We all grow up in a culture that normalizes the environmental harms of fossil capitalism—fumes from car tailpipes, plastic containers in the trash can, the occasional news story about the extinction of a species we’ve never heard of, a hole in the ozone layer, and so on, all normal. Insofar as you think about the world using capitalist ideology, you’ll believe that we can use some combination of government regulation and technological innovation to address those so-called “environmental externalities” in a way that sustains corporate profits and allows the fossil-fuel economy (now the fossil-fuel/AI economy) to keep cranking. But the tricky bit about climate change is that it’s not simply an environmental externality. It’s not like the discrete cost imposed on one place, or one species, or one group of people (like turtles or coral reefs or “frontline communities” or “the poor,” human beings sacrificed on the altar of the fossil-fuel system). Climate change is not local. It’s planetary. It threatens the entire world, in our children’s lifetimes. That is why it is worth phasing out fossil fuels and remaking everything, even if it makes the rich less rich. Because the world is going to be remade in unimaginable ways if we don’t.

To decide on the target readership for my book, I used a schema called “Global Warming’s Six Americas,” developed by the researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. From that schema, I segmented out the voters not just “concerned” but also “alarmed” about climate change. Together, these two groups form a crosspartisan majority. But as I lay out in my Introduction, this majority is conflicted about climate change: on the one hand, they want the United States to achieve its climate targets, but on the other hand, only minorities of even Democrats support ending fossil fuels. My book tries to address this political contradiction. And it actually does so, at least in the focus-group context. According to polling done by End Climate Silence and Lake Research Partners, the messages in the book raise support for the phase out of coal, oil, and gas among Democrats and Republicans concerned and alarmed about climate change by up to 10 points.

As important as it is to acknowledge progress, it is equally important to counter the disinformation that says we no longer need to worry about the climate future—whether that disinformation comes from the president or from purported climate experts … 3 degrees Celsius, the 2100 outcome of the medium-emissions scenario, would amount to catastrophic, civilization-threatening levels of warming. According to the most recent IPCC report, 3 degrees Celsius of heating would mean that, for around three months of the year, the entire East Coast of the United States—from Maine to the Midwest and the Great Plains—and half of California would be exposed to “hyperthermic conditions that pose a risk of mortality.” Southern California, the Southwest, the Deep South, and Florida would be this fatally hot nearly half the year.

It is remarkable that at the very moment the EU was supposedly fighting to include a roadmap to fossil fuel phaseout in the COP decision, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, was telling a press conference at the G20 that “we are not fighting fossil fuels, we are fighting the emissions from fossil fuels.” Not only does this statement directly undermine her own negotiators’ positions, it is in itself nonsensical – akin to saying “we are not giving up eating ice-cream, we are giving up absorbing the calories from that ice-cream” … That the president of the commission repeats such nonsense reveals why attempts like Cop30 repeatedly fail: so-called climate leaders in fact evince deep ambivalence about phasing out fossil fuels, ultimately unifying global climate politics around the lie that we can keep using fossil fuels and still deal with the climate crisis.

But would it really threaten the global ruling class if the world phased out fossil fuels? The answer to this question—Malm and Carton’s exegesis of the wealth lost if we stopped using coal, oil, and gas—lies at the core of Overshoot. Insofar as people think of “stranded assets” in relation to global decarbonization, they often assume those assets just include oil wells or coal mines, and maybe coal or “natural gas”–fired power plants. But Malm and Carton show that the term signifies a truly staggering amount of fixed and liquid capital. […] One study cited by Malm and Carton puts the sum of the monies to be stranded for halting warming at 2°C at four trillion dollars; another reaches a truly stunning $185 trillion. (In 2022, total world GDP was barely over $100 trillion.) The $185 trillion number is extreme, of course, but whatever the final amount lost, the bottom line is clear: global decarbonization requires a massive, fundamental reorganization of the economy.

Called the “1+N” framework, China’s climate policy is an all-of-government, all-of-society blueprint for the country’s decarbonization. Its foundational documents — the “1” document and the first “N” document (the first of a series of directives for the practical applications of the laws in the “1” document) — were released in 2021. As this framework is built out over the coming decades, China will be increasingly poised to use its economic might and willingness to flout historical global trade norms to establish a bloc of nations capable of pressuring Saudi Arabia, Russia and the U.S. to decarbonize. 

Mainstream economic ideas about the relationship between the biosphere and the economy are founded on assumptions, conjectures, and stipulations that have contradictory evidence, or no evidence, to back them up.

The world’s climate scientists say that already existing fossil-energy infrastructure is projected to emit the total carbon budget for halting global heating at 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial temperatures. This statement means … that the world cannot develop any more coal, oil, or gas, if we want our planet to remain relatively livable.

