That protest wave has evidently subsided, and Malm’s latest publications paint a rather bleak picture. In the fall of 2024, Malm co-authored Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown with his Lund University colleague Wim Carton. The book builds on recent research which shows that even assuming the rapid decarbonization of the global economy, the world is likely on track for a temperature increase of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. It is set to surpass—to overshoot—the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit by mid-century, even in a net-zero scenario. This will carry severe social, economic, and political consequences. “Fossil fuels taken out of the ground,” write Malm and Carton, “are projectiles fired indiscriminately into humanity, primarily the part of it living in the global South—carbon bombs, literally”. It is in particular the Global North — responsible for 92% of emissions in excess of the planetary boundary — that keeps pulling the trigger. As the duo notes, “five countries in the Global North — the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, and Norway — together accounted for 51 percent of the expansion from new oil and gas fields planned until mid-century”. Malm cites the same number in his other recent book, a pamphlet titled The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth (Verso 2024). The text is as much a scathing indictment of the West’s moral bankruptcy, but also an attempt at charting the same vicious imperial logic that drives both the destruction of Palestine and the destruction of the earth’s climate system.

In our conversation, Malm discusses the central ideas in his latest books, what makes Gustavo Petro’s Colombia “unique” among major fossil fuel-producing countries, the dangers of geoengineering, why the Frankfurt School offers a crucial lens for understanding the climate crisis, how the genocide in Palestine is connected to the longer history of fossil empire, and what to expect from the upcoming sequel to Overshoot titled The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, which will be published later this year. As Malm and Carton write in Overshoot, “The choice ahead is stark: unmitigated catastrophe or systemic transformation”.

[Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

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Bernardo Jurema: Andreas, you’ve just returned from Colombia, where you met with leftist president and former guerrilla fighter Gustavo Petro and interviewed him for Jacobin Magazine. Petro also makes an appearance in your new book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, co-authored with Wim Carton, in which you discuss his government’s unique attempt to commit a major oil- and coal-producing country to a complete fossil fuel phase-out. What makes the Colombian case so special, and what does it reveal about what you call our current Overshoot conjuncture?

Andreas Malm: I was in Colombia for two weeks— my first time not only in Colombia but in all of Latin America. It was an extremely intense trip, but I don’t think I’ve ever learned so much in such a short time. We went on a tour that was organized by a unit within the Ministry of Energy that involved an enormous number of meetings as well as visits to sites that are crucial for the fossil fuel landscape of Colombia. This included Barrancabermeja, the capital of the oil industry and its surroundings, as well as Cesar and La Guajira in the north, which is the heartland of the coal industry. We met a mind-boggling amount of people ranging from Petro himself, as well as Susana Muhamad, the recent Minister of the Environment, Irene Vélez, another former Minister of Energy and Mining, all the way to fisher folk who showed us how their water had been contaminated by oil outside Barrancabermeja. 

One impression that our visit confirmed is that Colombia is unique in the sense that it’s the only significant fossil fuel producing country committed to a complete phase-out. This is absolutely exceptional considering that even major fossil-fuel producers like the United States have nowhere the same structural dependency on fossil fuels that Colombia has, where fossil fuels have accounted for more than half of export revenues in recent decades. Since 2022, when Gustavo Petro came to power, the Colombian government has pursued a line saying that it is not going to hand out any new licenses for exploring or opening new reserves or installations for fossil fuels. It’s common that politicians who stand for office make grand promises and then they don’t live up to them. But in this case, despite extreme powerful pressure from capital interests both national and global, the government in Colombia has stuck to this promise, and has in fact not handed out a single license to an oil and gas company to explore for these fuels, hasn’t given out a single license to open a new coal mine, and perhaps most importantly stopped any move towards initiating fracking in the country. This is of course exactly what needs to be done if we’re going to in any way get the climate crisis under control. A big theme in Overshoot is that we cannot have new investments in fresh installations for digging up fossil fuels because it’s precisely the addition of new investments on top of those that are already there that burden us with the inertia that forces us to just keep going as so these new investments can be recuperated and yield profit. 

