In 2018, Bríd Smith and People Before Profit introduced a bill in the Dáil to ban any further exploration for oil and gas in Ireland. The Climate Emergency Measures Bill was part of a global campaign that many hoped would strangle the fossil fuel industry by cutting off investments and new projects. Climate science and the need to act urgently were largely accepted by most political parties and commentators. Even Fianna Fáil supported the bill.
At that time, earnest climate campaigners were enthused by the boycott and divestment campaigns then growing in momentum in universities and elsewhere. Huge pension funds were pledging to abandon all investments in fossil fuels. Campaigners were meeting various fund managers and their message was that time was up for fossil fuels; stop investing or risk losing out and suffering from “stranded assets” – oil and gas reserves that couldn’t and wouldn’t be used. We were told “smart” capitalists would leave the industry now and reap the profits from the solar and wind industry.
A global campaign had the fossil fuel giants on the run. Renewables were becoming cheaper every day and the transition to a carbon-free energy system was galloping ahead. In the years that followed, Greta Thunberg led massive protests and a global climate movement that seemed unstoppable. At one Dublin protest that was part of the global school strikers campaign, the Fine Gael Minister for the Environment came out of the Dáil to wave in support of the young strikers. Everyone, from FF/FG, investment managers, and even CEOs of giant oil companies were apparently on board. The Paris climate treaty, agreed in 2015 committed nations of the world to limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. Carbon budgets were worked out to calculate what levels of oil gas and coal would be burnt to ensure this threshold wasn’t exceeded.
It was difficult to raise doubts with many in the movement then about whether capitalism could be weaned so easily from fossil fuels. The argument often heard was that the fight against climate chaos didn’t have time for a revolution or socialism: in fact its greatest asset would be using the “dynamism” of the free market and capital to get the change needed as quickly as we needed. “Carbon markets”, “carbon taxes” and “price signals” would do the job. In the years that followed there were many breathless articles about the “death of coal” or oil or how global GDP was decoupling from Co2 emissions.
Seven years later and hopes for radical change seem dead in an era of Trump and a growing movement of far-right climate deniers. While FF/FG now plan for an LNG terminal in Ireland, globally the last 5 years have seen an unprecedented surge in fossil fuel investments. At present CO2 levels have reached 427 ppm, a level that scientists say has not been reached in over 3 million years, and many of the earth’s natural systems show signs of collapse with dire consequences for humanity and life on earth. What happened to the optimism of Paris and the acceptance by everyone bar a few cranks of the science on climate?
In a word: Capitalism.
Intransigent and Relentless Logic
Capitalism has zero intentions of decoupling itself from oil, gas or coal or the profits locked up in the reserves of the fossil fuel giants and their associated companies.
Overshoot is an astonishing book in that it chronicles the deliberate and calculated strategy of capitalism and its elites to burn the plant as a livable habitat for humanity and all of the earth’s species. Those knowingly doing this are not, largely, climate deniers and many don’t believe in the techno-utopian fantasies that others hope might magically solve the climate crisis.
They are motivated, however, by the intransigent and relentless logic of the capitalist system which means the drive to accumulate profits trumps all other concerns. Malm and Carton’s book lays out exactly how and why the world’s elites snubbed climate action and what this means for socialists and environmentalists today.
Expansion and Record Profits
“By 2021, the world had seen at least 1.1°C of global warming, six IPCC reports, twenty-six COPs and immeasurable suffering for the most affected people and areas.”
Formally, states agreed on the urgency of limiting CO2, but after Covid emissions reached historic heights. The last few years have also shown us what we can expect as the earth’s climate system responds to historic levels of carbon dioxide. Extreme weather, floods, heatwaves and massive crop disruption have ravaged the globe often striking those in the global south least able to survive such catastrophes. Heat that exceeds the wet bulb temperature at which humans can live is now regularly occurring around the globe. At the current rate that oil, gas and coal are being dug up, the “carbon budget” for 1.5 degrees will be gone in 6 years.
