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The world is descending deeper and deeper into climate chaos. As fires rage and storms churn, we're about to blow past 1.5°C of warming, which scientists and global leaders cite as the first point of no return for the planet. Past that mark irreparable catastrophes might ignite like a row of dominoes. And it seems as if we are spinning our wheels on climate action. It's not just 1.5°C, under current climate policy the world is on track to blow past 2°C, 2.5°C, and potentially even 3°C. Meanwhile, climate deniers seize power across the world
and global climate negotiations fail to produce any sort of meaningful emissions cuts. How did we come to this? How have we continually bowed to the reign of fossil-fueled business-as-usual, despite mounting climate catastrophes? To unravel this question, we'll journey through the treacherous landscape of climate inaction. We'll examine the violent return of fossil fascists like Trump, the illusory fictions of carbon capture, all the way to the pernicious ideology of overshoot. Today, we examine how the world surrendered to climate collapse.
Towards Collapse and the Rise of Fossil Fascism The damage of our current 1.3°C of global warming has already been catastrophic. Wildfires raged through Los Angeles in early 2025 killing 29 and forcing over 200,000 people from their homes. Tropical cyclone Daniel decimated Libya in 2023 killing almost 6,000 and with over 8,000 missing. Generational floods in Pakistan, Spain, and the US have decimated towns and livelihoods, while drought in Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia forces millions on the move. And as we burn more and more fossil fuels,
these catastrophes will only become more numerous and devastating. This makes the task ahead of us clear. To avoid even more death and planetary destruction we need to cut emissions to zero, which ultimately means confronting and dismantling fossil fuel production. In other words, any true climate action must ban fossil fuel exploration, extraction, and production. One study found that to stay below 1.5C of warming, 89% of coal, 58% of oil, and 56% of gas reserves must be left in the ground by 2050. Ending fossil fuel production is not a radical agenda. Instead, it's one based on life, especially considering that 1 in 5 deaths
are caused by just air pollution from burning fossil fuels. Yet, despite the death toll and immense body of climate science detailing the need to rapidly eliminate emissions, the dismantling of the fossil fuel industry is nowhere in sight. Indeed, the world, especially the imperial core, seems to be doing the exact opposite. Fossil fuel companies are locking in infrastructure that won't be exhausted until as late as 2090. In 2022 alone, 477 gas pipelines, 432 new coal mines, and 485 new coal plants were slated for or under construction. These assets, this fixed capital, mean potentially
trillions of dollars in profit for fossil capitalists or, if climate action is taken seriously, trillions in losses. As this review of carbon lock-in explains, the fixed capital of the fossil fuel empire represents "the largest network of infrastructure ever built, reflecting tens of trillions of dollars of assets and two centuries of technological evolution." But, to reap maximum profits from this massive network of infrastructure, fossil capital must ensure its continued survival. They must relentlessly guard and prolong the life span of their assets.
Enter Trump and the fossil fascist far-right. As I explained in this video, fossil capital has long protected itself by throwing its power and cash flows behind fascist figureheads eager to ensure business-as-usual. This is exactly what happened with Trump's return to power. Fossil capitalists poured money into his campaign, and in exchange, Trump has already cut down barriers to the and bolstered the flow of oil and gas [play clip]. During his first few months in the White House, Trump placed oil executives and climate deniers to head the Department of the Interior and Energy.