The situation in Colombia is obviously much more complicated. For instance, there is a coal mine that might be opened and destroy a community called Cañaverales. This is a coal mine that the government hasn’t been able to stop as it’s based on a contract that was handed out before the government came in. But the major problem is that during our trip we got the impression that everyone is more or less resigned to the fact that the right will be back in power next year because there is a new presidential election, as well as a congressional election, and Petro can’t stand again. The constitution doesn’t allow him to be re-electedand it’s not clear that he has a successor that has a fighting chance to win and carry on the project. Another issue is that Petro’s flagship reforms that concern labor law and health have been blocked by the right-wing forces controlling Congress. So the major reforms that were supposed to make a real difference to ordinary working people’s lives in Colombia haven’t been implemented, which of course is a source of major frustration for the government and its supporters. It means that a lot of people who voted for Petro will probably think: Why should I vote for a similar project when it doesn’t actually make anything better in my life? There are other problems as well, so it’s very likely that we will have a major reactionary surge in Colombia next year that can bring someone into power that might go all out for oil and gas and coal and unleash fracking in Colombia, which will cause tremendous disaster for the ecosystems where that’s going to happen, and of course bring even more fossil fuels to the surface to put on fire. So the feeling while being there was that yes, this is a unique experiment, and it’s also quite likely to be a brief parenthesis that will come to an end soon. 

Elias König: Pretty much everywhere outside of Colombia, the fossil fuel industry seems to be thriving and raking in record profits. As you note in Overshoot, global fossil fuel production is still expanding continuously, despite the fact that a decade ago, all major governments in the world signed the 2015 Paris Climate Accords and vowed to seriously limit dangerous climate change. What explains the inability — or unwillingness — of governments and financial institutions to halt this expansion?

Malm: The simple explanation is that there’s still so much money to be made out of fossil fuels. The trend that we’re seeing now during the second installation of Trump is a dissolution of ambitions on the climate front, a general withdrawal from all kinds of commitments, and a degrading of climate politics, pushing it down even further on the political agenda. This has all kinds of ripple effects, from countries boosting fossil fuel production to, for instance, a crisis in the world of direct air capture, the most hyped carbon dioxide removal technology. The leading contender in this field has been the Swiss company Climeworks, which has just in the past few weeks fallen into a morass of very serious crisis which is partly related to how the regulations and rules and subsidies and incentives around something like carbon dioxide removal. It’s an indirect fallout of the whole right-wing drift and anti-climate drift that we see in the wake of the Trump resurgence.

Jurema: In Overshoot, you argue that overshoot has become the dominant paradigm in climate governance: “Emissions are out of control and we have no project for bringing them under control, and so we must try different ventures than classical mitigation — the core doctrine of what we shall call overshoot ideology.” Could you explain what overshoot ideology is, who advances it, and how we arrived at this point?

Malm: Overshoot ideology as we understand it is rooted in the refusal of the dominant classes to attack and shut down the drivers of global heating. They say that it’s impossible to actually mitigate, that we can’t actually cut emissions at the speed required, and so we need to try to manage this crisis somehow. Other than mitigation, there are three main things that you can do about the climate crisis: You can adapt, just try to live with the crisis as well as you can. We discuss this in the first part of our book. The second part is about carbon dioxide removal. Potentially, it could be possible to remove the CO₂ that has been emitted and take it back down to the earth. However, it is quite a complicated question whether you actually can do it on any meaningful scale. Thirdly, you can do geoengineering: you can put some kind of objects between the earth and the sun to block some of the incoming sunlight and thereby cool the earth. 

While carbon dioxide removal seems to be falling on the agenda, my sense is now that geoengineering is rising very rapidly. There was a piece of news just the other week that the UK government is launching a project for outdoor testing. This means moving from conceptual modeling and theoretical research into actual outdoor experiments. Obviously, these experiments are very limited because you can’t actually experiment with full-scale geoengineering in any other way than implement it. You don’t know how it’s going to work until you actually do it on the full scale. It’s quite telling that the first experiment undertaken in the sense that you had actual jets injecting aerosols into the stratosphere was undertaken by an Israeli startup called Stardust Solutions in February last year, a company that is completely integrated into the technological ecosystem around the Israeli Defense Forces. Geoengineering as an actual material practice came into the world with the fighter jets that were at the very same time destroying Gaza—quite a birth for this technology. One reason that geoengineering is rising so much to the fore is that it is a technology for dealing with the climate crisis that is potentially—we don’t know this yet—compatible with the politics of someone like Donald Trump. Geoengineering can be done without any kind of acknowledgement that the accumulation of CO₂ in the atmosphere is a problem and that we need to do something about it.

