| OVERSHOOT How the World Surrendered To Climate Breakdown Andreas Malm & Wim Carton London: Verso, October 2024 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-80429-398-0 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-80429-398-9 | 401pp. | HC/GSI | $29.95 | |
This book begins its Preface by asking four1 questions:
It goes on to define a process it calls the overshoot conjuncture: the ongoing acceptance by climate modelers, and by the politicians who negotiate at annual Conferences of the Parties (COPs), that the next limit on global temperature rise — be it 1.5°C, 2°C, or something beyond, will inevitably be exceeded as consumption of fossil fuels grows.
Programmatic overshoot became, as we shall see, hegemonic in mainstream science and policy in the years surrounding the Paris Agreement; but this did not happen because the idea was so strikingly brilliant. Rather it represented an alignment with the power of business as usual. The idea corresponded to real material forces pushing the Earth toward 1.5°C and beyond, and here a degree of naive puzzlement must be registered. Why couldn't it just stop? What was it that drove the world into the heat, even as the consequences were plain to see? How was it that — despite all the reports, summits, pledges, agreements, and, above all, observations and experiences of disasters striking harder and harder—the curves were still pointing in the wrong direction, the emissions still growing, the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure proceeding apace as if nothing was happening? What spell had been cast on this world that just would not be broken? This is the question of why the world surrendered to climate breakdown, of why the warming was not contained at a level that might have been tolerable. But it is not an exercise in brooding historiography. This is a history of the present and near future: an attempt to gauge the power of the forces that destroy the conditions of life on Earth and that must be contended with in the coming years, if any such conditions are to be preserved. The heat is rapidly becoming too much to bear, and precisely for that reason, it is too late to give up this struggle. There is, henceforth, no path to a liveable planet that does not pass through the complete destruction of business as usual. What would that look like? – Pages ix-x |
Consumption of fossil fuels began around 1880 with the burning of coal, primarily in England. Coal powered the heating of homes, the manufacture of steel, cement and other goods, and the transportation of people and goods worldwide for a long time. (Steel and cement still use it, but that will soon change.) Petroleum, first extracted in ???, provided better fuels for transportation, and natural gas (once discarded as a waste product from oil wells) burned cleaner than either of the others. The civilization we enjoy today depends on their widespread use.
But problems stem from burning fossil fuels, and these are becoming worse by the year. First is coal. Burning it emits toxic heavy metals like mercury, radiation, sulfur that causes acid rain, and fine-grained soot that leads to respiratory diseases. Also, the preparation of coal for burning generates large amounts of coal slurry, which is stored in ponds that sometimes collapse. Oil also emits sulfur and particles when burned, and it damages the environment when spilled. Even natural gas releases some pollutants. And they all raise the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere when burned, heating the planet. This is why they must be phased out.
Born in a village in the northern Nile Delta, he earned a PhD in plant pathology and rose to be minister for higher education under Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was the architect of the 1987 Montreal Prorocol that banned substances harmful to the ozone layer. Here is a very sketchy portrait of his career.
In 1972, he was dispatched to Stockholm to represent Egypt at the UN conference on the environment, where the United Nations Environment program (UNEP) was set up; between 1975 and 1992, spanning the period when ecological issues rose to the surface of world diplomacy, it was Tolba who ran it. *
* * Having convened a symposium in the Austrian town of Villach in 1985, Mostafa Tolba stressed the urgency of this particular matter: "we run the risk of being overtaken by events, and of having to deal with a global warming" when "it is already too late to do anything about it or to deal with its impacts". The science had been clear enough since the 1960s; now was the time to impose restrictions on fossil fuels, or else temperatures might rise by "2°C or thereabouts" by the year 2030. Tolba proceeded to form an Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases, a synod of seven scientific experts. *
* * At workshops in Villach and the Italian resort town of Bellagio in 1987, the Group came up with the principal of "targets"—specified limits fro global warming, the transgression of which would be impermissible. Their utility lay in them being clear-cut; once adopted, progress toward meeting them would be "quantifiable and unambiguous". *
* * The US did not like Mostafa Tolba. He was a thorn in their side, an annoying holdover from the age of anti-colonialism, who had alienated allied regimes in Latin America during the negotiations over the Montreal Protocol. The White House would not let him capture climate policy as he had ozone policy. His messages to the world and the deliberations of his Group intimated that something like the Protocol—Limits: reductions: elimination—was in the offing for fossil fuels, a wholly different matter than chlorofluorocarbons. The Group even had the temerity of singling out the disproportionate use of such fuels in the US. too activist for American taste, it was sidestepped and consigned to oblivion—Tolba himself leaving UNEP in 1992—its role transferred to the IPCC, which, initially, did not engage in target practice. Nor was there any mention of a particular limit in the text of the UNFCCC. The objective of that Convention—adopted at the UN conference on the environment in Rio in 1992, the foundational document for all the COPs ever since—was, according to the famous article 2, to stabilise "greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system". A level—but which one? The UNFCCC evaded the question Tolba and his Group had raised. But it would impose itself on climate negotiations, unworkable without a notion of where truly intolerable dangers would set in, and then the original struggle would resume: between a US averse to unequivocal limits and the global South. – Pages 30-32 |
I suspect Mostafa Tolba was disliked for two reasons: he threatened the US fossil-fuel industry, and he empowered indigenous peoples of Latin America, whom their governments oppressed. During that period, as many books document, the US bolstered those governments in the name of stopping World Communism.