At the time of the Paris treaty and in the years after, various international reports from bodies like the IEA (International Energy Agency) made it clear that limiting warming would mean not just keeping new oil, gas and coal fields in the ground but would see large numbers of existing fields closed. These reports coincided with oil and gas giants recording record profits as the “Covid rebound” saw historic demand for fossil fuels; “2022 ended with oil and gas companies over the moon. The big five ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, Total all reported the largest profits in their histories”. As well as reaping massive returns for their CEOs and shareholders, these giants ploughed record investments in NEW oil coal and gas fields ; they exhibited no fear of any “stranded assets”:
The fossil fuel industry were aided in these acts of ecocide by the global financial sector: “Between 2016 and 2021, the world’s 60 largest banks poured nearly 5 trillion dollars into fossil fuel projects, the sums bigger at the end of this half-decade than at its beginning.” Malm and Carton make clear the drivers of this were not the Ukraine war, or Trump’s election, or a few rogue actors, but systemic: “Capitalist society enacted a dissociation between the reality of climate breakdown and the interior drives of accumulation”.
Overshoot
Capitalism has proven incapable of limiting CO2 emissions but to retain any semblance of credibility on climate it has instead pioneered fantasies aimed at pretending to act. Fantasies such as overshoot or carbon capture or removal technologies.
With some honourable exceptions such as Kevin Anderson, Malm and and Carton detail how much of the world’s scientific community have gone along with these fantastical projections. The idea of “Overshoot” – that temperatures may, for a “brief” period, exceed 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming before returning down – is one such mirage. It has no scientific basis and is based on ignoring how the Earth’s natural systems operate. It allows governments and companies to pretend that today’s new LNG or oil fields can be exploited while still appearing to be committed to 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming. Similarly and connected are the various tech solutions such as carbon capture or carbon removal; based on little more than magical thinking that someday, somehow, someone will invent a cost effective way to deal with the CO2 that the fossil fuel industry will combust today. Many studies, including IPCC reports, lean heavily on this pretence in their calculations, again to allow for the delusion that we remain on a trajectory to limiting warming while simultaneously allowing for greater volumes of oil, gas and coal to be burnt.
Mandated to Care?
This drive toward climate breakdown is not simply a failure of individuals or states; it is hard-wired into capitalism:
“Capping global warming at 1.5°C or indeed any approaching limit would mandate a blow to the capitalist mode of production of a breadth and depth hitherto unseen”.
Malm and Carton make clear how the returns and profits from renewable energy are simply not on the same scale as those profits from fossil fuels. This is despite renewables being cheaper and essentially inexhaustible. Looking at the profits of major oil and gas companies compared to the renewable sector, they found that, “The mean profit mass of an oil and gas major was nearly 6,000 times larger than that of the typical solar company”. It is this, not the devastation of burning fossil fuels, that determines what capital will do.
In any sane society, profits wouldn’t be the deciding factor in what energy source to use when one (fossil fuel) was in the process of destroying life itself on a global scale. Many campaigners believed that once wind and solar could match fossil fuels in prices to consumers the ‘transition’ would take off in earnest. But there is no energy transition. What we are experiencing is an energy expansion; all the investments in renewables are simply in addition to the continued primary use of fossil fuels to power capital. Overshoot captures the shocking scale involved:
Fossil fuel profits are too central to modern capitalism to be limited or transitioned away from voluntarily. In the words of one investor, “We are not mandated to care about the planet.” Limiting warming is an existential threat to how capitalism functions.
Indeed, the opposite will occur, as new tech such as AI is harnessed chiefly to discover new reserves and develop new methods of extraction, ensuring that the potential profits from untapped deposits are even bigger the closer we head to utter catastrophe.
The promises made in 2015 and in the early days of the climate strikers have turned literally to dust. The hopes that Greens and others placed in minor state regulations allied with market mechanisms like carbon taxes have been exposed as child-like fantasies. As climate breakdown worsens any new movement will need to understand the chief lesson in Overshoot: capitalism will kill all life on earth unless it is destroyed first.
