Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry
Andreas Malm and Wim Carton. Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown. London: Verso Books, 2024. 416 pp.
Review by Adam Wickberg
24 April 2025
As 2024 became yet another record-breaking year in terms of heat measured as global mean surface temperature, the prospect of keeping within the 1.5 degree limit of the 2016 Paris Agreement started to look increasingly unrealistic (2024 was the warmest year on record and the first to reach 1.5°C according to Copernicus-derived satellite data). Despite multilateral agreements, pledges, protocols, commitments, rising scientific evidence, and new technological projects, the Keeling curve continues to register a steep rise in CO2 emissions. How did we end up in a situation where overshoot of agreed temperature targets seemed perfectly acceptable?
The second installment of a Trump administration has brought new meaning to the concept of new normal, as previously unimaginable actions are being rolled out daily. But even before this happened, the dominant classes had normalized planetary warming well beyond what was stipulated in the Paris Agreement. In their book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton argue that we have been lulled by the liberal greenwash of a climate mitigation process that has persuaded us we are on track, or at least soon will be on track, to decarbonize the economy and shift away from fossil fuels before we unleash dangerous levels of warming. Yet, a quick look at any emissions data will tell you that they are in fact accelerating year by year. The majority of CO2 emissions have been added to the atmosphere since 1990, when the international climate politics began in earnest with the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and annual Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings. In 2022, Saudi Aramco reported a record profit of $161 billon, the largest ever reported by a publicly traded company, and as of 2024, Wall Street has been betting on oil and gas rather than renewables which, at least in the US, now seems to have been the right bet. It is also where the main profits in the energy sector will be found, as Brett Christophers showed in his book the Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet (2024). This is a major obstacle to a market-driven green transition. For context, oil exports were prohibited in the US until 2015, and today, ten years later, it is the top export of the world’s leading oil producer. All of this has transpired while the attention has been focused on the Paris Agreement, as if the target itself would lead to the necessary political action. Instead, the contrary has been true. The Paris Agreement was celebrated as a victory, but it contained no binding elements and instead reverted to voluntary and nationally determined contributions to emission reductions that—unsurprisingly—have been modest to say the least. Malm and Carton do a great job in exposing the deeper mechanisms of this tragic predicament.
So why did the world surrender to climate breakdown? The answer spells economy and capital. Containing global warming at tolerable levels was simply deemed too expensive for the world economy to afford. While this may sound sarcastic, it is the essence of what climate economist William Nordhaus has advocated since around 1990. The method by which he arrived at this conclusion was via so-called Integrated Assessment Models, which combine climate models with economic models to produce scenarios of future warming and their economic impacts. These models quickly made their way into the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and particularly Working Group III, which focuses on solutions. When the IPCC issued a special report on the 1.5°C target in 2018, 568 out of 578 scenarios passed through overshoot. To digest this hard truth, the idea of net zero, which implies a balance between carbon removals and emissions at some point in the future, became the default response by governments and corporations who rushed to make pledges. Never mind that the technology for achieving these future removals at scale does not exist and that the trade-offs for actually deploying them if they did would be enormous.
In Malm and Carton’s account, what they call “overshoot ideology” was born out of the fact that there was no other credible way of bringing down emissions than something like a revolution, which would imply a massive change of economy and lifestyle. This ideology then crafted a counter-revolution which ultimately served to protect fossil capital from destruction. Lurking in the shadows of this ideology was the justified fear of so-called stranded assets, which would occur when long-term infrastructure investment in fossil extraction would be left without expected profits as a result of discontinued production to meet emission reduction targets. This destruction of fossil capital brought about by real mitigation, if the planet’s known and spoken-for fossil reserves were left in the ground, is estimated to amount to between thirteen and seventeen trillion dollars if we are to stay at 1.5 or 1.8°C of warming, a solid fifth of the world economy’s total value and four to five times the losses of the epic 2008 financial crash. This would undoubtedly send shocks through the economy and threaten the stability of many. The great strength of Malm and Carton’s book is that they spell out these planetary conflicts of interest across mainstream climate politics and mitigation to show that there is a very real struggle between a habitable planet and the interests of capital. These contradictions are kept from view of the public through the techno-optimistic scenarios in which business as usual can continue and the emissions clock can be wound backward via negative emissions technologies at some point. If anything, the arrival of the “drill, baby, drill” climate regime should make it plain to see that this conflict is unresolvable and that only a mass movement can save a habitable planet for all.