Unfortunately, the fossil fuel industries are among the most profitable. The authors note that in 2021, the "Big Five" — BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, Total — reported the biggest profits in their history.2
This means that, a) these companies have lots of resources to use on donations to influence politicians and on disinformation to influence the public; and b) they are "locked in" by the greed of their shareholders for maximum returns (and by their own greed) to keep investing and extracting. This might be called a version of the resource curse. As the authors make very clear, it is the primary reason why the leaders of oil companies, the banks that finance them, the politicians they support, the front groups and "think tanks" they endow, and to a certain extent the climate modelers, all tend to toe their line — which is that fossil fuels are too important to the world to cut back, and that the solutions to the climate crisis lie in carbon capture and in geoengineering.
The authors devote a good deal of their book to describing extreme weather events of recent years, and the enormous costs they entail. With regard to the second set of questions the authors ask in their preface, my view is that the oil company leaders are indeed under a sort of spell. But I'd rather call it a delusion: the flawed belief that there is no other alternative than pursuing ever-greater extraction of petroleum. It is delusional not because the product will run out, or even that it will get too expensive to extract, although both will happen at some point. It is that worsening weather conditions and the unrest they bring will make oil-company operations untenable. But the oil execs and the people they fund seem incapable of this insight — just as they seem incapable of understanding Ben Franklin's dictum "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
In their last chapter, "Chronicle of One More Year of Madness, the authors bring us up to date on events of that year, when their manuscript went to the publisher in October. One significant event was that Colombia elected the first left-wing president in its history: former guerrilla Gustavo Petro (!). He declared an end to oil exploration in his country, then the third largest producer of oil in Latin America, heading Columbia for zero output by 2034. But the oil barons are not worried; they know that Colombia is small potatoes in the petro-rush, and liable to fold given enough pressure.
The dispute is crystallized by the dispute between a climatologist and a CEO:
Was there anything sustainable in these trajectories? "We need to stop burning fossil fuels, said one climatologist at Lord Stern's research institute. "Now. Not some time when we've allowed companies to make all the money they possibly can." But the CEO of ENI was of a different mind. "We cannot shut down everything and rely just on renewables and that is the future, no, it's not like that. We have infrastructure, we have investment that we have to recover and we have the demand that is still there." Meanwhile, in the sphere of consumption, the sale of private jets was on course for another record... – Pages 257-258 |
The founding of the UNFCCC led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a treaty signed in the era when it was assumed that agreements to reduce environmental harm would legally bind the nations that ratified them. Alone among major nations, the US did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Over time, as Kyoto's expiration date neared, the COPs held every autumn would gradually abandon the goal of replacing fossil fuels with renewables. At COP15 in Copenhagen, US President Obama presented a draft text devoid of binding commitments. In a private meeting, he brought the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa on board; the rest of the global South demurred. From that day, the shift into conformity with the precepts of the overshoot conjuncture— adaptation, geoengineering, and carbon capture was gradual but indisputable. COP28, the last one these authors wee able to cover, took place in Abu Dhabi and was led by Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, then planning a vast expansion.4
Al Jaber himself toured the world in amazement that anyone would question his qualifications, made the case for the indispensability of fossil fuels and defended the strategy of ADNOC: "investing in our reserves here, it's investing in our economy." A Guardian journalist found "only one point when he's nonplussed. Does he intend to put Adnoc (sic) out of business? He stops still and turns to stare at me in astonishment. "Why would I want to do that?" Sultan Al Jaber had another preference for how to deal with the crisis. "If we're serious about mitigating climate change and reducing in a practical manner emissions we must scale up carbon capture technologies." Or, as he put it to a journalist from Reuters: "are we after decarbonization, or are we after some ideological idea against oil and gas? We are after emissions, so let's stay focused on that, that is our enemy; let's fight that, let's not fight an industry that has helped shape the world we are all in today." – Pages 253-254 |
This book is long and hard to read. Its authors are keen students of history and political philosophy, including The Communist Manifesto, and they rely on that document in analyzing the economic performance of renewables and fossil fuels. I found those parts hard going. In addition, the authors employ fancy words like "hebdomal" and are not averse to occasional snark. But the book is well written and imparts a wealth of data. I found it very worthwhile. Its endnotes are extensive and it is well indexed. That index, in fact, is the reason I consider it a keeper, after wavering over that assessment. I look forward to the sequel
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.