BOOKBUSTER REVIEW – Oil Be Damned: Part Four
Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown
By Andreas Malm & Wim Carton
Published by Verso, 2024, rrp £25
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
On Monday 11 November, COP29 Azerbaijan began, in an authoritarian oil-state that is effectively a branch of BP’s oil empire, with the Azerbaijani government hilariously claiming green credentials. Their website claims that ‘Azerbaijan is committed to developing its renewable energy potential, which is an important part of the country’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2050. The country intends to increase renewable power capacity to 30% by 2030 and diversify its existing energy system to become a leader in green energy’. Meanwhile the minister nominated to preside over COP29 is an ex-executive of SOCAR, the state oil company. There is definitely an unhealthy stink emanating from the cheerful propaganda. Which makes it not dissimilar to the previous rounds of the UN’s ‘climate change’ conferences, the last also having been hosted by oil-states.
Which brings us to Andreas Malm’s new book, co-written with Wim Carton, both of whom are associate professors at Sweden’s Lund University. Malm wrote the best-selling How to Blow Up a Pipeline. His ire is quite rightly raised by the greenwashing industry, dominated by climate-change denialists and fossil-fuel corporations. In this latest book he shows in detail how these bad-faith actors have far from addressing, for example, CO2 emissions to try and lower them, in fact pressed the accelerator to the floor.
‘Overshoot’ in this case refers to our CO2 targets in regard to a tipping point at which global average temperatures shoot past the ‘must not go higher than’ targets and start to snowball, or should we not say ‘fireball’? The latest reports indicate that we are already at the tipping point and that the current rate of emissions is looking likely to lock us in to an unavoidable whopping 3.2 degrees average global temperature rise. And to think we were worried about a 2.5 degree rise, which was deemed to be a point of no return.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
Malm and Carton dig deep into the way in which the capitalist and state fossil-fuel industries have propagandised, spreading disinformation and lies across every media outlet they can buy off or manipulate. As the world, especially our youth, migrated online in even greater numbers over lockdown, a trend that has only very partially reversed, those enriching themselves by spreading doubt about climate change found it ever easy to succeed, and have doubled-down on their mission to avert shareholder losses regardless of the long-term effects.
The US election result ensures yet more oil, coal, and gas extraction, and is unlikely to curb the rape of formerly pristine marine environments of the Pacific by an electric vehicle obsessed auto-industry, as they accelerate lithium extraction from the seabed. Meanwhile, here in the UK, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, and now Starmer, promote and open new ‘free trade’ economic low-tax zones, one of which includes Dartmoor national park. The restriction of a traditional right-to-roam, coupled with the presence of lithium and other metals in the granite uplands there, may fit into a jigsaw puzzle alongside low-regulation freeports – how can one not conclude that extraction is planned, albeit perhaps not immanently?
Malm & Carton concentrate on the fossil-fuel industry in Overshoot, but are not blind to the fact that this is just one aspect of the global failure to curb climate, and biodiversity, breakdown. They regard the world as having surrendered to this, and give a blow-by-blow account of the failures of the last three years. As Jello Biafra once put it, there is, in effect at least, an attitude under capitalist consumerism of ‘give me convenience or give me death’. No-one wants to give up their slice of pie to achieve necessary targets. But the super-rich could set an example, as none of them can eat their vast portion of pie in their lifetime, in fact they could feed whole countries with it. In a childish game of ‘no, you first’, closing the poverty gap and punishing overweening wealth may be the only way to avert the ‘no-win’ situation written into the rules of the game.
THERE IS NO PLANET B
The authors note that CO2 emissions dropped during Covid. They, and many others, hoped that this would prompt the world leaders to see reduction as a doable mission. Yet, as they put it, ‘like an arsonist briefly interrupted by the sound of voices in the building, fossil capital resumed its work’. And, not only did CO2 emissions rebound, but in fact ‘went way beyond the levels preceding the pandemic’, in fact ‘emissions rose by 6%, or two gigatonnes, giving overall the highest per annum emissions increase in history. They go on to analyse ‘the rise of overshoot ideology’, and given a Marxian analysis of ‘asset stranding’ and the role of capital and ‘value’ in this overshoot. It is a sobering but necessary read. They plan to follow the book up soon with one on ‘climate politics when it’s too late’.
The gist is, of course, that it is already too late, we are pretty much in the early stages of overshoot. There are few, in any, realistic ways to avert the crisis. But mitigation is urgently required, meaning hard choices. The lack of will to make these choices on the left leaves the field open for capitalist industry, investors and the neo-right to define mitigation strategies. That, needless to say, will be a complete disaster for the ‘have-nots’, amongst whom there inevitably will be millions of Britons – we’ll all burn together, and there is no Planet B. Unless… what?
Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
On World Climate Day, Sunday 8th December, the Electric Palace hosts DIVEST! The Climate Movement on Tour: Governmental response to climate change goes under the microscope in this powerful documentary, plus short films and post-film discussion from Divest East Sussex. Info & tickets: www.electricpalacecinema.com
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