Cut down regulations for fossil fuels, and has hacked at renewable and electrification subsidies. Essentially, while he scapegoats immigrants and people of color for America's problems, he's letting fossil capital set fire to the planet. And we're seeing this outside the US with the rise of Germany's far-right party AFD and Sweden's far-right party. Trump and his fossil fascist counterparts across the globe mark a new low in the descent into climate chaos and the consolidation of power in the hands of fossil capitalists. But the problem
is that the current capitalist alternative to fossil fascism has also worked hand in hand to facilitate business as usual. Perhaps in a far less obvious way, liberal capitalist figureheads like Biden or Macron have spearheaded a response to global warming that has meant decades of inaction and the continued accumulation of power and profits in the hands of fossil capitalists. And key to the false action of these liberal leaders is the idea of climate overshoot. The Liberal Response: Overshoot While Trump hands the reigns of power to fossil capital, the other option capitalism presents
us with, exemplified in Biden or even the Green Party in Germany, seems to be doing the necessary climate work. They're hosting climate summits and making net zero pledges. But as we will soon see, they are just paying lip service to action while acquiescing to business as usual- to the relentless drive of fossil capitalism. The Biden administration, for example, oversaw a massive expansion of oil drilling on public lands- a fossil fuel build-out that outpaced even Trump's first presidential term. During his presidency, Biden expedited pipeline construction
and facilitated record US oil production, and as a result under his administration, the US retook its place as the global leading exporter of liquified natural gas. In short, Biden, while championing his administration's environmental purity, was avoiding confronting and indeed aiding fossil capitalists. We even saw this in Germany as its Green Party approved the destruction of the hamlet of Luzerath to expand a lignite coal mine, and in 2022, the Green Party's economy minister was elated after securing a 15-year liquid natural gas deal with Qatar, explaining "Fifteen years
is great… I wouldn't have anything against 20-year or even longer contracts." In short, liberal capitalist governments, while establishing some renewable and clean energy initiatives, are, in reality, overseeing the continued expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure and locking in decades more emissions. Liberal governments are avoiding the one solution that will actually lessen the blow of climate chaos: directly confronting and dismantling fossil fuel production. But how could this be? These capitalist liberals are supposed to be climate warriors right? Aren't
they supposed to be overseeing the renewable energy transition they've claimed so many times is on the horizon? The key piece to this contradiction, this doublethink, this failure of the Paris Agreement, the failure to contain global heating to 1.5°C, is the mythical promise of overshoot. An insidious tool of capitalist climate governments that allows world leaders to set goals and claim climate action, while actually acquiessing to business-as-usual. But what is overshoot? The co-author of the book Overshoot, Andreas Malm, explains in an interview with the BreakDown, ["the idea of overshoot is basically that you can set
a limit to global warming and uh you can respect that limit by exceeding it and then returning to it"]. Essentially overshoot claims that the world can hurtle past 1.5°C of warming, hit some determined peak of warming, and then in the future, when technologies are more developed and cheaper, use carbon capture to drawdown emissions from the atmosphere bringing global temperatures back below 1.5°C. Reading between the lines, this allows global leaders to do nothing right now. It allows them to claim that they are working to address climate change without having to directly
confront fossil capital and destroy the immense profits borne out of fossil fuel production. Unfortunately, overshoot has become institutionalized as the path forward. Most climate models and climate pledges are steeped in this overshoot ideology. According to Andreas Malm and Wim Carton in Overshoot, out of the 578 scenarios included in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's special report on 1.5°C of warming, 568 included some amount of overshoot. So, just 10 scenarios did not rely on some future scaling up of carbon removal to save us from disaster.
The epicenter of this destructive overshoot ideology has been the annual conference of parties, more commonly known as COP. A yearly climate summit where fossil fuel barons can claim that 1.5C is still the goal while they lock in more and more oil and gas infrastructure [play clip]. These conferences have come to reveal the pageantry that is liberal capitalist climate action. Lacking any sort of binding legislation or contracts, the yearly COPs have become theater for world leaders to claim that they are "doing the work." As Malm and Carton argue, "The annual
summits became occasions for the incantation of optimism about a win-win low-carbon transition already underway…what mattered is not what anyone did, but what these leaders appeared to be doing, as seen from the audience floor." Overshoot has become an insidiously magical and effective tool for the capitalist elite. It allows for the contradiction of claiming 1.5C is the goal while doing the opposite- leaving climate action for future generations and allowing for the continued scaling up of fossil fuel infrastructure. But why exactly is overshoot
bad? If we can capture carbon from the atmosphere in the future, why should we be worried right now? Overshoot is scam: The concept of overshooting our climate targets and then attempting to reverse the damage that transgression has caused is a dangerous gamble. Because, the consequences of exceeding 1.5°C, 2°C, or even 2.5°C of warming will be irreversible and catastrophic. Under those temperatures, our landscapes will be transformed, extreme weather events will become more frequent and intense, and ecosystems will collapse. Not to mention, sea levels will rise, displacing millions.
