Overshoot, meet undershoot

To start with two news snippets. First, more developments in the world of manufactured food, as detailed here and in following comments by the attentive Steve L. I aim to write an update on this topic later in the year covering what’s emerged since my 2023 book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future – some interesting points of detail, but in general pretty much the story arc you’d expect from a technology over-hyped by journalists committed to easy techno-fixes rather than hard social change.

Second, the small farm future blog has just gone multilingual, with a Portuguese translation of this blog post of mine from back in 2015.

As it happens, both these snippets are somewhat relevant to the present post, which involves some thoughts on Andreas Malm and Wim Carton’s recent book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Verso, 2024). And then I will probably be silent again for a couple of weeks while I do the final edits on my book.

So, commenters here have been discussing the idea of ecological overshoot recently while I’ve been away. Thanks for that – another topic for a forthcoming post. But Malm and Carton mean something different by ‘overshoot’, namely the idea within international climate negotiation and analysis that it’s okay for global average temperatures to overshoot the 1.5^oC or 2^oC limits for global warming over preindustrial levels set by the 2015 Paris Agreement in the short term. The idea being that in the longer term, with greater wealth and technical know-how in the future, we’ll get this wild horse back under control.

The first half of Overshoot is a deep dive into the stupidity of this idea, and more specifically into the flaws of what Malm and Carton call the ‘bourgeois economics’ underlying it (I’ll come back to that phrase). I’m going to skip over that part of their book and just say that I found it convincing, and eye-opening. The ‘let’s pay later’ approach is a staple of contemporary economic thought that’s spectacularly inappropriate for dealing with climate change. Before reading Overshoot I had a rough general familiarity with the way that international climate negotiating worked and how unequal it is to the task before us, but the book brings home in impressive detail the full insanity of it all – a bit like a moribund medieval court obsessed with the minutiae of ...