Review of The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton (Verso Books, 2025)
Andreas Malm and Wim Carton have an enemy, and it’s not “climate deniers.” These authors acknowledge that the original Big Oil brand of climate denialism — which rejected the scientific fact that through the burning of fossil fuels humans emit carbon dioxide, which in turn warms the planet — is now less prevalent than a newer denialist argument, asserting that “climate change exists but it is not much of a problem.”
Nor is their enemy as broad or systemic as “capitalism,” although the authors have half-jokingly described their book as a sort of “readable IPCC report of a Marxist nature” and advocate goals like the “infliction of serious material costs on fossil capital.”
For these professors at Lund University in Sweden, the authors of the new book The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, the enemies du jour are the “rationalist-optimists.”
These people — we’ll name names later — are optimistic in that they callously maintain that, as Malm writes in his 2024 book, Overshoot, “everything will turn out well,” despite the fact that global heating is set to speed past 1.5 degrees Celsius and potentially hit 3 degrees Celsius, with devastating consequences for humanity. For this “ideology of anti-revolution,” overshoot of 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming and the sustained use of fossil fuels is “unavoidable.” Rationalist-optimists believe the climate can be stabilized or global warming “reversed” through the deployment of technological solutions, like pulling carbon out of the atmosphere via carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies or using “solar geoengineering” to dim the sun and temporarily cool the planet.
The rationalist half of the moniker refers to these people’s presumption that technologies like solar geoengineering or CDR — should it become affordable and thus feasible…
Auteur: Noah Gordon