König: You describe overshoot ideology as a form of “fundamental madness” and a manifestation of ruling class “psychopathology” rather than reason. Could you elaborate on the psychological mechanisms that, in your view, drive the proliferation and persistence of overshoot ideology?

Malm: This is a theme that you can find in Overshoot, but again it’s much more elaborated in The Long Heat, the sequel that will be published co-incidentally on October 7 this year. We will have one chapter trying to sketch a Freudo-marxist theory of geoengineering, as well as a long chapter in which we argue that denial of the climate crisis has been absolutely fundamental to the progression of this crisis—that without system-wide denial of this crisis, it would have actually come to a stop at a certain point. Denial is what fuels this crisis and denial comes in many different forms. At a certain point, denial can flip into repression. If geoengineering ever starts, when these sulfate planes are deployed, what they would do would literally be to repress global warming. And we argue that they would be as technology instruments for actual repression of a problem and that it’s very likely that geoengineering would also work as a form of repression in the strictly Freudian sense. 

Of course we try to ground this, after all we are Freudo-Marxists, in a historical materialist understanding of why at particular historical junctures dominant classes develop particular kinds of psychic syndromes, including psychopathologies. I’m personally totally convinced that we can’t make sense of the world today without doing fundamentally what Critical Theory did, what the Frankfurt School theory did, which was to enrich Marxism with psychoanalysis. Just look at Donald Trump’s recent rant about how there is a genocide going on against white farmers in South Africa. This is obviously a complete hallucination, while on the other hand you have an actual genocide happening in Gaza which he is helping to plan, organize, and implement. If you want to understand what’s going on there and with the far-right in general, you clearly need some kind of psychoanalytical tools. These kinds of things just cannot be understood in any kind of crude materialist sense as if it’s only the economy or material factors that can explain what’s happening here. We absolutely have to pay close attention to the psychological dimensions of our present moment if we’re going to make any kind of sense of it at all.

Jurema: The publication of Overshoot also marks the tenth anniversary of your PhD thesis, later published by Verso as Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming, which has since become a canonical work on the social roots of the climate crisis. As its title suggests, Fossil Capital traces these roots to the proliferation of capitalist social relations, specifically the emergence of a steam-powered fossil economy in 19th-century England. How do you look back at Fossil Capital today? And in what ways does Overshoot build on, extend, or revise the fossil capital hypothesis you first developed there?

Malm: Overshoot, in a way, builds on the argument in Fossil Capital about the relative cheapness and abundance of the flow, or what we would today call renewable energy, and the relative expensiveness of fossil fuels or the stock. The big difference is that Fossil Capital focused exclusively almost on the demand side. My concern was: Why did capitalists shift from water power to steam power? Hence the capitalists in focus in Fossil Capital are those capitalists who demanded and burned coal and not the companies producing the coal and selling it, because my assessment was that they didn’t play a very important role in terms of causing the transition. But Overshoot is almost completely focused on the supply side, so on the companies that produce fossil fuels. This is a major difference. 

How do I look back on FossilCapital as a book? Well, with a mix of two feelings. The first feeling is that I have been pretty tired of the whole steam engine story for a few years already. On the other hand, I feel, as quite a few academics do, nostalgia for the PhD period, when you have time to focus on one project and do research, and in particular archival research, which is the kind of research that I find far more pleasurable and enjoyable than any other kind of research. I am constantly frustrated by not being able to do historical research again, but I hope and pray that this will soon happen. In view of my own work, I see The Long Heat, the book that Wim and I are publishing this year, as the end of a cycle that began with Fossil Capital. My feeling is I don’t want to write more about contemporary climate politics. I’ve said what I can say, contributed what I can contribute. Now I want to do real historical work instead. Of course, the world is burning and it’s burning so fast, so it’s difficult to say that I’m going to be able to look away from it and just look back at the past, but this is my personal ambition for the next decade or two.

