How to Drive the World Over the Precipice – Overshoot by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton

Climate change is happening: the global average temperature has risen significantly. In climate policy and science, target levels of warming are set at a maximum of 2°C, but preferably 1,5°C. Currently the world temperature has already reached a tad over 1°C compared to pre-industrial times. Entering these “safety levels” is already dangerous, but surpassing them would invite disaster. “Overshoot” refers to the situation when the accumulated greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere cause enough warming to pass those thresholds. A failure, in other words.

However, in current climate debates, overshoot tends to be redefined as a temporary problem, or even an intentional climate policy strategy. The idea is that overshooting emission limits is not that big a problem; if the excess carbon dioxide can be captured technologically from the atmosphere later on. This has been a favored idea for those who want to delay climate mitigation, for example in order to “optimize” the costs of mitigation. Overshooting the targets of climate policy is often expressed as a regrettable detour on the long road towards decarbonization – replacing fossil fuels and other emission sources with cleaner alternatives and reaching net zero emissions eventually.

The new book by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (2025), argues that overshoot has become a dominant ideology in climate policy. It is not only a delaying tactic pushed by some interest groups: it has become integral to the global processes of climate negotiation and the models and scenarios used in them. The collective failure in mitigating climate change can be understood better if the dominance of overshoot is explored. Overshoot is a crucial book for our times. It constructs a detailed and harrowing narrative about the recent half a century, not only about climate science and politics, but also about the development of the productive forces of fossil capital.

Part One: The Failure of Climate Policy and the Rise of Overshoot Ideology

The authors begin by tracing the origins of global climate struggles. In this origin story, the Kyoto Protocol (1997, entered into force 2005) is described as a pinnacle of sorts. This may surprise many current readers, for whom the Paris Agreement (2015) represents a glimmer of hope and Kyoto more like a failure. However, for Malm and Carton, “the Kyoto era” was still part of a historical phase when the Global South carried some weight in climate policy. Even though the concrete accomplishments under the Kyoto Protocol were slim, it carried an element of obligation, of binding commitments, albeit small.

Malm and Carton are highly critical of the acclaimed report “Global Warming of 1,5°C” – while the report demonstrated the dangers of breaking the 1,5°C limit, it also “consecrated the notion of overshoot” by incorporating overshoot in most scenarios.(67) Frankly, aiming for that strict targets would have required overly ambitious and continuous emission cuts, in effect a revolutionary transformation of societies, tackling the power of fossil fuel capital and global inequality.(76) Basically only some scientists, activists and dispossessed were calling for that. Incorporating overshoot into the scenarios offered a way out.

The fundamental problem with the notion of overshoot is that it distorts our understanding of the temporal nature of climate change by ignoring a key feature of climate change, “accumulation”. Annual net emissions increase the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and it is the accumulated concentration which drives warming. Thus, earlier emissions have more time to affect climate warming, and conversely the earlier emission cuts are made, the better. The ideology of overshoot eliminates this temporal sequence and makes the situation one of “an addition undone by subtraction”.(87) False equivalence is made between earlier and later emissions. This temporal legerdemain however needed something tangible to (seem to) work. The dream of carbon capture to the rescue.

But how to capture carbon for real? Bioenergy combined with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS) would emerge as the golden goose of overshoot ideology, even though at the time the notion became all the rage, there were no existing installations. Currently there are half a dozen, with reported problems of CO2 leakage at some of them. A fictitious technology got a firm grip of reality.(79)

As emission cuts have been delayed for decades, we have ended up at a historical hinge point where the 1,5°C safety limit is in the process of being broken. Malm and Carton recognize this fact, but in an interesting way they mercilessly scold anyone who has bemoaned the impossibility of the target itself. There is a point in which the statement “one and a half degrees is dead” becomes a scientific certainty. But for Malm and Carton, the rhetorical “throwing in the towel” (37), and especially doing it much earlier in the game, has served the purpose of making ideas of revolutionary transformation of societies inconceivable—in turn reinforcing the impossibility of the target. If the two degrees threshold is proclaimed by many voices as a lost goal, it seems we are only steps away from claims that 2,5°C is also. There is no limit carved in stone; we face a continuum of defeatism which becomes a self-realizing prophecy.(52–53)

Such defeatism has supported the obstruction of climate mitigation, whatever the intentions of speakers or writers themselves. This is why even those in the climate movements who are quick to proclaim “realism” and the death of 1,5°C can end up with strange bedfellows—despite the fact that the argument itself seems to look more and more credible. For the authors, this is not the point, the point is to understand the effects of one’s actions in a continuum of political struggle: “And yet if by ‘too late’ we mean an absolute, objective, technical-physical impossibility of preventing things from getting even worse, it might never be too late with climate, at least as long as some substantial human population and a scrap of the biosphere exists.”(53)

This issue is closely connected with the themes of the coming book by the authors: The Long Heat: Climate Politics When it is Too Late (2026). The groundwork for its thesis is already laid in Overshoot. In the rhetorical climate of “too late”, carbon capture gains a stronger position, as do adaptation and geoengineering. At the core of the critique is a crucial idea: just like in the overshoot conjuncture carbon capture has been warped into an alternative to emission cuts, not a supplement to them, so also adaptation and geoengineering are being aggressively pushed as replacements for significant mitigations.

