By Humble_Humboldt. From https://racmag.substack.com/.
NEAR THE CLOSE OF LAST SEPTEMBER, scientists affiliated with the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) took the temperature of the Earth; what they found was, for lack of a more delicate phrase, the stuff of nightmares. In addition to clocking the hottest year on record for the seventh time this century, C3S’ multi-analysis dataset registered a noticeable step change in the pace of anthropogenic climate forcing. Whereas previous months had rarely overshot global heat records by a tenth of a degree Celsius, the September 2023 anomaly tore that precedent (like so many others) to shreds, materializing a value 0.5°C above its hitherto pandemic-era summit. The laws of physics, meanwhile, got busy loading all of this excess energy into regional weather systems like so many bullets into a magazine. Their grisliest campaign by far, a quasi-tropical cyclone in the Mediterranean basin named Storm Daniel, wreaked damage of apocalyptic proportions across the region, with the harm administered tending to increase in reverse proportion to a country’s weight within the global economic pecking order. Thus whereas Daniel’s worst offense along the Greek coast was to slash rural property values, its principal effect on war-beleaguered Libya was to slash bodies: “Corpses still litter the street…The storm has killed whole families.” “The residents of Derna are searching for the bodies of their loved ones by digging with their hands and simple agricultural tools.”
That Daniel captures the vision of the 21st century which large swathes of our political class hold dear goes without saying (one need look no further than the killing fields of Gaza for proof). What’s less well known is that it also samples one which hundreds—indeed, thousands—of scientists around the world have staked our planet’s future on as well. As Andreas Malm and Wim Carton document in Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, the pair’s latest contribution to the climate debate from the Left, the notion of “overshoot” has long dominated schemes to immunize humanity from the ills of fossil power. Its principal thrust might be reprised as follows: by allowing the capitalist world-system to “temporarily” indulge levels of warming we’d otherwise consider unacceptable, we can buy it the time it needs to wean itself off hydrocarbons for good. As for the excess emissions which would perforce accompany such a venture, those can simply be annulled by various forms of biological and mechanical carbon capture, in effect bringing the planet’s temperature back down to levels suitable for civilization (what to do with the billions of tons of carbon which would also enter—and thus acidify—the world’s oceans in the process tends to go left unsaid).
If the elementary premise of overshoot sounds dangerously improbable, then it’s only because the alternative was never considered an option to begin with. As Carton and Malm elaborate, early attempts to place a limit on the global carbon budget were endlessly wracked by one (and mostly one) question: will it endanger profits? Unsurprisingly, this eminently class-inflected question soon took on a conspicuous national dimension, with poor, climate-vulnerable countries leading the charge for limited warming against rich, historically fossil-dependent ones. It was thanks to the former’s tenacity that the latter ended up agreeing to impose both a hard ceiling (2°C above pre-industrial levels) and—critically—a soft ceiling (1.5°C) on global temperature rise at the 2015 Paris Accords. This was no small feat. As Carton and Malm wistfully recount, the battle for 1.5°C was very much an all-hands-on-deck endeavor:
But the South had not lost all punching power. On the road to Paris, the small island states assembled a front of more than 100 countries to demand 1.5°C as the absolute maximum. The climate movement, including the more established NGOs that frequented the corridors of the COPs, swung behind it. Whereas 2°C was a target for the rich, ‘1.5°C to stay alive’ was the cry of the poor.
Yet as far as victories go, this one was pyrrhic to the extreme. For although the (briefly) united Third World had been able to score a triumph on the plane of abstract targets, the minutiae of how to actually meet this target in practice were—if anything—still dictated by the same parameters which had legitimized its 2°C predecessor. Enter the logic of the IAM. Short for “Integrated Assessment Model,” this class of software aims to precisely quantify the relationship between ecosystem change and social-system change. More specifically, by twisting various dials mapping each variable to the other, the interested modeler can obtain a (supposedly) impartial rendering of how much social change would be required to affect a determinate amount of natural change, and vice versa.1 Transposed to climate, IAMs could thus be deployed by environmental czars in the First World to “stress test” the global economy for X, Y, or Z °C of warming: how much would the ruling class have to sacrifice in order for any of these targets to be met? What would the respective prices be of missing them? And—most basically and yet most decisively—how exactly did the latter stack up against the former for each one?
In the event, nigh every IAM scenario for 1.5°C ended up answering the final question in the red; the carbon budget was simply no match for its pecuniary cost. The reasons for this were many (not the least of which included IAMs’ hysterical underestimation of the actual economic fallout of climate change), but what mattered in the end was the more or less univocal determination that 1.5°C—though noble in spirit—was simply too expensive to make happen. Yet the climate science mainstream didn’t blench. Rather than forfeit the target in its entirety, they hatched multitudinous schemes to reanimate its corpse after the fact: in a word, overshoot. The latter’s fingerprint soon became evident virtually everywhere in the climate policy zeitgeist. Its most devastating casualty to date was the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, some 98% of whose 578 scenarios for “achieving” 1.5°C ended up breaching it en route. This global error in turn redounded to the plane of the national, with government after government promising to honor its emissions pledge by trimming the excess at some future date: “net zero” was thus born, and it had been midwifed by IAMs.
