Book Review: Overshoot by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton

Overshot and Kaput: Humankind Wears Out Its Welcome

by John Kendall Hawkins

When Noam Chomsky deflected questions about 9/11 -- refused to speculate like a common theorist of conspiracies -- but, in short, directed us to the Truth: We have bigger fish to fry and have to get to it ASAP. No doubt, he wouldn't deny that there were such men in the world who would be happy to be Insiders with sticks of dynamite. That sh*t built the world we know. People who spread opines like, "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. This election is too important for the people to decide." The Kissinger Doctrine, once so beloved, now junk.

Kissingers have been breeding like quazy wabbits since "we" double-tapped the Japs in '45. That is the way of the world. The world we must change. What Chomsky wanted to draw our attention to was what we still had limited time to do something about, his Three Big Concerns: Climate Change, nuclear war, and the end of democracy. Any one of these could bring an end to the experiment/accident called human life on planet Earth. How do we force our leaders to address this problem?

In Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Verso 2024) by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, we get a clear picture of where we, as a globe, are at regarding Climate Change policy. What we knew, when we knew it, and what we are doing about the crisis that definitely has Doom as a consequence of limited or non-action. Malm and Carton begin by telling the reader that mitigation is what they mean by overshoot. They write, "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." This strikes Malm and Carton as hideous and maybe insane.

If mitigation, such as it is, doesn't work, and it won't, there is a post-mitigation plan. "The dominant classes have to come up with secondary, backup measures for managing the consequences of excess heat." Reassuring, isn't it? they seem to enquire of the reader. The backup includes three options (or phases of bankruptcy, depending on how you look at it): Adaptation, carbon removal, and geoengineering. "All three are also replete with repercussions, ranging from the annoying to the apocalyptic," write the pair, who plan on publishing a separate analysis of the three backup options, already calling it The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It's Too Late. "It will pay special attention to the psychic dimensions of the climate crisis," they write, "notably the tremendous capacity of people in capitalist society to deny, and, when this no longer works, repress it."

The authors focus on fossil fuels. They can see that warnings fall on deaf ears. They note that the world had a chance to take advantage of the proverbial silver lining that came with Covid-19 and its lockdown regimen. They write,

In 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, something highly unusual took place: global CO2 emissions fell"The lockdowns that closed the highways of the world economy cut their total by some 5 or 6 per cent"coincidentally, the pandemic broke out just as the wave of climate mobilisations on streets from Berlin to Bogota' and Luanda to London crested - in 2019, this had been 'the fastest-growing social movement in history' - and so proposals were floated for using the pandemic to start the transition by then long overdue. These came to nothing.

Came to nothing. Miracles from God have been precious few for millennia -- this we all know -- but seeing the CO2 plummet in 2020 was almost like a sign from heaven that our so-called covenant since Noah was still solid. But no. Selfishness rules.

The authors continue the chronicle of our planet's demise. In 2021, "CO2 emissions rose by 6 per cent, or two gigatonnes." Then the authors got trippy. To picture an abstract gigatonne as a concrete image, they wrote, see a gigatonne as a unit of mass "which equals the weight of over 100,000,000 African elephants." Two gigatonnes, then, would be the equivalent of 200,000,000 African elephants. Phew, I whistled. That would be heaven on Earth for the Mbuti pygmies of the Ituri Forest, but then I actually pictured two-thirds of the American population replaced by African elephants. That's a lot of elephant sh*t. And methane.

The authors list the damage done already by climate catastrophe ignored for what it is -- potentially eschatological in scope -- "The double blow of a cyclone and an early monsoon "one third of Bangladesh under water"Pantanal, the planet's largest wetland..enveloped in flames"in the Atlantic - thirty named storms; within a fortnight, two hurricanes lacerating Nicaragua"for the first time, a hurricane struck Somalia"(cities more deeply flooded) or introducing novelties (wetlands ablaze)...Swathes of ,,,Turkey and Greece"aglow, while in the Chinese province of Henan, a year's worth of rain fell in three days - downpours 'unseen in the last 1,000 years' - but in southern Madagascar, drought forced eight in ten inhabitants to fill their stomachs with leaves, cacti and locusts." Almost there. Almost at the point where a plague of locusts arrives as a much-needed meal served up.

Overshoot is divided into a Preface and three main sections: The Limit Is Not A Limit; Fossil Capital Is A Demon, and Into the Long Heat. What we have going as mitigation is not enough; it's not even a start. The culprit is the one we all know: Big Oil. The Long Heat means our children and children's children will have to live underground to survive. That's what the book tells. Methodically. With detail. Last Chapter, like in its resignation to our fate. But -- it does hold out the notion that some shock to the system's dominant classes's control can lead to real mitigation.

I recall reading Daniel Ellsberg's memoir, The Doomsday Machine. In it he relates how he and a RAND colleague went to see Dr. Strangelove when it came out, and how he and his companion agreed that the crazy sh*t they'd just seen came across as "essentially a documentary." In the film, one of the strangest scenes is the one where Dr. Strangelove explains how everyone, after the war, will have to live underground, but the good news is each man will be given a set of 10 beautiful women to restock the world with humans. It is crazy thinking.

Some public policies are way too important for the elites and bloviators and technocrats to be put in charge of or to be ceded implicit control by the state in exchange for more and more money and power. In his most recent book, The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, a book co-written by ex-Google wonk Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger, wherein Schmidt writes, "AI"is being applied to more elements of our lives; it is altering the role our minds have traditionally played in shaping, ordering, and assessing our choices and actions." Schmidt, who, in his previous book Empire of the Mind (later re-titled to The New Digital Age), envisioned hologram machines in the dens of dominant class families, so that spoiled kids could go on field trips to the slum of Mumbai, is all for ceding control of mind to machines.