After Overshoot
Breaking down the concept of "overshoot", the enduring power of fossil capital and the politics of geoengineering.
In 2024, we’re set to break a major climate threshold for the first time: this will be the first calendar year in which global average temperatures breach the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold enshrined in the Paris Agreement. Importantly, while one year at this temperature doesn’t mean all is lost, it does fire a profound warning shot over our faltering progress on mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis.
While every fraction of a degree matters when it comes to the climate, the consensus is clear that above 1.5C the severity of impacts and risk of tipping points like mass coral reef die off or the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet become substantially higher. You might therefore expect this to be front page news. Yet compared with its gravity, it has barely made headlines. If, like us, you’re wondering why — as it turns out, this was always part of the plan.
In this episode, Adrienne and Andreas Malm break down the concept of “overshoot”, how it’s tied up with the power of fossil capital, and the future of climate politics, from ecofascism to geoengineering.
Andreas Malm is an associate professor in human ecology at Lund University and the author of several influential books, including Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016), How To Blow Up a Pipeline (2020) and, most recently, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, with Wim Carton.
Further Reading
Andreas Malm, "The Future Is the Termination Shock: On the Antinomies and Psychopathologies of Geoengineering, Part One", Historical Materialism.
Andreas Malm & Wim Carton, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Verso, 2024.