition to solar and wind. The fact that such a path would be the logical route to save the world from enormous pain did not even cross their minds. They apparently live by a different logic, the logic of business, the logic of profit, of ever-expanding capital. A logic that for these lords of the world and vassals of capital, must trump any other. So now the madness of continued greenhouse gas emissions is shepherded by the madness of American politics and the sociopath at its head.

Andreas Malm and Wim Carton have provided a penetrating analysis of the dire situation we are all in. It is a world in decline with climate breakdown baked in from past emissions and leaders driving us on a suicidal trajectory. The one hope they point to is the contradictions in the capitalist system itself. The interconnection of all business through the financial markets makes fossil capital, with its ballooned profits, vulnerable to a crash brought on by a perceptible threat to strand the assets. This may be the only way to apply the brakes to this runaway train. Hail the meltdown! say Malm and Carton. While such a crisis could be an opportunity for expropriating the fossil capitalists, their political power is a mighty obstacle. Meanwhile, they urge us not to give up but do all we can to fight against the madness of overshoot.