König: Across your work, you’ve developed a distinctive writing style. Readers of Malmian prose can expect an explosive cocktail of sharp historical materialist analysis, lucid examples, striking metaphors, and provocative punchlines. Overshoot is no exception. The book contains a plethora of witty passages, from blasting the “acronym logorrhea” of mainstream climate policy to describing the moral harms associated with renewable energies and fossil fuels as equivalent to comparing “shoplifting with genocide.”Who have been the inspirations behind your writing style — both in terms of intellectual influences and literary technique?

Malm: When it comes to writing I’m very much loyal to the kind of New Left Review and Verso ideal that you should write well. A lot of academics write extremely dull prose and we should try to avoid this. It shouldn’t be a pain to get through a text. I’m not a native English speaker, so ever since I started my PhD 16 years ago, my own way to develop an English prose that approaches some kind of decent quality has been to only read English fiction and to try to read as much of it as possible—both contemporary fiction and classic fiction. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to read anywhere near as much fiction as I’d like to do. This is a constant source of frustration. When I’m as stressed as I’ve been over the past couple of months, I barely read any fiction, which drives me nuts. Reading fiction is incredibly important to me and it’s the only way to keep something like a style alive. It’s impossible to have a good style by only reading non-fiction because good prose can only be found in literature.

When it comes to style, I have to briefly mention our upcoming book The Long Heat. We hope that readers will stay with it because it’s at least partly entertaining. There are a lot of jokes in this book, or attempts at jokes. We’ll see if they work. They mostly relate to shit, poop, excrement—this is a major theme in the book. So, it’s a book that tries to combine elements of the kind that you mentioned together with humor and sarcasm. We’ll see if it works, but it’s meant to be what we sometimes call a Marxist and readable IPCC report. These are the two attributes, among many others, that distinguish our book from the real thing because an IPCC report is not Marxist and it certainly isn’t readable! But here our attempt is to make it readable, with metaphors and punchlines and Marxist theory and humor and things like that.  

Jurema: We can’t finish this interview without addressing the ongoing genocide in Palestine. In your recent pamphlet, The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth, you build on your earlier work on fossil empire — including your 2017 SOAS talk on the subject—to trace the connections between the struggle for climate justice and the movement for Palestinian liberation. Could you explain how the subjugation of Palestine is tied to the longer history of fossil empire, and why these struggles are so deeply intertwined? More broadly speaking, what are the implications of this insight for how we understand imperialism and energy transition today? 

Malm: People are thinking about these connections between climate disaster and the genocide, the occupation, and Zionism from a lot of different perspectives. What I did in my pamphlet [The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth] was, again, derived from the period when I had actual time to do archival research. When I was doing research for my PhD in early 2013, I found it incredibly fascinating that the first moment when steamboats were deployed in warfare was in a war that targeted the Middle East, in a big battle that happened in the Palestinian town of Akka, which was completely pulverized. Shortly after, you had the more famous First Opium War where Nemesis, this classical steamboat, had a similar role in subjugating China, but that came later. The episode in Palestine coincided with the moment when Zionism crystallized as an ideology. This was non-Jewish Zionism—it was Christian and/or secular liberal British Victorian Zionism. The men who came up with the idea to relocate the Jews into Palestine were not, with maybe one exception, themselves Jewish. They were Christians or just secular liberal imperialists who wanted to advance the interests of the British empire. It was at this moment that the whole idea, for instance, of a land without a people that could be given to a people without a land came up and the basic precepts of Zionist ideology were formulated. This is something that I think the historiography of the conflict has been missing to this point because usually the story of Zionism is told from the end of the 19th century and then you have the Balfour declaration as the kind of big bang. But this happened 77 years before the Balfour declaration. So, it’s of interest from a purely historiographical view. Initially,I was hoping topublish some of this material in a sequel to my PhD thesis called Fossil Empire, but no funding ever came through. I still hope to do it at some point in the future, but there are just so many stories and details to unearth on the story of what happened in 1840 in itself, not least because the primary sources in the archives in the region appear not to have been mined. It seems like no one has looked into the actual Ottoman and Arabic sources about what happened—at least there’s nothing written in English that is based on these archival sources. 

