Wim Carton and Andreas Malm want a radical break to overcome the resignation to overshoot

Andreas Malm works in The Department of Human Geography at Lund University. He’s a scholar of human ecology and environmental history and has written several books, including The Progress of this Storm, Fossil Capital, How to Blow Up A Pipeline and White Skin, Black Fuel. Wim Carton works in the same department as a human geographer. The main focus of his research is the relationship between society and nature and how society-nature relations are informed and changed by ecological crisis. Right now he’s writing about culture, political economy and climate action, with a special emphasis on the promises of carbon removal. In this conversation we talk about their new book Overshoot (https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/products/3131-overshoot), the first of two books about the state of the climate crisis and the question of whether cutting emissions from fossil fuels is a purely technical or primarily political challenge. The second book will be called The Long Heat, which is a title that gives a name to the era that we are now entering, where powerful state and corporate interests continue to block even meagre climate action, making loss, damage, suffering and, basically, mass sacrifice seem inevitable, even somehow normal. Now, after the election of Donald Trump to a second term as US president, it’s clear that “the days of thinking that the US will ever be a reliable partner on addressing global warming are over,' in the words of New York Times reporter Coral Davenport. It’s hard to maintain hope in this moment, and that question of hope is something that comes up a surprising amount in Overshoot. Malm and Carton are suspicious of the palliative rhetoric of hope in the climate movement and how it tends to inoculate more active feelings of anger, frustration or grief. That said, they are a lot more suspicious of the rhetoric of hopelessness presented by those who are resigned to 1.5, 2, or 3 degrees of global heating. Overshoot is based on the notion that, since there is no reasonable hope of cutting emissions in time, we have to plan, now, to hurtle past our climate targets and pray that technology, adaptation and a little bit of luck will let us, after we’ve blown our carbon budget, bring things back within the realm of safety. The deferral of the burden is clear, but Carton and Malm break it down in a way that explains more fully how overshoot allows fossil capital to endlessly defer stranding its assets, to completely avoid any real disruption. This means that, as Wim puts it, resource radicals and ecosocialists who see a massive transformation as the only way forward have to bet, now, on the possibility of “rupture” as a response to business as usual. As this episode drops, representatives at COP29 will be debating whether or not to pick up their dismal efforts where they left off at COP28, when fossil fuels were finally identified as the root cause of the climate crisis after decades of dicking around. This absurd situation is captured nicely by Wim: “nothing really happens and we're constantly adding more and more carbon to the atmosphere.” which means that, by definition, “we're actually… going to exceed these targets.” Whether we’re ready for it or not blowing past the targets will come with extremely severe risks. Malm says the “only way to avoid the [situation] spinning completely out of control is to go after the drivers of these disasters, and that is the constant, ongoing investment and reinvestment in fossil fuels that is happening everywhere.”