The Overshoot Presidency and the State of Climate Politics

And billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, who not long ago argued for the ​“urgency of getting to zero emissions,” responded to Guterres’ warning by castigating a ​“doomsday view of climate change” and arguing that instead of an excessive focus on emission goals the international community should pivot to preventing poverty and disease (as though these could be delinked from global heating).

How are we to understand the planetary political dynamics that have brought us to this critical moment of ​“overshoot” — the term climate scientists use to describe crossing the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius of planetary warming set by the 2015 Paris Agreement? What are the possible political scenarios of climate breakdown, and how will large corporations and states try to profit from or live with environmental crisis? And what are the tasks and prospects for a climate movement that currently seems overwhelmed by both the continuation of liberal business-as-usual extractivism and the growing power of a ​“fossil fascist” politics of denialism or disavowal?

As Swedish scholar and activist Andreas Malm explored in his 2021 book White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism (cowritten with the Zetkin Collective), the surging global fortunes of the far Right are intimately tied to a racist and authoritarian politics that blames immigrants for environmental degradation while celebrating the industries that extract and consume fossil fuels — and which will only intensify repression against climate migrants when climate catastrophe can no longer be denied.

This October, Malm returns to this topic with the publication of his new book, The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, coauthored with fellow scholar and activist Wim Carton. The Long Heat is the second volume of a two-part series that began with the authors’ 2024 book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.

Across both books, Malm and Carton unfold a history of our catastrophic present, explaining the unbreakable bond between capital and fossil fuels. They also map out the technological fixes being rolled out as the planet continues to heat and demonstrate how schemes to adapt to or reverse global heating are likely to spawn even greater disasters and could lock in a future of mass unfreedom and suffering that only large-scale eco-socialist movements can forestall.

Malm and Carton spoke with In These Times this fall. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Alberto Toscano: The Long Heat focuses a lot on ideological critique and forecasting of three kinds of technological ​“solutions” to climate emergency: adaptation, carbon removal and geoengineering. What do these look like and how do they exacerbate the already catastrophic effects of overshoot?

Andreas Malm: I’ll start with what happened this past summer in Europe. In France, during the heatwaves, the big talking point was that Marine Le Pen’s far-right party, the Rassemblement National (National Rally), proposed mandatory air conditioning across the country in public buildings. Obviously, if you’re going to cover the country with AC units, you’re going to consume a lot of energy. Clearly, it’s not a long-term solution. But it’s indicative of this moment where immediate climate disasters do not prompt any effort to deal with the drivers of the crisis, but just the symptoms.

You find this in Spain, too, where the Socialist-led government reacted to the crazy wildfires by talking about the need for better preparation and putting improved emergency measures in place, without any mention of Repsol, the Spain-based fossil fuel giant pouring fuel on these fires all the time.

In France, it’s a similar situation. No one is talking about the multinational energy and petroleum company TotalEnergies.

So, what you had this summer in Southern Europe are these manifestations of the climate crisis that trigger discussions around various kinds of adaptation that, in the long run, will have no chance of keeping these countries livable if the underlying problem is left untreated.

Right now, we’re in what some people call a ​“doom loop,” where outbreaks of climate disaster do not prompt people to try to get things under control at the source of the problem, but instead push them to talk about other things, such as adaptation.

Alberto Toscano: You call Trump the ​“overshoot president.” But the political class’ broad acceptance of the inevitability of breaching the 1.5-degree target took place during the Biden administration. How does business-as-usual U.S. politics differ from Trumpism’s aggressive identification with the imperatives of fossil capital? And has Trump 2.0 affected the technological ​“solutionism” that appears to have replaced efforts to mitigate global heating?

Andreas Malm: When we write that Trump is the overshoot president, we mean he fully embodies the core of the overshoot conjuncture — namely, the total disregard for limits and the refusal to abide by any constraints in the climate system. This is a structural tendency, grounded in deep material structures and the capitalist mode of production, which, as every reader of Marx will know, cannot countenance any limits.

But Trump personifies this tendency. He doesn’t even pretend to recognize any limits, just goes all out on every front, including dismantling renewable energy in the U.S. This fuses with the fascist tendencies in his politics and in the Republican Party, which you wrote about very eloquently in Late Fascism. It’s a whole political paradigm that encompasses climate politics but includes many other fronts.

As for how this will affect the sort of techno-fixes we deal with in The Long Heat, the big question is: when will the Trump administration stake out a clear position on geoengineering? Many have speculated about him suddenly endorsing it, without necessarily believing in the existence of the climate crisis.

But on the other hand, speaking to the total insanity of the moment, you now actually have an emerging Republican politics on geoengineering that is based on things like the chemtrails conspiracy theory. So, you have legislative initiatives at various levels against fictional forms of geoengineering. After the floods in Texas, you had Republican figures blaming them on non-existing geoengineering. It’s completely irrational.

Wim Carton: As for carbon removal, it’s very unclear how much they’re keeping in place. In the ​“Big Beautiful Bill,” the tax credit for carbon removal was one of the few things from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that didn’t get axed. Then there’s these specialized direct air capture hubs Biden put in place. It’s unclear whether they will continue to get funding. All the companies waiting for this money are sitting on eggshells, very anxious about what’s going to happen. As with geoengineering, it’s very unclear.

