Overshoot
How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A scathing critique of proposals to geoengineer our way out of climate disaster by the bestselling author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline
It might soon be far too hot on this planet. What do we do then? In the era of "overshoot," schemes abound for turning down the heat–not now, but a few decades down the road. We’re being told that we can return to liveable temperatures by means of technologies for removing CO2 from the air or blocking incoming sunlight.If they even exist, such technologies are not safe.
They come with immense uncertainties and risks. Worse, like magical promises of future redemption, they might provide reasons for continuing to emit in the present. But do they also hold some potentials? In Overshoot two leading climate scholars subject the plans for saving the planet after it’s been wrecked to critical study. Carbon dioxide removal is already having effects, as an excuse for continuing business as usual, while geoengineering promises to bail out humanity if the heat reaches critical levels.
Both distract from the one urgent task: to slash emissions now. There can be no further delay. The climate revolution is long overdue, and in the end, no technology can absolve us of its tasks.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The world is blithely blowing past agreed upon global warming "limits," duped by unprovable assurances that eventually new technologies will be invented to remove the excess carbon from the atmosphere, according to this eye-opening and dire account. Climate scholars Malm (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and Carton delve into the recent history of the climate crisis to explain how this irrationally nonchalant attitude toward "overshoot" emerged ("What spell been cast on this world...?"). Over the course of a robust economic analysis of how the fossil fuel industry functions—especially focusing on its post-Covid lockdown boom, when fossil fuel companies used record profits to invest in record amounts of new fossil fuel infrastructure—the authors come to the startling conclusion that the only thing stopping the world from solving global warming is fossil fuel companies' fear of "asset stranding." The inside secret, the authors argue, is that there is no comparable profit to be made in renewables; fossil fuel companies thus have nothing to invest in that will give them the same rate of return. In a rousing conclusion, Malm and Carton survey potential economic solutions and come down in favor of a "mercilessly confrontational" approach: scrubbing the fossil fuel industry's "assets" fully off the books, the same way enslavers were not "compensated" in the postbellum South. Readers will be overwhelmed but galvanized.