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In 2024, Wim Carton and Andreas Malm released Overshoot - How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown. It was praised and critiqued in various quarters - but we included it in our books of the year because it’s a) beautifully written - with plenty of lateral-thought LOLs and b) was perfectly timed to come out just as the data was increasingly at odds with the “Keep 1.5 Alive” stuff of “incantatory governance” - the magical thinking that seems to be a really complicated way of avoiding some obvious, but difficult, choices. But Overshoot was just the first half of a 2-parter.

In the final part, out in October, The Long Heat - Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, Carton and Malm take up the challenge about what to do about it. Will adaptation, carbon dioxide removals, and geoengineering be topics seriously engaged with? Or will they just be a new version of finding ways to avoid the fossil fuels “stranded assets” conversation we’ve avoided having for 35 years of climate politics?

In this conversation, we spend a lot of time talking about carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, revealing their roots in extending fossil fuel use, and argues for the necessity of political change to make meaningful progress.

But we ended up in an unexpected place. The book, surprisingly to me when I read it, concludes (however reluctantly) that CDR is going to be necessary. But that it needs to be decoupled from a system full of perverse incentives and moral hazard on meth and towards a re-framing of CDR as a public good.

What’s in the Conversation

00:00 Introduction and Opening Remarks

00:17 Host Introduction and Upcoming Events

02:27 Guest Introduction: Wim Carton

04:48 Discussing 'Overshoot' and Climate Politics

06:13 The Role of Fossil Fuel Companies

16:38 Adaptation Strategies and Challenges

18:43 Technological Solutions and Their Limits

20:07 Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)

20:51 The Concept of Negative Magic

21:41 Problematizing Reversibility

22:43 Political Economy of Carbon Dioxide Removal

24:08 Klaus Lachner and Carbon Removal

28:05 Startups and the Political Economy

31:07 Challenges in Carbon Removal Market

35:36 The Role of the State in Carbon Removal

40:12 Concluding Thoughts and Future Discussions

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Next episode out very soon is with Solitaire Townsend - talking about her debut novel - a cli-fi/alt-history/Roman-Empire mashup - Godstorm. What if Rome invented the combustion engine, so it never fell?

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