The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It's Too Late

by Andreas Malm, Wim Carton

Overview

A scathing critique of proposals to geoengineer our way out of climate disaster, by the bestselling author of How to Blow Up a Pipline

Warming is about to hit one and a half degrees, perhaps two degrees soon after. What do we do then?

In the overshoot era, schemes abound for turning the heat down at a later date, by means of technologies for removing CO2 from the air or blocking sunlight. Such technologies are by no means safe: they come with immense risks. Like magical promises of future redemption, they provide reasons for continuing emissions in the present. But do they also hold some potentials? Can the catastrophe be reversed, masked or simply adapted to, once it is a fact? Or will any such roundabout measure rather make things worse? This book maps the new frontlines in the struggle for a liveable planet and insists on the climate revolution long overdue. In the end, no technologies can absolve us of its tasks.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781836740308
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	10/07/2025
Pages:	656
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x (d)

About the Author

Wim Carton is associate professor of sustainability science at Lund University, Sweden. He’s the author of over 20 academic articles and book chapters on climate politics. His work has appeared in top journals such as Nature Climate Change, WIRES Climate Change and Antipode.

Andreas Malm is associate professor of human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of several acclaimed books, such as, with the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. His book How to Blow Up a Pipeline is an international bestseller and has been turned into a feature film.

Editorial Reviews

"The Long Heat is a vital corrective to the public conversation about technology, ideology and the climate. If you still believe or hope that climate catastrophe can be averted through technological rather than political change, I urge you to read this book."
—Sally Rooney, author of Normal People

"Don’t be fooled by talk of the green transition: fossil fuels haven’t gone anywhere. Andreas Malm and Wim Carton methodically identify fossil capital’s strategies for adapting to a warming world, from carbon removal to geoengineering, and relentlessly dismantle their logics. Pairing exhaustive research with controlled fury, The Long Heat is an indispensable guide to the grim future that lies in store if fossil capital continues to dominate our planet—and a powerful charge to defeat it."
—Alyssa Battistoni

"A sharp analysis of the dizzying catalogue of strange, sometimes promising, more often doomed technologies defining this next stage of ecological crisis and the forces behind them. Malm and Carton are essential guides through capital’s vision for the future, and the pathways for reclaiming it."
—Adrienne Buller, author and editor of The BREAK-DOWN

"In the showrooms of climate politics, speculative techno-fixes are moving centre stage, manifesting the fantasy that capitalism can coexist with a stable climate. Carton and Malm shoot them down, one by one. Each techno-fix will fail, and fail spectacularly in a cascading cataclysm that intensifies with the crossing of each earth-system tipping point. Nature is dialectical, climate processes can tip and jump, but The Long Heat also looks to a different dialectic: the leaps of human history. This is a book for the climate movement in an era of accelerating peril. It will help us find the emergency brake, and work out which climate technologies can fit anti-capitalist hands."
—Gareth Dale, author of Between State Capitalism and Globalisation

From the Publisher