Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.

At the global climate conference in Paris in 2015 (COP21), the nations of the world agreed to take necessary action to prevent average global temperature from getting more than 1.5°C warmer than it was at the beginning of the industrial age. In 2024, we reached 1.5°C of warming, and we see little sign that global temperature will stop rising. Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, is the recent history of how that came to happen. It happened with the introduction of “overshoot” into the economic negotiations around global climate change. 

Overshoot is the concept certain economists have coined to describe a trajectory in which we blow past 1.5°C for the time being, and then at some undefined point in the future we will have the technologies available to start removing carbon from the atmosphere and eventually bring average global temperature back down to the target of 1.5°. Those economists argue that overshoot will be less disruptive economically than trying to end the burning of fossil fuels in the near term. Of course, their argument says nothing of the economic disruption that continued global warming in the near term will have on island nations, coastal communities, tropical zones, and other parts of the world that are already bearing the brunt of climate change.

Malm and Carton are both professors at Lund University in Sweden. In 2016, Malm published Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, a history of the beginnings of the use of coal-fired steam to power industrial operations in England in the early nineteenth century. He shows that decisions to shift to steam power were not made by industrial workers but by the capitalist class, who found steam engines easier to control than workers or waterpower (the main non-human source of energy to drive industrial machinery before the advent of steam power). Malm’s subsidiary argument in Fossil Capital is that we should not be calling the new geological era we are entering the Anthropocene because “we” (humanity collectively) did not choose to adopt coal and other fossil fuels; rather, we should call the new era the Capitalocene.

Malm and Carton show, in Overshoot, how the capitalist class has commandeered policy discussions at the global level and at all the COP conferences since Paris. Their analysis centers on the concept of stranded assets. When coal, petroleum, and natural gas sit in Earth’s crust, they are just inanimate substances like any other minerals. But after corporations invest huge sums of capital to explore for those fossil fuels, the discovered and developed coal, petroleum, and gas become assets on the corporations’ books. The fossil fuels are still just sitting there, but they are capital assets in the same sense that a piece of industrial machinery or a factory building is a capital asset. An investment has been made to create something that promises to yield profits, and return on investment, in the future. The corporations that “own” fossil fuels in the ground don’t want to see an end to the use of fossil fuels because that would mean the assets that they spent vast sums to discover and develop will continue to just sit there, not yielding profits and return on investment. An end to fossil fuels would also strand other assets, such as pipelines, oil refineries, and fossil-fuel-burning power plants that promise to continue yielding profits and returns on investment as long as they are in use.

The authors argue that all of the polite negotiations among government policy-makers and testimony from endangered island nations will come to naught so long as the institution of capitalism is the dominant decision-making entity in whether or not we continue to use fossil fuels. The book begins with alarming statistics showing that, although there was a brief downturn in fossil-fuel consumption and consequent emissions during the Covid-19 pandemic, the fossil-fuel industry has roared back with a vengeance since then, and the numbers have ballooned for new coal mines opened, oil-exploration projects initiated, pipeline-construction projects developed and under construction. Those are all assets in the making, assets that will have to be stranded if we have any hope of preventing our precious planet from roasting, and assets that capital will do everything in its power to convert to profits and return on investment rather than stranding.

Malm and Carton draw a powerful comparison between fossil fuels and enslaved persons in the nineteenth century. To plantation owners, those persons were assets. The enslavers had invested in them with the promise that they would yield future profits and return on investment. The capitalists who owned slaves resisted the anti-slavery movements because they didn’t want to lose their assets. When England outlawed slavery, it compensated the owners for their stranded assets. Abraham Lincoln, in an effort to rid Washington, DC, of slavery, offered each DC owner $400 per enslaved person.  The District of Columbia ended up paying each slave owner $300 per emancipated slave. The United States fought a brutal Civil War, which finally ended slavery, and one outcome was that the plantation owners in the South lost $4 million dollars in assets without compensation. (That history ignores the fact that reparations were not paid to the formerly enslaved in either England or the United States.)

I recently reviewed Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World, in which she shows that advances in sustainable technologies are happening faster than we are often aware, and that we have the opportunity to create a sustainable future. Malm and Carton demonstrate that, at the same time, the corporations that own fossil assets are forging ahead. Even if we are using more renewable energy sources, capital is continuing to increase emissions of greenhouse gases. If we are to stop and eventually reverse global warming, huge volumes of fossil fuels will have to remain in the ground, which means one of two things: capital will have to strand those assets without compensation or we, the rest of humanity, will have to find a way to compensate capital for its stranded fossil assets. The authors show that accomplishing that will be as difficult as ending slavery was, because capitalism is such a powerful force guiding world affairs.

Observers are trying to assess why we are utterly failing to address global warming. In November 2022, the Economist wrote:

Malm and Carton respond: “That statement won the 2022 award for best rendering of the maxim ‘it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’”

And what role does the Christian church play in all this? Reading Overshoot, I am reminded of a powerful book I read about two decades ago, Christianity Incorporated: How Big Business is Buying the Church, by Michael L. Budde and Robert W. Brimlow (Brazos Press, 2002). They argue that the Church provides the chaplaincy for capitalism. To describe what they mean, they describe military chaplaincy. Long ago, military leaders recognized that they are training soldiers and sailors, should war come, to violate one of God’s central commands: thou shalt not kill. The military can develop more effective fighters if it incorporates into its officer corps chaplains who serve to soothe the troubled souls of military personnel. How can we cease being the chaplains to capitalism and start seriously to address our climate crisis?

Fredric L. Quivik