The core of the overshoot ideology is decidedly rotten. Because faith in the success of overshoot means a belief in the power of carbon capture. Whether through bioenergy carbon capture and storage or through direct air capture, the champions of overshoot and indeed the majority of climate action pathways claim that we need a mass scale-up of carbon removal technologies. The problem is that these technologies are untested and unproven at a mass scale. Bioenergy carbon capture and storage, for example, would require land 1 to 2 times the size of India,
as it relies on growing carbon-removing crops to burn and use for fuel, and as of 2023, there are only 6 plants in operation. Meanwhile, directly capturing carbon out of the air is essentially a pipedream. While there are a few operational plants, they are just that, few. The current, very optimistic rollout of direct carbon capture by 2030, which includes all projects still in the concept stage, still falls short of the 2050 net zero energy goal according to the International Energy Agency. What's even more concerning is that these technologies currently represent less than
0.1% of all carbon removed from the atmosphere. If we're already struggling to scale up renewables at a rapid pace, why on earth should we expect to do so with carbon removal? And we would need a massive scale-up of carbon capture technology. This paper estimates that up to 400 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide would need to be removed from the atmosphere by 2100 to limit warming to 1.5 °C… "In emissions terms, that is equivalent to running the US energy industry in reverse for around 80 years." Not to mention, these carbon removal technologies should be focused
on eliminating and quickly abating any lingering sectors that we're still trying to decarbonize- not occupied with the emissions of business as usual and comparably easy sectors to switch to zero carbon. Essentially, overshoot leans heavily on the fabrication of carbon capture. It claims that we can emit all we want now because someday down the road we'll have carbon removal at a scale that can turn back the clock on the climate. But those promised technologies are unproven and untested at the scale many overshoot pathways demand.
But even if carbon capture technologies did work at the scale we need them to, shooting past 1.5C of warming will cause innumerable climate catastrophes while we wait for mass carbon capture deployment. Once we breach 1.5C of warming and head towards 2C, we increase the likelihood of four irreversible tipping points. As Malm explains in an interview with BreakDown ["6:39 there's a cluster of these tipping points between 1.5 and 2 degrees that's when the melting of the Greenland ice sheet becomes irreversible which means 7 MERS of sea level rise same with the
West Antarctic ice sheet same with the potential collapse of the Amazon into a Savannah and the melting of the permafrost']. So, overshooting 1.5C would mean the permanent death of coral reefs, the Amazon turning into savannah, the complete meltdown of the Greenland, and West Antarctic Ice sheet, and the melting of boreal permafrost, all of which are irreversible. Put another way, no amount of carbon capture will be able to reconstruct coral reefs or the ice sheets.
Again Malm argues ["the true extremism here is not to insist on 1.5 degrees as a Target but it is to just let things continue in the hope that we can have some kind of techno fix towards the end of the century if these tipping points are crossed there's no going back"]. In essence, overshoot condemns us to a world drastically different than the one we know and love today. Not only does overshoot draw us closer to catastrophic tipping points, but it also assures the continued death and destruction wrought by supercharged droughts, storms, floods, and fires. It means more storms like Daniel that decimated Libya
or even worse wildfires than those that hit Los Angeles earlier this year. And these disasters will hit poor and marginalized people the hardest. Leading Malm and Carton to claim that overshoot is an act of paupercide. The ruling class is choosing business as usual and the pursuit of profits now in exchange for the immiseration of millions in the coming future. And given this destruction, why on earth should we put our faith in future capitalist leaders to do the heavy lifting when the current ones are avoiding the task of confronting fossil fuels
at all costs? I'll say it again, overshoot is an immense gamble. One that ensures the deaths of millions and a cascade of tipping points in the hopes that untested technologies will someday save us. Overshoot exploits future generations so that the current ruling class may profit, plain and simple. Malm and Carton compare it to "hosting a massive party in which you let the guests set the roof on fire, flood the basement and spoil the garden, only to then move out and leave the repair bill on the table for your children and grandchildren to take care
of." And the longer we wait to confront fossil capital-to dismantle fossil fuel production-the deeper ingrained that production will become in our economy. Infrastructure, profits, and emission will grow, making it even more difficult for future generations to scrape back below 1.5C of warming. Overshoot is not the answer nor is fossil fascism. The only way to avoid tipping points and prevent climate change is to directly confront fossil capital. To end fossil fuel use altogether. We Must Strand Assets: In 2022, leftist leader Gustavo Petro ascended to the Colombian presidency on a wave of mass democratic support. This