IAMs, it goes without saying, are far from value-neutral artifacts. No less machines than the power looms of Industrial Revolution fame, their operation is loaded with historical specificity. As such, their zealous refusal to countenance a world beyond fossil capital is best located in that most famous of hidden abodes: production. To this end, Carton and Malm conduct a sweeping audit of global capitalism’s (likely irrevocable) reliance on the extraction-cum-combustion of fossil fuels.2 Their results make for sober reading. For one thing, as of 2021 the investors and states of the world had plowed an eye-watering $5 trillion into oil, gas, and coal production: a network of flows which—if considered its own economy—would rank as the 20th largest on Earth. These flows in turn acted as their own geologic force, depositing fixed capital along every stage of the hydrocarbon value chain. To make sense of this awesome exercise of geoeconomic power, Carton and Malm helpfully revive an obscure coinage from volume 3 of Marx’s Capital:
And those discoveries [of new oil and gas reserves] presuppose…the sinking of fixed capital into the Earth. Something loosely similar happens in agriculture, when a farmer brings into cultivation fields of low fertility by, for example, using ‘certain liquid fertilizers’ and ‘special ploughs’ to master heavy, clayey soil, or building drainage ditches, or leveling hills. Marx here speaks of ‘capital fixed in the earth’ and comes up with the Gallicism ‘la terre-capital.’...Unless we want to coin a new term…this one appears the most apt for hydrocarbon reserves. To distinguish it from agriculture and other mining, we might want to speak of ‘fossil terre-capital.’ Unlike in farming, in a narrow but significant distinction, fossil terre-capital would here mean capital fixed into the Earth in the process of making the desired subterranean land appear as such [emphasis original].
Beginning with exploration (drones, wells, drillships), graduating to production (platforms, mines, refineries), and eventuating in distribution (terminals, pipelines, gas stations), the circuit of fossil capital has thus sedimented itself in more ways than one. What’s more, the accumulation of fossil terre-capital tends to be matched by growth in its fictitious counterpart. Carton and Malm speak here of the former’s integration with the “common capital of the class”: as hydrocarbons become ever more requisite to the valorization process, their import to global financial markets rises pro-rata (if not, indeed, even faster). The sequence begins humbly enough: a loan extended to a budding oil developer, a share derived from the latter’s profits. These accords in turn form the basis for new ones—perhaps to renew a credit card, secure a home, weather the dry season—thus crystallizing a kind of black gold standard upon which capitalist production becomes irrevocably dependent. One gets a sense for the sheer weight of this dependency in the counterfactual:
For world capitalism as a whole…the sum total of the losses [from decarbonization] would be anybody’s guess. ‘When it comes to the fossil fuel system, the write-downs would be four or five times bigger than the size of the financial crisis’ of 2008, in the educated guess of Campanale—but where would such self-amplifying mega-write-downs come to a stop? Efforts to prevent the feedback loops of a hothouse planet might send such loops into the capitalist world economy instead. As one asset manager from London put it in 2023, there could be little doubt that ‘there are large, large balance sheets, which in a net-zero world will be entirely useless’...‘one of the biggest ever shifts [$900 billion] in the allocation of capital,’ in the estimation of Financial Times.
Small wonder, then, that IAMs had diagnosed the retirement of fossil fuels so negatively for the global economy (even if they’d radically misfired in their estimation of the costs of climate change). Bar a slaughter of values without precedent in capitalist history, no force on Earth could put the hydrocarbon genie back in his preindustrial bottle. The consequences for 1.5°C were fatal. As one EU-sponsored report grimly confessed, “Today, a gradual scenario would imply that the goals of the Paris Agreement will not be reached. Scenarios that seek to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement of 1.5°C imply immediate and ubiquitous measures and are therefore seen as rapid and disruptive to the fossil fuel sectors” [emphasis added].
It is here that the imperative to overshoot 1.5°C rears its ugly head. But overshoot by how much? The answer to this question is complicated by the fact that, over the past few decades, much of the growth (if not the original base) in demand for fossil fuels has been snatched by renewable power sources, namely solar and wind. It is thanks to the latter two that forecasts of global temperature rise by 2100 have fallen appreciably over time: from the unthinkably nightmarish 4°C a decade ago to the (slightly less noxious) 3°C now. Is it possible to narrow the gap still further? Likely not. As Carton and Malm eloquently explain, renewables suffer from a central defect which—though actually quite beneficial for their end-users—renders them a losing bet for their producers:
For the flow [i.e. any power source based on the immobilization of mobile energy] appears without labour. It would be as impossible and redundant to mobilise labour for making the sun shine or the wind blow as for making humans exercise their lungs to breathe: these things come naturally, by themselves. Like mushrooms in the forest, here the fuel is ripe for picking prior to and in proud disregard of any process of production. ‘Value is labour,’ Marx spells out; ‘value itself is defined as social labour,’ Adorno reaffirms. It follows that the flow cannot have value [emphasis original].