However, without ambitious emission cuts, the historical inheritance of carbon in the atmosphere will keep accumulating and the world will slip further into the abyss. In such a situation, carbon capture and geoengineering are like fingers plugging leaks in a dam which will inevitably burst as the pressure builds too high. If the greenhouse gas concentration keeps growing, any temporary relief is beside the point. (Adaptation is a more complex subject: some forms are inevitably needed. But who gets to adapt and who don’t, and by what means, those are key questions.) The only historical conjuncture imaginable where carbon capture and perhaps some carefully selected forms of geoengineering might be reasonable, is one where considerable and consistent emissions cuts are already underway.

Part Two: The Tentacles of Fossil Capital

If the countries of the world were to take decarbonization seriously, the transition would not only be a technological project—it would require loss of value of fossil fuel assets: “obliteration of value is a necessary part of the definition of climate action.”(113) Following strict climate targets would thus necessarily entail that a large part of fossil fuel assets would be worthless and would be kept in the ground. The authors warn however that this asset stranding should not be understood superficially.

A certain kind of destruction of value is part and parcel of the normal workings of capitalism, “creative destruction” due to new technologies replacing old ones.(109–110) But the devaluation of fossil fuel assets would not result from such “internal” factors of capitalism. Rather, it would be the end result of political decisions and actions. Such political asset stranding is not historically unprecedented: Lincoln and the abolition of slavery are mentioned as one example. That particular “asset stranding” required a civil war though, and the slave owners were compensated for their losses. But the deeply entangled role of fossil fuels in the metabolism of contemporary societies would make decarbonization a unique world-historical event.

Yet, isn’t there an acceleration of technologies that will eventually drive fossil fuels into a form of creative destruction, namely the technologies of renewable energy? After all, they are becoming ever cheaper and more effective. There is a crucial historical tension at play: the closer the world comes to breaking the 1,5°C limit, the more developed the material productive forces necessary for decarbonization become.

Why has this not resulted in a quick and widespread energy transition? Emissions have gone down substantially in some countries, partly due to renewable energy production but also resulting from substituting natural gas for coal, or using biomass. Solar and wind power are constructed at an increasing pace, that is true, but globally speaking—or focusing on either China or the US—this has been an addition on top of fossil fuels, not a replacement of them.(191) A critical factor here is that although the production of electricity, especially solar and wind power have become cheaper than fossil fuels, the situation is somewhat different with key industrial processes that require high temperatures.

Addition instead of replacement has been a historical feature of energy systems, as was recently explored by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, in his book More and More and More (2024). As Fressoz also notes, the crucial difference is that decarbonization as a politically induced form of asset stranding should be historically unique and should follow a different logic. It has to emerge from a political demand, motivated by inherent problems in using fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are stocks, whereas renewable energy is available as flows. Once the technologies are developed and in place, harvesting takes place in a sense passively. It´s very hard to gain competitive edge, as everyone has access to the same technology. Rainwater is a working analogue: barrels and gutters make gathering more efficient, but one cannot make it rain more.(208–209) This is a key reason why renewable energy has not managed to create comparable profits.(212)

On the contrary, the gathering of renewable energy suffers from its own efficiency, as has been often described. As its instruments become better and better, it gets closer to the condition of “free gifts of nature”.(212) To put it another way, renewable energy does not fit well within the context of capitalist value production and cannot thus compete with fossil fuels in the terms dictated by the latter: “The amount of fossil fuels in circulation is a function of their profitability; conversely, unprofitability puts a lid on the development of solar and wind, insofar as the actors who decide about investments in the means of energy production are guided by profit rather than some other principle or pursuit. And it is the latter possibility that defies the imagination.”(218)

A true energy transition would require that fossil fuel assets were devalued. This will never happen merely because harvesting flows becomes cheaper in comparison to extracting the stocks. The opposite happens, as the profitability of fossil capital rises and its economic and political power is accordingly amplified. This counterintuitive idea explains a lot. Political proclamations that we are just on the cusp of the great energy transition, that soon the development of technology will lead to creative destruction, are blind to these economic dimensions.

Decarbonization will never be realized by the invisible hand. It requires strong political intervention: protesting, boycotting, coercion, sanction, prohibitions, steering and planning. Value has to be abolished. The low-carbon technologies afford the potential of transformation but cannot by themselves steer development onto different rails.