We talk about these technologies as ways to keep the specter of asset stranding [that is, dismantling fossil fuel infrastructure] at bay. But the Republican Party and Trump currently don’t need that. Either they fully deny climate change, or, like Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, they say, yes, climate change is real, but it is the inevitable side effect of building a modern world. He’s essentially saying, we know it’s real, but we couldn’t care less. We’re just going to have to live with it.

What that is going to look like is very unclear, but obviously, if you have a president who keeps pushing fossil fuel extraction and refuses to accept limits, then these technologies, in the long run, become increasingly necessary. There’s going to be a certain point at which one must do something about it, one way or another. And the worst scenario is geoengineering. But it could equally well be catastrophic, muscular adaptationism, as we explore in the book.

This is the tragedy of overshoot: the more you ignore the limits, the more these technologies impose themselves.

Alberto Toscano: One distinctive aspect of your book is how you weave together analysis of climate politics with psychological or even psychoanalytic insights, as in the shift from literal denial of global heating and climate catastrophe to efforts at ​“repression” of climate change, both in the psychological and material sense.

Andreas Malm: The prediction that literal denial is coming to an end is flawed. There were people during the Biden administration who made that argument, including scholars I admire greatly, like Adrienne Buller in The Value of a Whale. It’s a wonderful book but its point of departure is that no one can deny the reality of the climate crisis anymore, so we will have green capitalism instead. But just a few years later, you have Trump back in office, and the largest party in the polls in Germany, the country that had been the pivot of the decarbonization process in Europe, is the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which is as crazily denialist as ever. So, these forces are returning to the fore.

But the hypothesis when it comes to geoengineering is that at some point it might become impossible to ignore the effects of the climate crisis if disasters are shocking and large enough. This is not difficult to imagine. Even if denialists are in office at that point — a Trump figure in the U.S. and the AfD in Germany — they might have to do something about these manifestations of climate breakdown. And the technology that exists for rapidly reducing the speed of the warming, and perhaps halting it altogether, or even cutting temperatures, is solar geoengineering.

So, our ​“Freudian” hypothesis is that you could have a shift from denial into something like a repression of the climate crisis — of its symptoms — where there’s a technology that promises to suppress global warming, but at the expense of creating all sorts of other contradictions and likely disasters within the climate system.

Alberto Toscano: What is the place of carbon removal in these crisis scenarios?

Wim Carton: We see the same dynamics there as with adaptation. If you are beyond these 1.5-degree limits and want to reverse temperatures, they are a biophysical necessity. We will probably need some form of removal. The problem is they are not combined with efforts to cut fossil fuels and do full-on mitigation.

We talk about this Cambrian explosion of technologies in the book, from nature-based solutions, like using rock dust to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, to industrial forms of direct air capture. But they all threaten to exacerbate the energy and resource problems we already face, given the massive side effects they might have, especially at the planetary scales they’re being imagined at.

The bigger political problem is that they’re envisaged as everything except a reversal that would sit on top of radical decarbonization. They’re seen as either a direct form of offsetting — carbon credits, mainly going to companies like Microsoft to offset their emissions — or direct commodity production, meaning they’re planning to do things like produce synthetic fuels with captured CO2. 

Of course, carbon is the building block of almost everything, but the vast majority of these commodities are not durable, so the CO2 will ultimately end up in the atmosphere again. And then you have enhanced oil recovery, which is the main way carbon removal, or at least carbon storage, has been developed. 

All of these represent opportunities to continue fossil fuel extraction. From the very beginning, this whole notion of carbon dioxide removal has been tied to the fact that phasing out fossil fuels was seen as impossible, at least in the medium term. The notion of substituting fossil fuel phase-outs with these technologies is deeply ingrained in our understanding of what they’re supposed to be about.

Alberto Toscano: Your accounts of the politics of carbon removal and geoengineering differ in important ways. You argue for the possibility, or even necessity, of direct air capture technologies as part of a progressive response to climate crisis. But you depict geoengineering as inherently disastrous. 

Andreas Malm: Wim and I have been working together on these issues for some years now, and one of our entry points was realizing there is an excess of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is growing all the time. This means technologies for removing carbon and drawing it down from the atmosphere are needed. 

When we started doing this research, I had somewhat naïve hopes for direct air capture as a viable technology for removing CO2. But when you read the developing science, it turns out there are all sorts of problems. Wim, for instance, is looking into the question of mineralization, where it might not actually be as easy to turn captured CO2 into stone as the companies doing this have led us to believe. There was a paper published just the other day in Nature that massively reduced predictions about the amount of actual geological storage you can do, and all sorts of problems are emerging with direct air capture too. 

This doesn’t lead us to jettison direct air capture completely, but we have to hedge it with a lot of caveats. As with any other carbon dioxide removal technology, if we’re able to achieve something, it’s going to be on a very limited scale. 