That neither the sun’s rays nor the motion of air parcels can command the labor-power which is presently occupied by oil, gas, and coal production has a few notable consequences. First of all, there is simply no revenue to be mined from the flow in itself the way one might from a discrete quantum of hydrocarbons. Sure, the former might yield gains from the processes of manufacture and installation, but once these have been finalized, its capture can never be mechanized, its available supply never constrained in the manner of the latter; this renders it incapable of generating either surplus value or rents, respectively. Secondly, and for the precise reason that they require no additional human or extra-human inputs, renewables are now the cheapest power source available in most of the world. Indeed, so impressive can their plenitude be that they’ve not infrequently brought electricity prices come crashing down in many of the grids they conquer:
This phenomenon is known in the technical literature as the ‘revenue decline’ or—a synonym—‘value decline’ for wind and solar. It correlates perfectly with penetration levels; empirical observations from some of the most highly developed markets suggest that the decline sets in early, particularly for solar, and then accelerates once the two sources, together or alone, generate one quarter to one third of the electricity. That is when the overabundance really starts depressing prices and, consequently, revenues. After that point, both tumble ‘until they reach a floor (either close to zero or mildly negative)’ [emphasis mine].
To some extent, of course, the value decline can be temporarily arrested by certain policy interventions, e.g. targeted subsidies, green tariffs, consumer stimulus. And indeed, not a few bourgeois states have already reported considerable success with them (one need only recall the historically unrivaled time it took for China to finally bend its emissions curve). Nonetheless, the question remains: will the monetizability of the flow attain such heights as to oust fossil fuels? If history is any indication, the answer is a probable ‘no’: “Between 2016 and 2022, fossil fuel companies raised 3.6 trillion US dollars in various types of credits on global debt markets. Producers of renewable energy attracted 160 billion.” Returning to 1.5°C specifically, it’s estimated that global renewables capacity will have to grow from 3.9 terawatts (TW) to 11.2 TW within the next five years in order for that level of warming to be observed. Given the (relatively) anemic volumes of capital which the sector has absorbed thus far, however, there are few reasons to believe a sudden upsurge of investor sentiment is forthcoming. To the contrary, one recent projection claims that the 11.2 TW benchmark, if anything, is going to be undershot, with current policies set to leave behind a 3.8 TW gap by decade’s end. This gap is itself sure to grow after Saudi delegates axed an old commitment to triple global renewables capacity at this year’s COP climate summit, in effect robbing the wind from the sails of whatever progress had been made up until then. Worse still, the U.S. government’s unhinged economic warfare against China (the global renewables power par excellence) is creating new bottlenecks where none had previously existed. Thus in addition to constraining the global supply of affordable EVs, Washington’s aggression recently prompted Beijing to declare an indefinite ban on the export of various rare-earth minerals, including such key elements to the green transition as gallium, antinomy, and germanium.
If neither markets nor the states tasked with piloting them can save the planet from catching aflame, then that leaves only one alternative: the masses. Unfortunately, the world neocolonial modernity made has not been terribly kind to them of late. Indeed, whether by killing them, displacing them, and/or impoverishing them at ballooning rates, it has done much to render the prospect of a world worth living—let alone one beyond fossil capital—a thing of fancy. This basic design (what the late Mike Davis once called “the late-capitalist triage of humanity”) becomes manifest in one simple act of accounting: as of 2021, the Earth’s preeminent emitters of carbon had spent anywhere from 3-15x as much of their budgets on militarizing their borders as they had on climate change mitigation and adaptation. Facts on the ground followed suit. Thus across the Maghreb, Black refugees fleeing crises borne partly of rising temperatures have been sent (with EU sponsorship) on forced treks throughout the Sahara, where it’s hoped that they’ll face either certain death or abduction by armed marauders who will visit upon them sexual violence, torture, enslavement, and/or (once again) death. This hideous feedback was more recently mirrored by the example of Gaza, noted earlier. As Israeli forces laid the strip to ruins—their carnage enabled, critically, by the CO2 equivalent of 150,000 tons of coal during the first two months alone—Houthi rebels commenced a blockade of the Red Sea in a bid to bring the killings to a close. In response, the world’s largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels (otherwise known as the U.S. military) launched an operation to restore the status quo ante, having dropped 100 bombs on northwestern Yemen within the first day alone. Though the American-led (and, for the most part, exclusively American-composed) campaign failed to accomplish its stated objective, it did serve as a grotesquely ideal proper noun for the essence of fossil capitalism: carbon burnt to kill the poor so that more carbon could be burnt to kill yet more of the poor. Needless to say, a slaughter of one of these two is sure to come long before that of the other.
1 - The inverse pairing is best conceived as follows: “how much social change would be affected by a determinate amount of natural change?”
2 - Two moments of the same fundamental process.
🔻 2025 Humble_Humboldt. All rights waived for the third world. No rights granted to the imperial core or its collaborators.