{"id":3511565,"date":"2025-04-02T11:05:46","date_gmt":"2025-04-02T11:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3511565"},"modified":"2025-04-02T11:05:46","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T11:05:46","slug":"overshoot-meet-undershoot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2025-04-02\/overshoot-meet-undershoot\/","title":{"rendered":"Overshoot, meet undershoot"},"content":{"rendered":"

To start with two news snippets. First, more developments in the world of manufactured food, as detailed\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and in following comments by the attentive Steve L. I aim to write an update on this topic later in the year covering what\u2019s emerged since my 2023 book\u00a0Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future\u00a0<\/em>\u2013 some interesting points of detail, but in general pretty much the story arc you\u2019d expect from a technology over-hyped by journalists committed to easy techno-fixes rather than hard social change.<\/p>\n

Second, the small farm future blog has just gone multilingual, with a\u00a0Portuguese translation<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0this<\/a>\u00a0blog post of mine from back in 2015.<\/p>\n

As it happens, both these snippets are somewhat relevant to the present post, which involves some thoughts on Andreas Malm and Wim Carton\u2019s recent book\u00a0Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown\u00a0<\/em>(Verso, 2024). And then I will probably be silent again for a couple of weeks while I do the final edits on my book.<\/p>\n

So, commenters here have been discussing the idea of ecological overshoot recently while I\u2019ve been away. Thanks for that \u2013 another topic for a forthcoming post. But Malm and Carton mean something different by \u2018overshoot\u2019, namely the idea within international climate negotiation and analysis that it\u2019s okay for global average temperatures to overshoot the 1.5o<\/sup>C or 2o<\/sup>C 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\u2019ll get this wild horse back under control.<\/p>\n

The first half of\u00a0Overshoot<\/em>\u00a0is a deep dive into the stupidity of this idea, and more specifically into the flaws of what Malm and Carton call the \u2018bourgeois economics\u2019 underlying it (I\u2019ll come back to that phrase). I\u2019m going to skip over that part of their book and just say that I found it convincing, and eye-opening. The \u2018let\u2019s pay later\u2019 approach is a staple of contemporary economic thought that\u2019s spectacularly inappropriate for dealing with climate change. Before reading\u00a0Overshoot<\/em>\u00a0I 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 \u2013 a bit like a moribund medieval court obsessed with the minutiae of its obscure rituals and decorum, while the world outside the castle walls disintegrates.<\/p>\n

Malm and Carton point up a tricky problem though. An awful lot of the capital circulating in the present global economy is tied directly or indirectly to fossil fuels, so if we \u2018leave it in the ground\u2019 or strand fossil assets, we basically tank the economy as we know it. Better than tanking the climate though, right? Yes, of course. But it does suggest that hand-wavy notions about a quick and economically smooth transition to low-carbon energy \u2013 no problem, nothing to see here, business as usual \u2013 are problematic in directly economic terms, quite apart from any technological or engineering issues.<\/p>\n

Yet it\u2019s around those technological and engineering issues, and their social correlates, where I found that Malm and Carton\u2019s book started to get quite weird. In the lengthy Chapter 6, entitled \u2018We are going to be driven by value\u2019, they make a play for the idea that a quick transition to a fully renewable global energy system is readily possible. Nothing too unusual about that \u2013 many people embrace that notion. But the weakness and strangeness of some of the book\u2019s arguments on this front made me wonder what was going on, especially because the authors are obviously otherwise smart and well-informed.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to go too far into the renewables \u2018transition\u2019 issue, though I\u2019ll be saying a little more about it in yet another forthcoming post. But Malm and Carton go to town on the idea that energy from the sun and the wind is free, and so can\u2019t be turned into a profit stream, and so in turn is not selected over fossil energy in a profit-based capitalist system. At times, their argument waxes mystical: \u201cFossil fuels impose a zero-sum game on the land. The strange commodity exacts zones and corridors exclusively for itself. In the helio-aeolian flow, the land rather unfolds its leaves like a sunflower\u201d (pp.179-80).<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got no problem with mysticism as such. In fact, I think we could do with more of it. But not really in the sphere of energy economics. There are various non-mystical reasons why fossil fuels remain more profitable than renewables. Many of these are laid out in detail in Brett Christophers\u2019 book\u00a0The Price Is Wrong<\/em>, which Malm and Carton refer to but don\u2019t really engage with intellectually. These reasons encompass things like merit price and merchant risk in wholesale electricity markets, the difficulties of hedging renewable energy prices, the price of land, the price of electricity grids, the price of minerals, and the price of economic growth, the relative price of oil and gas as chemical feedstocks compared to power-to-X options, the economic rent associated with monopoly oil and gas supply, and a bunch of other things.<\/p>\n