A sidenote: all this deals with production of energy as a business of producing marketable commodities. If a business, whether a steel factory or an oil rig, wants cheaper electricity for its operations, wind and solar are increasingly tempting. When use value is primary to exchange value, renewable energy prevails quite easily, especially when we are talking about electricity. This kind of use of energy comprises only a part of the total energy budgets of societies, however. The key question is whether renewable energy manages to dominate the whole energy sector (including heat, industry, et cetera).

The authors handle these questions pretty well on a global level, but the differences between nations are left unattended. One important motive for adopting renewable energy for some countries is to get a more favorable balance of trade or to become more self-sufficient, if they have been dependent on fossil fuel imports, for example. The book is mostly silent on such issues.

Finally: There is More Struggle Ahead, Not Less

Even if the 1,5°C degree target is “dead”, this does not signify the end of the climate struggle. As is often stated, avoiding every tenth of a degree is significant, and this is a crucial point. Without ambitious emission cuts, everything else will eventually come to naught.

But the most important message for Malm and Carton is that new fronts are emerging in the climate struggle. As defeatism vis a vis climate targets is adopted ever more widely in societies, a likely scenario is that carbon capture and geoengineering replace mitigation as the primary strategies. The battles on the new climate fronts are fought over whether these false promises are believed in a world that abandoned ambitious climate targets and surrendered to “the inevitable”.

Parts of the political message of the book is easy, albeit grim, to accept. It seems clear that the current COP process will not escape the overshoot trajectory. The call for the destruction of the value of fossil assets is a vital one, and the depth of the issue has not yet been recognized sufficiently in the climate movements.

But for Malm and Carton, all this amounts to a lonesome struggle: “we are alone in this. We have no reliable friends in the capitalist classes.”(236) It is hard to glean a meaningful strategy of action on this basis. In his earlier book How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021) Malm focused on place-based resistance and literal destruction of fossil fuel assets, calling for sabotage as a tactic. In this book Malm and Carton look for future possibilities in actions which clearly are state-based: ending fossil fuel subsidies, taxing extraction, forbidding extraction on state lands (or marine zones).(242–243)

But if capital is understood in so totalizing a fashion—nobody in the capitalist classes has any motive for decarbonization—what kind of political struggles could even result in such state-based action? The authors freely admit that they have no ready-made strategies, but perhaps more room could be cleared for them in one’s thinking. The assumption of solitary struggle precludes most alliance-forging. Are there really no potential capitalist beneficiaries of energy transformations, say, in sectors, where cheap electricity is vital for their operations?

Another problematic theme is the simplifying opposition between production and consumption. The key message of the book is that the battles have to be fought first and foremost to rein in production of fossil fuels. Malm and Carton criticize appeals to change consumption habits by referring to studies that (rightly) show how strongly emissions correlate with affluence—talking about everyday consumption of regular folks is a distraction. The problem of affluence and inequality is indisputable, but that does not invalidate the demand side of the equation.

As fossil fuels have reached their tentacles into every nook and cranny of our societies, as the current socio-ecological metabolism is still fatefully dependent on them, all sections of society by necessity consume them. In any country where fossil fuels form a major part of the energy budget, even the poorer parts of the society indirectly emit too much simply by living in apartments warmed by coal, food cooked by gas or electricity produced by coal; relying on cars running on petrol, unable to choose less carbon-intensive diets in “food deserts” and so on.

If indeed “replumbing and rewiring” the society is called for, it requires precisely demand-side solutions: changing the infrastructures within which all people live their lives.(217) This means new systems of traffic and transport, new or refurbished housing, transformed food systems. The call for mobilization against fossil capital is vital, but the authors unnecessarily push aside these dimensions—which again require state-based action and open vistas for new alliances.

Another critical question considers differences in national or regional societal contexts. China is of course a key issue. Although China’s historically cumulative emissions are still lower than those of the US, they already bypassed those of the EU in 2024. Those are territorial emissions, mind you: the EU is still ahead in consumption-based historical emissions and even more so, if the history of colonization is taken into account. But China is currently emitting so much that it will close those gaps soon. Also, the growth of emissions is nowadays driven mostly by internal Chinese development, not by “outsourced” emissions of other countries.

China is a mixed economy, and although it is of course deeply involved in the global economy, it cannot be understood only as a part of the international fossil capital. The Chinese state has subsidized a huge amount of economically inefficient and irrational extraction of coal, in order to power a historically unique growth in production of especially steel and cement, and to construct new infrastructure. In the Chinese case, the actions of the state are not only as a steward of fossil capital but an agent in its own. We can not understand this development without putting these two factors together.

This is why it is crucial to be able to differentiate between contexts of climate struggle to understand how the manifestations of the fossil fuel economy may demand radically divergent strategies of action. In the US, fracking is a major enemy that perhaps can be confronted quite directly, but such tactics will not work with, say, Saudi Aramco in Middle East. In many African countries the struggle is between the danger of the resource traps of oil and gas and the promise of more diverse development. If the struggle is perceived only through one global prism of fossil capital, good strategies may be developed for some contexts, but the unfolding climate disaster requires tailored strategies everywhere.