The world is on the highway to climate hell that will make Dante’s Inferno, Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal, and the movie Come and See look like a candy store. 

This very same world seems to have abandoned the 1.5 degree target that might just have stabilised earth’s climate and might have also mitigated the worst immediate devastation global warming will bring.

Today, almost a decade after the Paris Agreement was negotiated, the world is continuing to carry on as usual. 

When the countries of the world agreed on the goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, it seemed possible – even probable – that humanity was on the right track to avoid the worst consequences of global warming.

This goal was stricter than the one proposed in Kyoto seven years earlier. It reflected both scientific progress and the willingness of policy makers to respond to the urgency of the moment.

Among the supporters of the Paris Agreement were the world’s largest polluters: the United States and China. And plenty of small island states that are most threatened by rising sea levels.

Almost a decade later, fossil fuel emissions have continued to rise steadily – with a very brief decline during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Today, there is a renewed increase. 

Although scientists agree that no new fossil fuel projects should be approved, oil and gas corporations have cranked up the construction boom in recent years with new gas pipelines and drilling sites from Mozambique to the Permian Basin. 

At the same time, the impact of global warming is likely to end the relative stability of the earth’s climate that we have enjoyed during the last 12,000 years. A stable climate allowed for agriculture – the greatest invention of mankind.

Meanwhile, the consequences of global warming – are becoming more and more noticeable: 

• devastating heat waves and floods in Europe, 
• prolonged drought in East Africa and 
• increasingly more frequent and more violent hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico.

One of the reasons that an environmental Armageddon might come lies in the ideology of overshoot that, seemingly, justifies a do-nothing approach to global warming.

Overshoot accepts that the officially established limits of global warming will be exceeded before technological innovations bring temperatures back to an acceptable level. It is a technological determinism of the worst kind. 

Overshoot’s way of not think critically had entered mainstream climate policy around the time of the Paris Agreement. 

The ideology of overshoot has been megaphoned by the corporate press that, for example, likes to show TV-adds for fuel-guzzling cars. Corporate media generate around $1 trillion dollars of advertising income – annually. A trillion has 12 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000.

Overshoot has prevailed due to the vague provisions of the much-vaunted treaty. The result is a well-crafted hallucination of a “continue as before” ideology. 

The ideological-manipulative media and corporate lobbying con of the public, has allowed oil corporations to rake in record profits as the planet continues to heat up and we are moving towards the 6^th mass extinction that – this time around – includes us!

The idea behind overshoot is that it is a techno-destiny that the public passively submits itself to. On the other side of the coin, the business elite can successfully pretend to actively pursue – mostly for public relations reasons – with its self-invented programme that play-acts dealing with the approaching catastrophe.

The ideological message of overshoot is: let it continue for the time being, and then we will put things in order towards the end of this century. 

The overshoot ideology is party to the political economy of capitalism. The inherent structure of global capitalism favours fossil fuels (read: high corporate profits) over renewable (low profit) energies. 

Yet, overcoming the overshoot ideology requires a direct confrontation with the dynamics of capitalist accumulation. 

It may frustrate those who do not want to conduct a fundamental examination of the much needed changes that moves the earth towards a global environmental revolution. 

Perhaps the ideological mastermind behind all this was William Nordhaus and his To Slow or Not to Slow. 

Restricted to looking at economic – not the environmental and human cost – Nordhaus came to the conclusion that a rapid phasing out of fossil fuels would cause high economic costs.

Hence, fixing global warming should therefore be left to future generations. Probably, he did not consider that there might not be future generations to fix the environment.

An even worse assumption is that fossil fuels would accelerate global development which would make societies more prosperous and better equipped to deal with the consequences of global warming. 

Nordhaus’ “slow or not to slow” scheme (read: scam, con and cunning trick) was an ideological master stroke of neoliberalism against the environment. Not surprisingly, The Intercept called Nordhaus’ economics,

When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics

How an elite clique of math-addled economists hijacked climate policy

Furnished with that, the ideology of overshoot took off significantly after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 which set the limit of global warming at 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The European Union was unsure, and the United States did not ratify the treaty.

At that time, scientists began to develop computer models that linked biophysical systems with basic (read: dodgy) economic assumptions. 

Like all prognostic models, these were based on a number of rather illusive assumptions, such as the rational behaviour of investors – an hallucination. 