The idea in the pamphlet is that this connection between fossil fuels and the colonization of Palestine was there from the very beginning, and has continued up until the very present. The text is based on a lecture manuscript that I wrote over a couple of weeks for a lecture that I gave in Beirut.There are points that I realized afterwards I could and should have made. For instance, the main supplier of oil to the Zionist entity is Azerbaijan. But what that means in reality is British Petroleum, because the oil is pumped together by BP and the Azerbaijan National Oil Corporation [State Oil Company of the Republic of Azerbaijan, SOCAR]. It is BP which pumps the oil through the pipeline that goes from Tbilisi to Ceyhan, from where it it’s shipped to the ports of the 1948 areas. BP of course is the same company that first discovered oil in the Middle East and a pillar of the British Mandate was the Kirkuk-Haifa pipeline that was operated by the company that we now know as BP. It is absolutely extraordinary that it’s still the British and it’s still the same corporate entity that is supplying the most important fossil fuel to the colonizing entity. This is just one point among many that I could have made in the pamphlet.Then there’s the whole jet fuel situation. There are good NGO reports which show that the jet fuel that the fighter jets are using for destroying what’s left of Gaza is coming from the US. It’s refined in Texas and then shipped over to the ports in the 1948 areas. The fundamental structure of the occupation is exactly the same as during the Yeshuv period, during the Mandate, and arguably even before that. So, just as in 1840, these incursions ever deeper into Palestine happen because they are fueled by a circuit of fossil fuels upheld and maintained by the Western empire.

The genocide has now shifted into an even higher gear in Gaza with a total starvation of the population and with an even more aggressive invasion and with a fully normalized process of just slaughtering hundreds of Palestinians every day. This acceleration is enabled by the return of Donald Trump to the White House. It was already terrible during Biden, just as the way that oil and gas were exploited was terrible during Biden. It’s not that there is any kind of qualitative difference. It’s just that Trump unleashing everything, he’s just removing even a sense of nominal limits to anything. At the very moment that the US were giving green light to Netanyahu and his entity to just go in and destroy everything in Gaza, he recently toured the Gulf, he went to the Saudis and to the Qataris, who gave him this—psychoanalytically quite significant—flying palace, and confirmed the alliance between the US and the reactionary Gulf monarchies. The alliance between Trump and the Gulf monarchies is fundamentally about oil and gas. None of it would happen if it weren’t for the fossil fuels that the regimes on both sides love so much and gain so much profit from. There are of course complexities here. One important complexity is that the actual oil and gas produced in the Gulf is no longer very important for the US, in the sense that they don’t need to import the amounts from the Middle East that they used to. The Americans are already the world’s largest oil and gas producer. Much more of the oil and gas from the Gulf are now going instead eastwards towards Asian markets. 

One important thing to remember here is that an important foundation for the US empire is the status of the US dollar as the global currency, which in turn is fundamentally based on the fact that oil and gas are being traded in dollar. These together make up by far the single most important commodity in world trade and the fact that they are traded in dollar means that the dollar retains its status as world money with all the privileges which that status produces for the US. This means that imperial position of the US is based on oil from the Gulf region and other exporting countries being traded in dollar, wherever this oil and gas ends up being consumed finally. The Gulf monarchies may trade more with Asia, but as long as the trade is still conducted in dollars they are in effect propping up the US empire and consolidating the status of the dollar as world money. So the Middle East is losing none of its importance for US imperial power—to the contrary, the Gulf countries just seem to become more important. Obviously there are some contradictions here because the desire to be friends with Saudi Arabia is at times difficult to reconcile with the desire to let the occupation do whatever it wants. So now, for instance, the normalization project [between Israel and Saudi Arabia] seems to be on hold. This is not because the Saudis in any way care about the Palestinians. It’s just that they have an ideology, casting themselves as the protectors of Islam and its holy sites, which puts some kind of ideological limits on what they can do. Like I said, it’s complex and contradictory in a sense and in another sense it’s also very simple and crude. 