Those who live not in conspiracy but reality must offer voters a story, grounded in facts and pointing to America’s loftiest ideals, about the threat of climate change, the villainy of those who are making it worse, and the new, clean-energy economy that can be built with hope and ingenuity, which will bring immediate benefits to the working and middle classes and a redeemed future to America’s children. 

Instead of getting baited into a he said, she said dispute about a fracking ban, Harris should simply say that she’s for “freedom of energy choice.”

“Fossil-fuel propaganda is spun out of six key terms that dominate the language of climate politics: alarmist, cost, growth, ‘India and China’, innovation, and resilience. Together these terms weave a narrative that goes something like this: ‘Yes, climate change is real, but calling it an existential threat is just alarmist. And, anyway, phasing out coal, oil, and gas would cost us too much. Human flourishing relies on the economic growth enabled by fossil fuels, so we need to keep using them and deal with climate change by fostering technological innovation and increasing our resilience. Besides, America should not act unilaterally on the climate crisis while emissions are rising in India and China.’ This narrative is designed to encourage the incorrect and dangerous belief that the world does not need essentially to stop using fossil fuels—either because climate change won’t be that destructive or, in some versions of the story, because the world can keep using coal, oil, and gas and still halt global heating anyway.”

“Moving forward, journalists—and citizens as well—should recognize that oil and gas producers increasingly sound like climate advocates, using the same words and phrases that call for the end of the fossil fuel era. This is their new greenwashing strategy. It is all the more important never to take anyone’s words at face value, but to interpret them in the context of an entire statement—whether an industry advertisement, a think-tank report, or a text from U.N. climate talks—assessing that statement in relation to both the latest climate silence and actual industry investments. Propaganda shouldn’t be amplified. It should be exposed.”

“The IPCC’s statement signals the time for playing pretend is over. No country or leader can excuse more new coal, oil or gas development with fossil fuel producers’ false promises of magically effective technologies to reduce or recapture fossil energy emissions. The world must halt new fossil fuel development and dismantle current fossil energy infrastructure in a way that is fair to workers in the industry and people in the developing world. And this must be done now, so we can give our children a livable world.”

“The genre that offers us [a] pattern of extended political struggle is, of course, the epic. Its sweeping, episodic, iterative form attempts to narrate the labor of overthrowing an old or illegitimate order and building a new world. It tells stories about fighting to shape history. (If the idea of shaping history seems impossibly naive to you, then you may be part of the problem.) For all its oppressive uses as the literature of empire, the epic can equally be the literature of resistance.”

“The models saying ‘we need CDR’ are not establishing scientific facts. They are positing political futures…The whole idea of carbon removal was developed to keep the fossil-fuel system going.”

“‘Driving’ signifies something very different for the American worker at a big-box store who is forced to commute in her car to the mall versus the private equity manager speeding a gleaming Lamborghini around the cliffs of the Italian Riviera. One act is the expression of entanglement in an exploitative economic system that makes it impossible not to emit carbon; the other is the expression of the injustice of that very system.”

“I will admit that nihilism and despair are very attractive—sexy, even, considering also they’re the affects that all too easily signify ‘intellectual sophistication’ in the Anthropocene. Embracing cynicism and hopelessness allows you both to look tough, as if you have the backbone to face devastating truths about global warming, and to take yourself off the hook of the duty to work toward resolving the crisis.”

“Newspapers and television news programs should not only inform news consumers about the climate crisis, but also acknowledge the climate crisis in their business practices. Making ads for fossil fuel companies is a betrayal of the public and a dereliction of duty. It’s flat-out a form of climate denial.”

“As rhetoricians have known for thousands of years, communicators must appeal to the imagination, using vivid images that conjure visceral emotions, to move people to act. In the case of the climate crisis, communicators should help voters feel a complex of three specific emotions: fear of climate breakdown, outrage that powerful actors are blocking the passage of effective climate policy, and desire for a transformed global economy. Fear motivates us to protect ourselves and the people we love; outrage empowers us to experience the climate crisis as a political problem with clear antagonists; and desire enables us to accept the costs of decarbonization as greatly outweighed by the benefits of preserving the living world.”

“More than 7 in 10 Americans (72 percent) say that if there is a connection between an extreme weather event and climate change, they want to hear about it in the news, including 85 percent of Democrats, 59 percent of independents, and 62 percent of Republicans.”

“Climate change requires us to keep two perspectives in mind at once: we must feel and accept the essential limits of the planetary system on which we entirely depend, and we must embrace our capacity to remake our collective fictions and thereby redistribute social and political power. In that double consciousness we may find an idea of humanity that will save us.”

“To think of climate change as something that we are doing, instead of something we are being prevented from undoing, perpetuates the very ideology of the fossil-fuel economy we’re trying to transform.”

“Stories about the effects of climate change on vulnerable communities are not universally understood as evidence for the reality and the danger of climate change [because] the dynamic of racial othering still structures political identifications in America.”