Risky Business: The Future of Fossil Fuel Capitalism
Book Review by Ross Thrasher
Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton. Verso, 2024.
The definition of the term overshoot is to go past (a point) unintentionally, especially through traveling too fast or being unable to stop. Modern society is in a state of chronic overshoot, overconsuming the natural resources that support life itself while betting the future on unproven technological solutions. The point(s) we are going past are the very planetary boundaries we need to respect in order to survive.
Modern society is gluttonous, consuming to the point of morbid obesity, while counting on a future crash diet or a new drug to keep us alive and thriving. Swedish academics Malm and Carton expose the fallacy of planetary overshoot in a book that exhaustively indicts our contemporary climate madness — 122 pages of citations for 260 pages of text.
The authors place under the microscope (1) the history of fossil-fuel production: still expanding after the COVID hiccup, and (2) the annual COP negotiations: still unable to enforce compliance with emissions limits or temperature targets. The way overshoot is conveniently rationalized allows for “business as usual” in the realm of fossil-fuel capitalism. It starts from the assumption that holding the global climate increase to the Paris targets (1.5 or even 2 degrees C.) is impossible without destroying our industrial civilization. Therefore we must adapt to a hotter climate in the near term, and enlist techniques like CO2 sequestration and geo-engineering (blocking sunlight) to draw down the excess emissions and re-cool the planet.
But this rationale ignores the intervening impacts, more immediately, on the Global South, of a baked-in 2C (or higher) increase: unbearable heat, desertification, sea-level rise, and disastrous weather events. Without enforceable restrictions on carbon emissions, many tropical regions will soon become uninhabitable. And the affluent North will have to cope with as many as a billion climate refugees, some of them angry and violent.
Malm and Carton’s case against climate overshoot comes down to a critique of capitalism. New fossil-fuel enterprises require ten years or more of massive capital investment to search for, extract, refine, ship and store their products. They need many more years of lucrative sales to recoup this investment and make a profit. Any threat by governments or international agencies to restrict production invokes the risk of stranding these expensive capital assets — mines, equipment, offshore platforms, pipelines, oil tankers, etc. Investment banks and stock markets, entangled with these assets, would also take a huge hit.
Today the planet has nearly squandered its carbon budget. It is very clear from scientific modelling that a direct path to net zero by 2050 would require the almost-immediate cessation of fossil-fuel burning. Such a shutdown would represent a revolutionary shift in the economic system, comparable to the abolition of slavery in the 19th century or the elimination of private property after the Russian Revolution. “Capping global warming at 1.5C or indeed any approaching limit would mandate a blow to the capitalist mode of production of a breadth and depth hitherto unseen.”
The fear of stranded assets gave rise to research on greenhouse gas removal techniques. As early as 2004 the International Energy Agency’s model “prophesised that the total use of fossil fuels could almost double [by] 2050, as long as power plants and refineries built during this time had a CO2-capturing device somewhere sucking on the chimney”. Here was the seed of the overshoot philosophy. But over the next decade, none of the many carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration projects proved viable at scale, despite generous government subsidies. So the technological reversal of global warming, in a world that remains wedded to fossil fuels, is still very much a wish-list project of the future.
In the meantime, renewable sources of energy are capable of replacing fossil fuels using well-established techniques. Malm and Carton devote a chapter to numerous clean-transition roadmaps, drawing heavily on Mark Jacobson’s 2023 book No Miracles Needed. Solar panels and wind turbines are the leaders in this transition, of course, followed by tidal, wave and geothermal power. (Nuclear is not included). Concerns about land use and raw materials are swatted away. The major enterprises that are not yet transferable to green power — petrochemicals and long-distance aviation and shipping — could be decarbonized if there is enough political support for research and development.
Moreover, the cost of renewables like solar and wind has plummeted. But in a capitalist economy, this ironically makes them less attractive to investors seeking profits because the capital currently tied up in potentially stranded assets needs to be realized. And the consequence of this is the overshoot of the Paris targets, which in turn will lead to millions of preventable deaths while the affluent continue to over-consume.
Clearly an intervention is urgently needed. Malm and Carton offer a catalogue of supply-side policies that can be deployed to trigger a green transition: “Subsidies to fossil fuel companies could be removed, taxes slapped on extraction, exports restricted, state-owned lands and waters closed for explorationists, production subjected to quotas to be traded and steadily withdrawn, permits revoked, credits … choked off. Moratoria and bans could be imposed on anything from oil drilling to coal plants.” Given the inevitable resistance to such measures from the private sector, nationalization for the purpose of winding down the industry might be the only realistic solution.
Against the prevailing tide of still-growing worldwide investment in and production of oil, gas and even coal, Ecuador and Colombia are offered as hopeful examples of countries in which popular sentiment has contributed to fossil fuel shutdowns. But the final chapter chronicles One More Year of Madness, a litany of climate disasters, rising temperatures and new carbon extraction projects around the globe in 2023.
Overshoot is an impressive piece of scholarship, a detailed review of the literature on fossil economics and its clean-energy alternatives. The authors don’t pull any punches in their risk assessment of the status quo. And they have promised a sequel volume that will assess in greater depth the reversal technologies (CCS and geo-engineering) upon which the “business as usual” approach to energy production would have to depend in the future.
This book has rocked my world.
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