Malm, A. & W. Carton. 2025. Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Change. Verso, London. 490p.
Zeihan, P. 2025. The End of the World is just the Beginning. Harper Collins. 498+xip
As climate deteriorations pile up, along with rapidly increasing ineptness on the part of most global political leaders, the taboos against discussing our probable future without a frosting of hopium, are starting to disappear. However, ticking off a list of the latest climate shocks and calling out, again, all the failures to take effective actions itself can quickly become its own brand of literary cliché. Two new additions to the rapidly growing genre of “End of the World Studies” have recently crossed my internet feed, and appeared to offer, if not actual solutions, very different views of the same problem.
Andreas Malm is best known for his book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, where he emphatically broke with the prevailing “we can have radical transformation without making any basic changes” dogma of mainstream environmentalism. He has written a number of books about the increasingly harsh realities of the changing climate, and has proposed the concept of “Eco-Leninism” as a rational option in an increasingly irrational political ecosystem. His co-author Wim Carton is a lecturer at Lund University on sustainability issues.
Overshoot, the title of Malm and Carton’s work, is not your grandfather’s overshoot: the term used by William Catton to describe ecological overshoot in his seminal book of that name. Instead Malm and Carton reveal a new and devious application of the term by the organizations supposedly fighting climate change. There have been 31 international climate conferences (ICCPs) charged with setting up agreements to limit greenhouse gases. The story has been told many times of how the conferences have been co-opted by the giant fossil fuel corporations and their governmental hangers-on. The initial half of the historical run of the ICCPs were a series of kabuki dramas with the overdeveloped industrial powers making empty promises, and the Global South complaining about the lack of action. These complaints have become more strident as climate damage accumulates in the Global South, and the Polluting North continues to evade and equivocate. Around 2015, it became clear that the 1.5C firewall for permissible temperature rise was going to be breached; some new directions were needed, and in typical fashion, the Polluting North came up with a deceptive solution. Computer models were brought in. Algorithms were programed. Assumptions were invoked. Experts decided that modeling the effects of climate heating would be more “realistic” if everyone assumed that workable carbon capture technology (BECCS, for example) would be a reality within 5 years 10 years soon. Then it wouldn’t matter that much if temperatures shot up above 1.5°C, or 2.5°C, or maybe 3°C for a little while, we’d just pull it back down later. Meanwhile it’s Overshoot, baby. Business as usual.
Of course the question is not so much why the major economic interests would try to avoid responsibility for the climate change they caused; it is why so many climate scientists and major environmental organization are turning a blind eye, if not actually collaborating in the fraud. Malm and Carton believe that it is the Terror of “Stranded Assets” that is driving both the bad and the well intentioned actors into a modern “conspiracy of dunces”. The cumulative investment in the global economic superstructure is immense, and, like everything else in today’s economy, highly leveraged. Stranded assets include not only existing and producing refineries, factories, mines, oil platforms, but also massive amounts of capital that have been spent to identify resources that are owned but not yet exploited. Climate mitigation policies threaten not only future profits but the economic survival of a huge part of the global economy. It’s not that surprising the corporations prefer to fight to the bitter end of the inhabitable world, rather than suffer their own possible demise.
Overshoot is a very useful review of our “Jackpot” dilemma (William Gibson’s visualization of the Polycrisis in his novel The Peripheral) and how we got here. Many other writers have reported on the meaningless flood of PMCspeak coming from the UNCCC and IPCC meetings, but Malm and Carton take the time to unpick the tangled web of questionable or outright false assumptions, rationales, and dodgy institutional relationships that keep any practical policies or mandates off the table. They make an impressive case that we’ve blown past the first “point of no return” (1.5°C) and will simply construct additional “points of no return” and find excuses to blow past them as well. This leaves a “Gibsonian Jackpot” as probably our least worst scenario for the future.
Malm and Carton take a hard-line Marxist point of view in their analysis, and while this does not undermine their basic position, it makes their prose unnecessarily dense and incomprehensible for anyone not from a university Marxist Studies background, or a Jacobin groupie. Abstruse discussions of what Marx meant in such-and-such letter to Engels in the late 1800’s, or that dispute between Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg in the 1900’s may be fascinating to historical cognoscenti but they are not required background knowledge for understanding overshoot (in either the Cattonian or Malm-Cartonian senses), or to the search for alternatives.
It strikes me that the stranded assets that loom so large in Malm’s and Carton’s analysis are really as much an excuse as a rationale. Throughout the book the authors seem to give short shrift to the huge role played by rent seeking, debt pyramiding, and asset inflation that is now the main driver of the financialized Neoliberal economy. The main text of Overshoot mentions debt only five times, two of those referencing events in the past or the other side of the world. The assumption that the investors in fossil fuels and their derivatives must somehow be compensated is akin the “bondholders have to be paid” trope that aggravated the 2008 housing crisis and the ongoing Global South debt crises. However, “debts that can’t be repaid, won’t be repaid” (Michael Hudson). Huge as they may be, the stranded assets are not a physical or biological force, but a series of bad decisions by parasitic rent seekers who now hope to coerce states to act as private banker collection goons.
Malm and Carton evidently have few hopes that humanity will avoid an apocalyptic future. When they get to the inevitable “what is to be done?” point, the admit that they got nuttin’: “the two of us have no recipes”. They include de-growth in what they consider (without any justification given) failed possible alternatives. As something of a consolation prize they bring up a scenario of “Yasuní Victorious”: former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s failed “Leave it in the ground” policy for the oil of the Tiputini National Park. However, this overhyped initiative boiled down to 12 platforms and 230 wells being built in the park anyway. In 2023 a national referendum passed requiring termination of all petroleum exploitation in the park and as of a year ago a few areas have indeed been closed down. So there’s that.
