MOTHER'S DAY SPECIALS! SHOW ME MORE

Close Notification

Your cart does not contain any items

Overshoot

How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown

Andreas Malm Wim Carton

$46.95

Paperback

Forthcoming
Pre-Order now

QTY:

English
Verso Books
14 October 2025
The world is on the cusp of one and a half degrees of warming - just the rise it has committed itself to avoiding. Heat at such levels would be intolerable. Even before one and a half, seasons of climate disaster have struck with ever more devastating force, and yet a notion has taken hold that the cause is now lost: the intolerable has become unavoidable. The limit will be overshot - perhaps two degrees as well - and the best we can do is cool down the Earth at some later point, towards the end of the century, by means of technologies not yet proven.

How did this happen? How could the idea of overshoot gain such traction? What forces are driving us into a climate that people - particularly poor people in the global South - won't be able to cope with? In Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton present a history of the present phase of the crisis, likely to extend decades into the future, as the fossil fuel industry swims in the largest profits ever made. Money continues to flow into the construction of pipelines, platforms, terminals, mines - assets that will have to be destroyed for the planet to remain liveable. Too much heat has become officially acceptable because such revolutionary destruction is not. But should the rest of us abide by that priority?

Unflinchingly critical of business-as-usual and the calls for surrender to it, sweeping in scope, stirring and sobering, Overshoot lays out the stakes for the climate struggle in the years ahead.
By:   ,
Imprint:   Verso Books
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 198mm,  Width: 129mm, 
Weight:   500g
ISBN:   9781804299906
ISBN 10:   1804299901
Pages:   416
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming

Wim Carton is Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at Lund University, Sweden. He's the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics. His work has appeared in top journals such as Nature Climate Change, WIRES Climate Change and Antipode. Andreas Malm is Associate Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of several acclaimed books, most recently, with the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. His book How to Blow Up a Pipeline is an international bestseller and has been turned into a feature film.

Reviews for Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown

The world has surrendered to climate breakdown. But that failure does not require us to continue surrendering to the power of fossil capital. In this brilliant and urgent analysis, Malm and Carton show how the failure came about, explore moments when it might have been resisted, explode the myth of ""overshoot"" that sustains business-as-usual, and lay out the challenge that a revolutionary climate politics must take on. -- Timothy Mitchell, author of <i>Carbon Democracy</i> Malm and Carton expose how the harsh reality of the financial and physical infrastructures of fossil fuels, in partnership with unrealistic models reliant on 'negative' emissions, continue to trap us on the highway to hellish warming. -- Julia Steinberger, Professor of Societal Challenges of Climate Change at the University of Lausanne A brilliant and impassioned book, which explains why greenhouse gas reduction targets are repeatedly missed-and why they will never be met until the demon of fossil capital is laid to rest. -- Nancy Fraser, author of <i>Cannibal Capitalism</i> The world we called unliveable and unforgivable just five years ago is now an imminent reality. There is no better map of that world, which we now must navigate, or our journey to it, through acquiescence and normalization, or the brutal path forward, intolerable but necessary, than this book. Please read it. -- David Wallace-Wells, author of <i>The Uninhabitable Earth</i> 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... 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. * Publishers Weekly, starred review * As the crisis careens out of control, Carton and Malm have done the world a great service. Their book is required reading to understand how the people who are supposed to be planning for a better future are failing us and failing the planet. -- Christopher Ketcham * The Fern * A relentless history of climate collapse. Compiling all the dates and names future humans might seek out to understand how their lives were forfeited by past generations, Malm and Carton detail a history of capital, land, and discourse, naming the profiteers and alarmists along the way. It's a history so contemporary to read it written in past tense feels like seeing our own coffins. -- Autumn Wright * Unwinnable *


See Also