Not all these things are necessarily set in stone for all time in such a way that it\u2019s inconceivable renewables will ever compete with fossil fuels. But you\u2019d expect an in-depth academic treatment of climate and energy futures to engage with them properly, rather than unfurling strange arguments about free energy and sunflowers. When they do pick up on such issues, usually as brief asides or in footnotes, Malm and Carton tend to the airily dismissive, or to superficial talking points. An example is the bizarre argument that because renewable electricity is used as a source of power on drilling rigs, this somehow undermines the case for the fossil energy that\u2019s extracted.<\/p>\n

My point is not, of course, to justify fossil energy. It\u2019s simply to dispute the notion we could easily transition from fossils to renewables if it wasn\u2019t for those dang capitalists who insist on \u2018being driven by value\u2019.<\/p>\n

So, what\u2019s this strange turn in Malm and Carton\u2019s argument about? It seems to me it\u2019s about politics \u2013 more specifically, about some politics they don\u2019t want to look at \u2026 and also some politics they look at a bit too much.<\/p>\n

Reading a little between the lines, Malm and Carton basically divide contemporary political positions into four categories. First, ecomodernism \u2013 which, rightly I think, they view as a tall tale of nuclear power, radical decoupling of humanity from earth systems and overly technological solutionism. Second, left-wing politics and specifically Marxism, to which their colours are firmly nailed (non-Marxist forms of leftism don\u2019t get much of a look-in in the book). Third, a suite of positions they variously call conservative, reactionary or business-as-usual, and which they\u2019re none too keen on. Fourth and finally, what they call \u2018anarcho-primitivism\u2019. They say little about what this means to them \u2013 their lengthiest remarks coming, I think, on page 188 where they say \u201cthe two principal submissions from the anarcho-primitivist camp\u201d are (1) that a transition from fossils to renewables would be ethically bad and (2) that it would be more desirable to have \u201cgeneralised puritanism\/privation or 7 billion people \u2018or so\u2019 removed from the planet\u201d.<\/p>\n

Trying to place myself within their scheme \u2026 well, I\u2019m\u00a0not an ecomodernist<\/a>, and while I lean left on a lot of issues, I can\u2019t really identify straightforwardly as a socialist, still less a Marxist. Likewise with conservative, reactionary or business-as-usual politics. So I guess I must be an anarcho-primitivist. I\u2019m pretty sure that\u2019s where Malm and Carton would pigeonhole my kind of thinking.<\/p>\n

However, my kind of thinking isn\u2019t really anarchist, or primitivist \u2013 not by their rubrics anyway. I don\u2019t think using renewables instead of fossils is ethically bad, I don\u2019t favour \u2018generalised puritanism\/privation\u2019 and I certainly don\u2019t want 7 billion people \u2018or so\u2019 to be removed from the planet.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not my aim in this post to lay out in detail my own positions. In a nutshell, I\u2019d say I draw principally from civic republicanism, agrarian populism and distributism, with a side of Luddism (albeit not the caricatured \u2018anti-technology\u2019 version) \u2013 neither left nor right in any simple sense, and not anarchist or primitivist either. But certainly a belief that we (by which I mostly mean we richer people in the richer countries) need to consume less stuff and less energy, to rethink what it means to live within limits (which,\u00a0please<\/em>, is\u00a0not a \u2018Malthusian\u2019 position<\/a>\u00a0nor about privation and puritanism) and to rethink what it means to live as protagonists within a surrounding renewable ecology.<\/p>\n

These are the kind of issues that I believe demand our attention. Instead \u2018anarcho-primitivism\u2019 basically serves Malm and Carton as a dismissive catchall category for any position that doesn\u2019t embrace a high-energy status quo, justified by neo-Malthusian arguments about mass death in the absence of techno-fixes.<\/p>\n