Like Overshoot, Zeihan’s The End of the World is just the Beginning acknowledges we’ve gone past the point of no return, but for reasons entirely different from those presented in Overshoot. Zeihan gives us a “Just So Story” chronicle of human civilization from the Indus Valley to the Indispensable Nation, a trajectory that reached a Panglossian Utopia just after the turn of this century, and then got forever frittered away. The story is told in engaging prose that gives due emphasis to the accidents of geography and climate that assisted the rise of humanity. To be fair, Zeihan does not ignore or suppress the various wars, genocides, and enslavements that litter the historical roadside. However, he conflates arithmetic means and universals: if average food supply or health is rising, that must imply that everyone is healthier and better fed—at one point even claiming that the present capitalist Nirvana has “not only filled 8 billion bellies, it has done so with the odd out-of-season avocado.” (p. 469 of the Kindle edition). This will be news to the ~20% of those 8 billion now facing food insecurity.
But what ended the glorious “Order”, as Zeihan, terms it (a.k.a. the Washington Consensus)? His focus is on two things: declining birth rates, and the end of money sloshing around it the capitalist economy. Again to be fair, Zeihan introduces a few nuances into this otherwise typical growth-addict dogma. He attributes the falling birth rates to the end of the Baby Boom and economic squeezes, without parroting the usual pronatalist anti-women claptrap. He also attributes the global economic downturn chaos in supply chains and to the increasing stresses in global finance due to a shortage of consumers. However, some other economists, such as Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff, have reached an entirely different diagnosis:
“The U.S. market itself is shrinking because the United States has reached the end of its financial expansion that’s occurred since 1945. It’s the end of an 80-year expansion that’s indebted the country more and more and more to the point that the wage earners, the 50% or 90% of the population, cannot afford to increase their consumption anymore.” Michael Hudson
But not to worry: by 2040 the demographic downturn will reverse and lots of newly minted Millennial consumers will be pumping their earnings into a regenerated Wall Street, and maybe the City of London. Never mind that Hudson and increasing numbers of other economists have reached the opposite conclusion, that a global financial downturn comes from a financialized economy sucking away more and more of itself into parasitic rent-seeking, and ultimately the endless economic growth fantasy becoming the “strength through exhaustion” reality.
Zeihan has an even bigger surprise for us. The world as we know it will indeed end, in ways not entirely different from the grim scenarios in Overshoot, but we in the U.S. will get off easy. Zeihan’s exceptionalist proclivities have to do a lot of heavy lifting here: global heating is real but somehow only has bad effects on other people. Water overuse is a problem when Russia drains the Aral Sea but somehow draining the Colorado River and the Ogallala Aquifer by the US is not mentioned. The old canard that global heating will boost US agricultural productivity is trotted out, with no mention that it will boost pest activity, or shift the ideal growing area of wheat and corn from the rich, deep soils of the Midwest north to the much poorer region of Canadian pine forests and boreal bogs. Sea level rise and climate migration (and the probable drowning of most major coastal U.S. cities) are not mentioned anywhere in End of the World.
The book ends with some scenarios of what the future will be like. Many of these are short timeline explorations of the social chaos that many climate activists have warned us is coming. The United States does have a few undoubted advantages, notably big oceans separating us from other continents, and most of our landmass is in a solidly temperate climate belt. The certainly puts us in a better position that Bangladesh, or even most of Europe. However, whether this will be enough to shield us from the consequences of a Strength-Through-Exhaustion economy and a foreign policy that’s both thuggish and inept, is not very likely.
Both books are worth reading, despite the debatability of the authors’ conclusions. Both are rich in detail not often found in standard climate crisis literature. Overshoot gives the reader a clearer understanding of high level climate chicanery, which in turn explains the lack of progress in stopping humanity’s ride into Jackpot World. End of the World will make an interesting literary companion for students of collapse, since they will soon be able compare Zeihan’s detailed near-future scenarios with events-on-the-ground unfolding in real time.
But other than feeling helpless about the inevitable, do these books offer anything that could even slightly deflect from the grim current trajectory? Malm and Carton, as stated, end their Overshoot with a limp gesture, but at least it’s a gesture in the right direction: overthrow of the current dead-end economic system. As already noted, they admit to no real ideas for how to do that, despite their deep dive into Marxist and Neo-Marxist hagiography. So maybe the way forward is to give Marx and his acolytes a bit of a rest and spend some time studying Michael Hudson, Richard Wolff, and other modern critics of financialization and neoliberal rent-seeking. Hudsonian economics doesn’t cancel out Marx, but its focus on current excesses and outrages of Central Bank finance, medical insurance, real estate, and higher education (the FIRE sector) would be much more relevant, and more easily understood by ordinary citizens not tuned into the climate debate but trying to find some way through their clouded future. The FIRE sector is not the only thing driving the coming Apocalypse, but there is no aspect of the Apocalypse that the FIRE sector does not aggravate. However, when the oligarchy dreams up myriad ways of inserting their rent-seeking schemes into our lives, it gives us myriad openings to frustrate and stymie their plans, and increase the fragility of the Neoliberal Order. It is here to be found the best chance to bring on the meltdown and panic that Overshoot claims is our only hope.
[Photo: Jackpot World (screen shot from The Peripheral. Amazon Prime)]