König: Beyond analyzing the capitalist roots of climate chaos, a recurring theme in your work is that of resistance. In Overshoot, you address more recent instances of resistance, such as the example of Ecuador: in August 2023, its people made history by democratically voting to strand fossil fuel assets in Yasuní National Park, a radical act of defiance in what you and Carton describe as a “thoroughly deranged” year. At the same you joke in a recent blurb for Adam Hanieh’s excellent Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market that the readers should “read and run for your life”—how dire do you think the prospects for resistance are within the current matrix of fossil capitalism?

Malm: How is it possible to be hopeful if you look at the trends and climate, and if you follow the genocide? The overwhelming feeling, of course, I think for any sane person is acute and uncontainable despair. And what do you do with that despair? You stick to the most radical possible rejection of this society that we’re living in. Which is a difficult position of course to have as a person living in this society. Does it mean that you just physically withdraw from society and end up in some remote part of whatever nature exists still? Not necessarily. My holy trinity is Marx, Adorno and Freud, but these days I would say that Adorno is the one that I really can’t live without. What Adorno ends up saying is that, okay, society is totally fucked up and we we’re not in a position to stop it from producing these catastrophes, but the only ethical position that is justified is one of resistance, it’s one of total, principled, committed and uncompromising resistance, and that’s of course how I feel. 

What does that mean in practice? You can discuss a lot of different options ranging from what just happened in New York to some kind of engaged withdrawal. A lot of the Frankfurt School people ultimately chose the latter. It’s kind of an attractive option to say: I hate this fucking society so much, and I’ve done what I could as an activist and organizer, so I’m just going to spend the next 10 years and just write books in which I give my view of how society became this completely fucked up thing and how people have been trying to stop it from becoming this thing. There is of course a spectrum between the most militant possible self-sacrificial martyrdom action on the one hand, and something like the Adornian engaged withdrawal on the other side of the spectrum, where you hate society so much and you despair about it so much that you end up just expressing this position in text. Like quite a few other people, I feel suspended somewhere within this spectrum, sometimes trying to do both things, but that’s also difficult.

Bernardo: Overshoot makes clear that the capitalist classes remain deeply invested in decades of continued fossil fuel extraction and combustion, and that they expect the political conditions to remain favorable to this project. Meanwhile, the climate movement—driven by the urgency of breakdown—often operates on a much narrower horizon, focused on mobilizing for the next action, summit, or election. Yet even its greatest victories are precarious if they cannot be defended against fossil rollbacks and counterattacks. How do you view this dilemma? Do you believe the climate movement needs to cultivate longer-term strategic planning and institution-building to sustain its gains?

Malm: I wish there were a climate movement about which you could have precisely this kind of discussion. The climate movement in Europe is a total shadow of what it was a few years ago, during the protest cycle of 2018 and 2019.This was the context for How to Blow Up a Pipeline: what tactics should be deployed, and can we build more, longer term strategies and things like that. We’re much more in a void now. So, it’s very difficult to say what I think the climate movement should do or shouldn’t do because it barely exists as a force anymore, which is just one sign of the enormous defeat. But there are people who see signs here and there. There was a Guardian piece, written not so long ago, arguing that the people who still care about the climate are going to adopt more radical tactics. The UK is a special case because of the way that absolutely peaceful civil disobedience was completely dominant in movements like XR [Extinction Rebellion], so if you sabotage something that’s considered super extraordinary in the UK. In France, people have been doing that all the time, so it’s a completely different situation. France is the only European country other than my own totally meaningless country of Sweden that I spend some time in these days. The situation there is very different from any other country, as you have a very vibrant, comparatively speaking, environmental movement—primarily Les Soulèvements de la Terre. However, they’re not the climate movement in the narrow or precise sense that Ende Gelände was or is, for instance. It’s a much broader thing. 

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Elias König is a philosophy PhD student at the University of Twente, Netherlands. He works on climate justice and political theory after fossil liberalism