Just as Malm and Carton tend to lump everyone who doesn\u2019t embrace high-energy techno-fixes into the anarcho-primitivist slot, so I must confess to having an increasingly hard time these days distinguishing between ecomodernism, most forms of leftism and most forms of \u2018reactionary\u2019 or business-as-usual thinking. All of these embrace a kind of sociological \u2018things can only get better\u2019 modernism which inevitably has to invoke heroic techno-salvation to keep it afloat.<\/p>\n

Three points about this creeping ecomodernisation of mainstream politics by way of conclusion.<\/p>\n

First, while techno-salvation narratives like to invoke groundbreaking new material technics, their political technics are shopworn. Government power, market forces \u2026 or, for Malm and Carton, a simple matter of \u201ca bit of Marxism and common sense\u201d. When they look for political thinkers to inform the present extraordinary moment in human history, Malm and Carton\u2019s go-to choices are Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, Luxembourg and Adorno. I daresay there are some useful nuggets within the voluminous writings of that bunch to guide present thinking, but \u2026 well, no \u2013 the question of how revolutionary leftwing politics could seize the reins of a modernising, industrialising and energetically growing world that occupied those twentieth-century thinkers really isn\u2019t the fundamental question today.<\/p>\n

Hence my \u2018overshoot, meet undershoot\u2019 title \u2013 we\u2019re seriously undershooting the level of political rethinking needed via an overshot faith in techno-salvation. Malm and Carton\u2019s term \u2018bourgeois economics\u2019 to describe mainstream economic orthodoxy is revealing in this respect. Implicitly, this sees the problem as merely the dominance of economic thought by a particular class perspective that can be overcome by more accurate scientific analysis. That\u2019s a really old kind of social science thinking that I don\u2019t think is at all equal to present problems, and in fact is a part of them \u2013 the slippage from the idea of scientific truth to the idea of a scientific understanding of human society that generates the correct political prescriptions for it.<\/p>\n

Second, where does the scorn for a caricatured \u2018anarcho-primitivism\u2019 come from? To some degree, I think it\u2019s stitched deep into the fabric of our (eco)modernist historical culture, right across the political spectrum, as discussed often enough on this site over the years and as touched on in that \u2018small farm romance\u2019 article recently translated into Portuguese. Perhaps I\u2019ll come back to it again sometime. A lot of people have a peculiar horror for the idea of a lower energy and more local world, necessarily involving more people working the land \u2013 whereas the idea of living in a suburb and working in an office tends to get a free pass. I think there will be more of the former and less of the latter in the future whether we like it or not, but it\u2019s a bit odd that our culture is\u00a0so<\/em>\u00a0resistant to the possibility that the former might have its plus points.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to dwell on the reasons for that here, except to say that maybe one of them is the fact that so much of our public narrative about the future is in the hands of academics, journalists and politicos \u2013 basically wordsmiths, aka symbolic capitalists or the professional managerial class, who like to write and model on paper or on the computer, and for whom the idea of doing practical work instead typically evinces sheer horror. It wouldn\u2019t hurt if a bit more of the public narrative was commanded by people who don\u2019t write, analyse or model for a living.<\/p>\n

Finally, Malm and Carton\u2019s apparent inability to understand the difference between sunlight, which you don\u2019t have to pay for, and electricity, which you do, is a bit ironic in view of strictures against \u2018anarcho-primitivism\u2019 as agrarian practice. The free availability of sunlight, and the costliness of electricity and other forms of energy, is basically why the future will most likely be more rural and agrarian, and why we will not be using electricity to split water to feed bacteria to make protein but instead will be using sunlight to feed plants to make protein, and other necessary nutrients. So the land will not be unfolding its leaves like a sunflower. It may, however, be producing sunflowers. And if it is, this will involve human work. That is, agrarian work. Local work. Practical work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A lot of people have a peculiar horror for the idea of a lower energy and more local world, necessarily involving more people working the land \u2013 whereas the idea of living in a suburb and working in an office tends to get a free pass. I think there will be more of the former and less of the latter in the future whether we like it or not, but it\u2019s a bit odd that our culture is\u00a0so\u00a0resistant to the possibility that the former might have its plus points.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3511730,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79718,79719,213531],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3511565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","category-foodwater","category-food-water-featured"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3511565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3511565"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3511565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3511731,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3511565\/revisions\/3511731"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3511730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3511565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3511565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3511565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}