Our leaders surrendered to climate breakdown. We don’t have to follow them

What do we do when catastrophic climate chaos is a fact? Are we already there? Is it now too late to avoid warming of one and a half degrees and maybe two as well? How did we even reach the point where these questions seem relevant to ask?

What follows is a history of what we shall call the overshoot conjuncture, or the period when officially declared limits to global warming are exceeded – or in the process of being so – and the dominant classes responsible for the excess throw up their hands in resignation and accept that intolerable heat is coming.

This acceptance can be tacit or explicit. It is often couched in the idea of a promised return to safer levels: we can let the warming pass 1.5°C or 2°C and then, at a later date, reverse it and turn the temperatures down to where they should be. Too much heat is acceptable, because it can be undone post factum with technologies for cooling the Earth.

Overshoot is here not a fate passively acquiesced to. It is an actively championed programme for how to deal with the rush into catastrophe: let it continue for the time being, and then we shall sort things out towards the end of this century.

Programmatic overshoot became, as we shall see, hegemonic in mainstream science and policy in the years surrounding the Paris Agreement; but this did not happen because the idea was so strikingly brilliant. Rather it represented an alignment with the power of business as usual. The idea corresponded to real material forces pushing the Earth towards 1.5°C and beyond, and here a degree of naïve puzzlement must be registered.

Why couldn’t it just stop? What was it that drove the world into the heat, even as the consequences were plain to see? How was it that – despite all the reports, summits, pledges, agreements and, above all, observations and experiences of disasters striking harder and harder – the curves were still pointing in the wrong direction, the emissions still growing, the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure proceeding apace as if nothing was happening? What spell had been cast on this world that just would not be broken?

This is the question of why the world surrendered to climate breakdown, of why the warming was not contained at a level that might have been tolerable. But it is not an exercise in brooding historiography. This is a history of the present and near future: an attempt to gauge the power of the forces that destroy the conditions of life on Earth and that must be contended with in the coming years, if any such conditions are to be preserved.

The heat is rapidly becoming too much to bear, and precisely for that reason, it is too late to give up this struggle. There is, henceforth, no path to a liveable planet that does not pass through the complete destruction of business as usual. What would that look like?

Overshoot is thus a term with several valences. Before it entered the climate lexicon, it denoted the overuse of resources on Earth in general, but we shall set that broader phenomenon aside and focus on overshoot in a rapidly warming world.

Here it can mean simply a rise in temperatures above a declared limit; a programme for going ahead with it and then annulling the rise; a conjuncture when these things are occurring, in the physical world as well as the realm of ideas – we shall slide between them.

The years between 2018 and 2022 marked a kind of beginning. It was in 2018 that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, laying out the dangers of crossing this boundary and inspiring the ‘international community’ to confirm its commit- ment to it. Warming in excess of 1.5°C, the world learned this year, would be too unsafe to live with.

Before the ink had dried on the Special Report, however, this very boundary came into view; and what then transpired on the ground was a revving of the engine. The half-decade between the Special Report and the events of 2022 formed the start of the overshoot conjuncture – a limit officially understood and proclaimed, only to immediately become an object of transgression.

These two elements had not been conjoined before. But they may well be so again, as the crisis deepens: this conjuncture inclines towards renewal and deterioration. If 1.5°C was in the spotlight during those years, it will be 1.7°C next, then 2°C, and so on, the logic of overshoot potentially reappearing at every identified limit, more ahead of us than behind.

Can the transgression of the temperature limits from the Paris Agreement still be prevented? Could it be done without much pain? Is it merely a segment of oil and gas companies that stand between the rest of us and a stabilised climate? Or is it a technical necessity that still ties us all to fossil fuels, at this late hour?

These are some points of entry into the problem, which is one of political economy as much as history. The barrage is kept up by forces at work in the depths of capital accumulation.

The dominant classes have to come up with secondary, backup measures for managing the consequences of excess heat. Three stand out.

Adaptation is the pursuit of adjusting life to a climate of disasters and making it less disastrous. Carbon dioxide removal is designed to draw the gas down from the atmosphere after the fact. Geoengineering is the art of blocking incoming sunlight to reduce the influx of heat to the Earth.

All three centre on technologies; all come to the fore because fossil capital has been so successful in staving off challenges; all depart from the refusal of states to undertake any meaningful mitigation: the temperature rise overtops the barriers and gets channelled into new political projects.

*This is an edited version of the Preface to Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown – a new book by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton

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