was a moment in environmental history because Petro was an unabashed climate warrior. Unlike the false promises of Biden or the German Green Party, Petro seems genuinely committed to cutting emissions. With a democratic mandate behind him, Petro announced and set in motion the phase-out of all fossil fuel production in Colombia. Petro is doing what no other state leader is doing. He is actually confronting fossil capital head-on and banning fossil fuels. Colombia is now a case study on state-led climate action. One that doesn't just scale up renewables, but also bans
and dismantles fossil fuel production. Because, the solution to climate change is quite simple, we must end the fossil fuel industry, which at its core means stranding billions, if not trillions of dollars in fossil fuel pipelines, rigs, mines, tankers, and so much more. This is an economy-shattering and revolutionary task in a world where so much is reliant on fossil fuels. Indeed, this paper estimates that stranding fossil fuel assets to meet 1.8C or 1.5C would mean a $13-17 trillion loss for oil and gas producers. The authors then write "This implies
a strong incentive for fossil fuel producers to continue resisting climate stabilization." Which is why we're seeing the combination of overshoot ideology and fossil fascism burst into climate politics. And when you consider the fact that the biggest banks are heavily invested in fossil fuel companies, while everything from plastics to food production runs on oil and gas extraction, the dismantling of the fossil fuel industry would mean a complete overhaul of the economy- a mass stranding of assets on a scale we've never seen. According to the founder of the Carbon Tracker
Initiative, halting fossil fuel extraction and production could mean economy-wide losses four or five times larger than the 2008 financial crisis. But the longer we wait, the larger the crisis will be. Fossil capitalists will continue to pour more money into fixed capital in the form of oil wells, pipelines, and rigs the longer we keep delaying the confrontation. As Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno writes "The more the system expands, the more it hardens into what it has always been." So, the long we wait, the more drastic the battle with fossil capital will be.
It makes sense, then, why liberal capitalist leaders are so reluctant to confront fossil capital and end fossil fuel production. A 100% renewable world without fossil fuel emissions requires challenging the foundations of our capitalist economy. It means an escape from profit and capitalism. Overshoot allows leaders to ignore that challenge for now. The ruling class can conveniently kick the can down the road to later generations. But this confrontation must happen eventually. Otherwise, the world will continue to heat up and descend further into
climate chaos. There are historical parallels to the mass stranding of fossil fuel assets, like the abolition of slavery in the US or the 1917 seizure of assets by the Bolsheviks in Russia. These were world-shaking events, but necessary for the well-being of so many. A 100% renewable world without fossil fuels is possible we just have to have the courage to challenge capitalism and dismantle the fossil fuel empire. But right now, that fossil fuel empire is gaining steam, especially in the United States where Trump has taken power once again is attempting to rip down environmental policy left and right.
It feels like every day there's a new executive action striking, firing EPA workers, or censoring climate science, and then the next day the motion is overturned in the courts. Like in the case of the USDA restoring climate change-related pages to their website after a lawsuit. Under Trump and in this age of disinformation and media bias, it can be hard actually know what's going on, especially with climate policy, which is why I've been using this video's sponsor Ground News to peer past the curtain of media bias and stay up to date with Trump's anti-environmental agenda. For this story, of the more than 35 sources compiled,
over 40% leaned left while less than 20% leaned center. Comparing the headlines with Ground News's Bias Comparison, we can see how the contents of these articles differ (show Bias Comparison feature, located under primary story headline). For example, left-leaning outlets frame the USDA's removal of climate change webpages as a clear violation of federal law and a harmful censorship effort, while center-leaning outlets adopt a neutral, procedural tone, describing the restoration as a "positive sign" without casting blame. I've been using Ground News for a long time because of tools like bias comparison that helps make sense of Trump's anti-climate agenda. Ground News is a website and app
that collects over 50,000 media sources into one place and lets you compare how headlines are being covered across the political spectrum. Every story comes with a quick visual breakdown of the political bias, factuality, and ownership of the sources reporting - all backed by ratings from three independent news monitoring organizations. The layout of Ground News allows you to quickly compare headlines and articles to see what information is emphasized or left out. I especially like the Blindspot feed, which highlights stories that are disproportionately covered by one side of the political spectrum. Especially when it comes to news about climate
change, I think it's really important to see what articles on both sides of the political spectrum are missing. Which is why I use Ground News literally every day. You can go to ground.news/occ or scan the QR code on screen today to get 40% off their Vantage Subscription, which includes a feature called my news bias. It's basically a dashboard that visualizes your news diet over time. It shows your top news sources, whether you engage with different perspectives, what topics you're interested in and a lot more. Go to ground.news/occ, scan the QR code on screen or click the link in the description today to
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