In his most recent book, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and his co-author Wim Carton show us why, despite a complete understanding of the deepening climate catastrophe, the forces shaping our world have not attempted to stop or even to mitigate the worsening crisis.
As oil production and profits have shot up in recent decades, even more since the Covid-19 pandemic, we have reached what Malm and Carton describe as overshoot. They describe this as a condition in which global capitalism’s leaders realize that they can’t keep average global temperatures within the now well-known 1.5 degrees Celsius limit set in 2018 without stranding (losing) trillions of dollars in capital, and that they should therefore keep producing and using fossil fuels, all the while advancing new technologies that will someday (they say or hope) help our world get back to or below that 1.5 degree limit. The line of thinking became “Overshoot, adapt, recover.” Throughout their descriptions of this phenomenon, the authors expose the complete cynicism and greed of those who run the for-profit system and corporations that are driving the destruction of our planet and necessitating the overshoot ideology that rationalizes the continuing destruction.
Overshoot ideology is based in the basic fact that profit-making corporations simply cannot allow their investments in fixed capital (decades of research, massive drilling platforms, fracking machinery, etc.) to go unused, or to take losses or lose market share to other corporations. This stranding of assets is simply unthinkable for members of the capitalist class.
On the practical, scientific side of things, the authors discuss how scientists like Mark Jacobson and others of Stanford University have shown that we could go to a zero fossil fuel world. This is totally feasible, without much more investment, use of land, or ecological destruction than is already being used to produce the power we already generate. They write that “The problem sits not in the technology, but in the dysfunctional relationship.” By “dysfunctional relationship,” they mean the pursuit of profit by a very few individuals and corporations, operating for their own benefit rather that the needs of humanity and our environment. It is this dysfunctional social relationship that has led us to this catastrophic place, not a lack of technology or resources.
But the need to protect massive investments in fixed capital has led the capitalists and their political leaders to ignore such practical options for moving beyond fossil capital, and is what causes (or even necessitates) overshoot. Not only would corporations lose profits, but entire nation-states would lose tax dollars and resource bases. If the world were to actually stop fossil fuel production today, as we need to, $13-$17 trillion would be stranded, or lost to the initial investors.
And of course, fossil capital is totally interconnected with finance and many other types of capital. Hence an attack (or even modest limitations) on fossil capital is an attack on all capital and capitalism itself. Fossil capital and all other forms of capital are driven by value, rate of return, and competition. Even minimal demands to limit oil or coal production would therefore throw those objectives into question. They would be an unbearable loss for capital, so that even modest demands to limit fossil output are or would become “transitional” demands under current conditions of crisis. In other words, following Leon Trotsky’s writings on the Transitional Program, Malm and Carton argue that any demands made on fossil capital would directly call into question the very bases of the global capitalist regime. It follows that society would then be faced with a potentially revolutionary situation.
For this reason, they call the ideology of overshoot an “alternative to revolution,” or even an “anti-revolution.”
Malm and Carton draw parallels between the needs of today’s fossil fuel industries with those of the slave-owning southern oligarchy in the early 19th century United States. Rather than allow political forces to stop its westward expansion of slavery in that period, southern states actually initiated a civil war, because they knew that if their system of slave labor cotton production could not expand, their assets (slaves and land) would be stranded (lost). The same basic dilemma exists today for fossil capital.
They also portray overshoot as similar to what Stalin’s Comintern advised the German Communist Party to do when facing the rising threat of Nazism in 1930s Germany – allow the Nazis to take power, which will then lead to their destruction. This strategy led to disaster, allowing fascists to take power while also demoralizing and weakening the European working classes. They use Trotsky’s analysis of fascism in 1932-1933 to instead make the point that even late in the game, after suffering real losses, even belated fightback and uprisings could change the real balance of forces. But, they also use Trotsky’s words to argue that once the fascists come to power (or once we today have gone into overshoot), the obstacles become more challenging. In Trotsky’s words, the task of getting rid of fascism becomes “incomparably more gruesome.” The same is true today of the struggle against fossil capital and the climate catastrophe.
They point out that today some are calling for a so-called popular front, in which working class and revolutionary parties ally with supposedly more progressive capitalists to fight against the more reactionary capitalists whose profits are based solely on fossil fuels. This idea again follows what the Stalinist Comintern told working class parties around the world to do in order to combat fascism in the early 1930s. Malm and Carton correctly condemn this idea, which ignores the fundamental class conflict between workers and capitalists as well as the global network of investments that tie nearly all big capitalists into the tentacles of the fossil fuel industries.
Malm and Carton argue that we do not need and should not try to create a popular front, nor can we have a political solution that compromises with fossil capital, because fossil capital CANNOT compromise. Any compromise it might make that could solve the climate crisis would cut into profits, strand trillions in assets, and call the entire system into question. The authors argue that to stop overshoot, a war of sorts will be needed. In this case, a revolution.
They argue that there are possibilities for resistance in some regions, and that, on a large enough scale, these might trigger such demands on fossil capital that a crisis emerges and a revolutionary upsurge can begin. They point out that an event like the Yasuni victory in Ecuador in 2023 could happen on a larger scale, in a region more integral for capitalist profits, and that such an event might “touch off the panic” that could lead to a push to end fossil capital.
As in Malm’s past works, Malm and his co-author do not go beyond this suggestive example. They leave it to us to decide how best to organize and act to challenge this system and its destruction of our environment.
But their deep research and brilliant analysis demonstrate once again (as in the previous book, White Skin, Black Fuel), that fossil capital and capitalism itself are the problems. They cannot be changed or reformed into something better. The big capitalists are willing to destroy the planet and everyone on it for profits. There can be no compromising with a system like this or the people who run it. We must get rid of them entirely.