This drives home the point that what we absolutely, urgently have to do is to stop more emissions so that we don’t reach a challenge that is unworkable, which is to take down an impossible quantity of CO2. No technology can achieve this in the end.

But the approach here is different from geoengineering. 

Wim Carton: The difference between carbon removal and geoengineering is that while carbon removal doesn’t take away the core problem, it does have the potential to lower atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Solar energy engineering is a very different beast in that it deals only with the symptoms, and in that sense it’s purely a form of repression.

The main difference is we just don’t see any prospect of a progressive political program for solar engineering, because of all the geopolitical challenges it poses, and all the opportunities for centralizing massive power in the hands of single actors who could transform basic parameters of terrestrial and social life, including sunlight itself. You would need to have some kind of superhuman in charge of what is an extremely dangerous technology.

In The Long Heat we explore the many frightening potential side-effects built into this technology, including ​“termination shock” [the rapid and potentially catastrophic leap in global temperatures that could happen if geoengineering is halted after having been implemented for some time].

Alberto Toscano: At the start of The Long Heat, you describe one struggle around state-led ​“adaptation” efforts in France’s Soulevèments de la Terre (Uprisings of the Earth) movement, which protested the creation of giant water reservoirs (“mega-basins”) that could be used for crop irrigation amid increasing temperatures and more frequent droughts. The protests brought together a diverse coalition, including small farmers who saw the projects as benefiting only big agriculture as well as activists concerned about their negative environmental impact. But they may also presage more struggles to come over different climate change ​“fixes.” Where do climate movements like these fit in, and can they converge in a global struggle against fossil fuels?

Andreas Malm: I think the ​“battle of Sainte-Soline” in March 2023, when protesters against the water reservoir projects clashed with the police, could be read as a sign of an emerging front of climate politics related to adaptation projects in Europe. But it might have been a fluke.

To be honest, if you look at Europe, I don’t think the climate movement has ever been in such a dismal state since I started relating to it 20 years ago. The contrast with where it was six years ago is just incredible. It has basically vanished as a political force.

I can’t predict whether we’re going to see more flare-ups of social struggle on these secondary fronts, because there is so much destruction happening in the world that goes unchallenged. The state of social movements generally is very bad, while whatever movement energy is left in Europe these days goes into fighting this interminable genocide in Palestine. Greta Thunberg being on the flotilla is a perfect example. She’s obviously doing the right thing, but this is one reason we don’t have a powerful climate movement now: because if you’re a decent human being who wants to do political activism these days, you try to contribute to protest against this fucking genocide.

On the other hand, when it comes to carbon removal, perhaps none of this will ever actually happen. It might have been one big castle in the air that distracted people from mitigation, and vanishes as total hype at the end of the day. When it comes to geoengineering, the same thing could happen.

If there are ever going to be meaningful struggles on these fronts, it will require politically savvy agents who can intervene with clear messages and disruptive tactical programs. This is what Soulèvements de la Terre managed to do in France.

Alberto Toscano: Are there any political openings for more radical politics of mitigation and energy transition?

Andreas Malm: Colombia has an incredibly impressive government, with a very high level of political consciousness about climate — and about the genocide in Gaza, too. It is saying loud and clear that the climate disaster needs to be attacked at the root, and we must phase out fossil fuels.

Colombia’s economy is based, to a very large extent, on the extraction of oil and coal. But since 2022, you have for the first time a left-wing government, under President Gustavo Petro, who won with the support of trade unions. And he’s told them we’re going to shift away from fossil fuels.

Petro’s relation to the two big unions in the extractive sector — the USO (Union Sindical Obrera), the oil workers union, and Sintracarbón, the coal workers’ union — are complex and contradictory. USO’s president, for instance, has defended ongoing fracking.

When trade unions say there aren’t as many jobs in renewable energy, they’re right. You put up a few solar panels, you have a few workers that maintain them, but the extraction of solar power doesn’t generate a substantial number of jobs, unlike fossil fuels. So, there is a deep structural attachment between trade unions in this sector and continued extraction of fossil fuels.

However, you also have oppositional currents that support the program of transitioning out of fossil fuels. It’s a very contradictory situation. But it remains the only case in the world where you have a fossil fuel-producing country governed by people who say we want to end fossil fuels and who have an organic relationship to the trade union movement.

This is related to the no less fascinating question of the coal boycott of Israel. The boycott was initiated by Sintracarbón, which asked for a boycott against the genocide in November 2023. That set the ball in motion. But then you have one part of Sintracarbón, namely the part of the union based at the Drummond mines — Drummond is this very nasty Alabama company that kept sending coal from Colombia to Israel after the ban was announced — and this part of Sintracarbón is against the boycott.

It’s very complicated, as trade-union politics tends to be. Some on the Left argue that it’s in the interest of workers to be on board with transitions, but it’s way more complicated than that. There are real ties between unions and fossil fuel industries that are very hard to break, and doing so requires a very high degree of political consciousness.

If you’re interested in union politics and what trade unions can do about fossil fuels, I can’t think of a more important political site than Colombia today, because things are actually happening there that people like us have been talking about for many years.