The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late

A scathing critique of proposals to geoengineer our way out of climate disaster, by the bestselling authors of Overshoot

The world is crossing the 1.5 C global warming limit, perhaps exceeding 2 C soon after. What is to be done when these boundaries, set by the Paris Agreement, have been passed? In the overshoot era, schemes proliferate for muscular adaptation or for new technologies to turn the heat down at a later date by re­moving CO2 from the air or blocking sunlight. Such technologies are by no means safe; they come with immense risks and provide an excuse for those who would prefer to avoid limiting emissions in the present. But do they also hold out some potential? Can the catastrophe be reversed, masked or simply adapted to once it is a fact? Or will any such round­about measures simply make things worse?

The Long Heat maps the new front lines in the struggle for a liveable planet and insists on the climate revolution long overdue. In the end, no technology can absolve us of responsibility for our planet and each other.

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, such as, 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.