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The world is on the cusp of one and a half degrees of warming - just the rise it has committed itself to avoiding. Heat at such levels would be intolerable. Even before one and a half, seasons of climate disaster have struck with ever more devastating force, and yet a notion has taken hold that the cause is now lost: the intolerable has become unavoidable. The limit will be overshot - perhaps two degrees as well - and the best we can do is cool down the Earth at some later point, towards the end of the century, by means of technologies not yet proven.
How did this happen? How could the idea of overshoot gain such traction? What forces are driving us into a climate that people - particularly poor people in the global South - won't be able to cope with? In Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton present a history of the present phase of the crisis, likely to extend decades into the future, as the fossil fuel industry swims in the largest profits ever made. Money continues to flow into the construction of pipelines, platforms, terminals, mines - assets that will have to be destroyed for the planet to remain liveable. Too much heat has become officially acceptable because such revolutionary destruction is not. But should the rest of us abide by that priority?
Unflinchingly critical of business-as-usual and the calls for surrender to it, sweeping in scope, stirring and sobering, Overshoot lays out the stakes for the climate struggle in the years ahead.
List of contents
Preface
i. THE LIMIT IS NOT A LIMIT
1. Chronicle of Three Years Out of Control
2. When Is It Too Late?
3. The Rise of Overshoot Ideology
ii. FOSSIL CAPITAL IS A DEMON
4. The Political Economy of Asset Stranding (or, Gore and Blood Come to Wall Street)
5. How to Kill a Spectre
6. We Are Going to Be Driven by Value
iii. INTO THE LONG HEAT
7. Ten Theses on the Overshoot Conjuncture
8. Induce the Panic
9. Chronicle of One More Year of Madness
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
About the author
Andreas Malm teaches human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of, among other books, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming and How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire.Wim Carton is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, Sweden. He's the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics. His work has appeared in top journals such as Nature Climate Change, WIRES Climate Change and Antipode.
Summary
A devastating critique of the forces propelling us beyond critical temperature limits, by the bestselling author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Report
In Overshoot, a rageful, radical and timely new history of the ecological present, the activist scholars Wim Carton and Andreas Malm ask how it is - how it could be - that the world seems to be surrendering to climate breakdown. 'What do we do when catastrophic climate chaos is a fact?' they ask. The apparent answer is 'Let it continue for the time being.' The New York Times