These provided decision-makers over-optimistic predictions to continue to use fossil fuels and still meet the internationally agreed climate goals. 

These models received a decisive boost in popularity through the introduction of carbon capture and storage – another hallucination. 

Suddenly, it became possible to remove an enormous amount of CO₂ from the “computer-generated” atmosphere with a few simple keystrokes.

However, all these models omitted decisive factors like the thawing of permafrost and large-scale climate migration.

Discomforting for the ideologues of overshoot, a new study – published in the scientific journal Nature – shows that the ability to lower the Earth’s temperature after an overshoot is by no means guaranteed.

Instead, only rapid emission reductions in the near future are most effective in reducing climate risks. In other words, overshoot is grossly misleading and has inappropriate input assumptions.

At the end of the 2000s, small island states such as the Maldives and the Marshall Islands began to vigorously demand a tightening of the 2-degree target from the Kyoto Protocol, on the grounds that such a rise in temperature would submerge a large part of their territory.

Their goal was a target of 1.5 degrees Celsius, combined with legal obligations that heavy-duty polluter (the OECD countries) drastically reduce their emissions by certain dates.

However, what these island nations received was something completely different: a more stringent warming target, but without emission caps or quotas and without any obligation beyond the mere reporting of climate progress every five years. In other words, a bit of greenwashing.

Meanwhile, a report on global warming – published in October 2018 – contained sobering depictions of a world plunged into the abyss of climate catastrophe: 

• widespread crop failures,
• water shortages,
• deadly heat waves and 
• the spread of viruses from animals to humans. 

To prevent this, system transformations on an unprecedented scale are necessary. This includes effective planning in urban areas and a marked change in investment patterns. 

However, the opposite of such a system change has occurred in the USA with the orange monster’s drill baby drill policy. 

Despite Trump, changes in capitalism to rescue the environment need to be directed at the base and the superstructure: at the means of production (the economy) and the resulting relations (culture, institutions, ideology).

In all this, there is a real prospect that what is called stranded assets – particularly those locked up in fossil fuel projects – will become unprofitable before the end of their expected economic life. 

This might well be the main force that prevents the world (and lobbying corporations) from fighting global warming. 

Meanwhile, stranded assets remain a typical feature of capitalism. For example, technical innovations often make modes of production obsolete: Microsoft Word rendered typewriters obsolete; the assembly line annihilate hand-made cars, blacksmiths are virtually unknown today, etc.

Worse, oil and gas are so deeply entrenched in every sector of the global economy that a massive loss of these assets would lead to serious shocks throughout the capitalist system.

Fossil fuel producers would lose between $4 and $185 trillion if global warming was limited to 1.5 degrees. 

This alone explains the hard-core corporate lobbying and the rise of climate change denial symbioses between oil companies, banks, corporate think thanks, lobbying and public relation firms, the corporate press, conservative politicians, and so on. The list goes on.

In other words, as long as corporations, adjacent lobbyist and the corporate press can make enough people believe that global warming is not real, corporations will cash in – significantly.

Worse, even if the development of renewable energies is more cost-effective, renewable energy will always be less profitable than fossil energy because its production requires significantly less labour.

The exploitation of labour remains the decisive factor in obtaining value from a commodity called labour in the capitalist system. 

Without measures such as a ban on fracking or a CO-tax, which make new pipelines or drilling sites more economically unattractive, we can probably expect that the trend in expansion of fossil fuels in recent years, will continue.

What should not happen is a massive bailout of the fossil fuel industry in which polluting and environmentally destructive companies receive billions to stop oil and gas production. It is an immoral compensation for not destroying the planet.

Meanwhile, the newly elected president of Colombia – Gustavo Petro – declared the end of oil and gas exploration and pledged to completely stop fossil extraction by 2034.

In the end, putting a stop to global warming will not come from politicians who are financially committed (read: campaign funding) to the fossil fuel giants. It will not be supported by a corporate media that also depends on advertising revenue.

In 2023, the global oil and gas industry earned a record income of more than $2.4 trillion. Meanwhile, they invested just 4% of their capital expenditure on clean energy. So much for shiny corporate videos on sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and business ethics.

Change will not come from fuel corporations with their trillions of dollars’ worth of assets and the prospect of making stratospheric profits.

It will come from ordinary people and their collective desire to move the world towards real, sustainable climate change.

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