“Radical” stems from the Latin for “root,” and the root problem of our times is a climate wobbling like a top on its final rotations. This root problem forms the core of Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, a new book by Wim Carton and Andreas Malm, which explores how we engineered the climate crisis and how only radical action might extract us from it.

Even a cursory glance at this book shows its authors’ convictions on the matter. “What,” they ask, “makes up meaningful politics when catastrophe is already a fact?” And: “When Is It Too Late?” As to that last question, Carton, an associate professor at Lund University, Sweden, who specializes in sustainability, and Malm, an eco-Marxist of the same rank at that institution, have a clear answer: Not yet. Any attempt at mitigating the crisis, however, will have to subvert political and economic elites and their agendas “with a force and confrontational resolve unlike anything in the common memory or imagination.”

The great obstacle to efforts at mitigation is overshoot, a juncture at which “officially declared limits to global warming are exceeded ... and the dominant classes responsible for the excess throw up their hands in resignation and accept that intolerable heat is coming.” The prevailing mood among those in power is to “let it continue for the time being, and then we shall sort things out towards the end of this century.” Essentially, temperatures, after exceeding upper-limit targets, would be brought down later through carbon-removal technologies.

To drive home the urgency and redirect the dialogue about the crisis, the authors choose their words deliberately, favoring “climate crisis” and “climate breakdown” over the non-committal, milquetoast “climate change.” Language matters. Climate has always changed, but never before as drastically, as unpredictably, or as rapidly as now. Even “warming” sounds ... well, tepid. At times, Malm and Carton’s assessment of language and terminology veers into the poetic, no small feat and a relief with such abstract matter. Climate-science acronyms, in their apt phrasing, are “so much linguistic litter churned out onto the beach, seemingly destined to be swept away by the rising seas.”

The 1.5-degree temperature increase environmentalists campaigned for as a limit, many scientists agree, is no longer realistic. And we aren’t exactly heading in the right direction; we saw a 2 gigaton CO₂ emissions increase in 2021 alone — 6 percent of total emissions, the largest leap yet. The authors have a way of making such head-spinning numbers concrete, as when they compare two gigatons to the weight of two hundred million African elephants. Try to visualize the amount of gas that balances even a single elephant on a scale!

The seldom-addressed pachyderm in the room is that fossil-fuel production is still rising. At current rates, humanity’s carbon budget, if we want to stop short of “the boundary between tolerable and intolerable heating,” will be maxed out in only nine years. To stay safe, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns, not a single new oil or gas field or coal mine worldwide can be approved.

But geoengineering, “the art of blocking incoming sunlight,” is the elites’ messianic cure-all. Next to fossil fuels, it is the authors’ bête noire. Carton and Malm point out that all options to avert a full meltdown — adaptation, carbon dioxide removal, and geoengineering — require more technology, more natural resources. And they are largely untested or hitherto inefficient.

“There is,” the writers believe, “no path to a livable planet that does not pass through the complete destruction of business-as-usual.” Malm previously laid out a roadmap in his 2021 “direct action” manifesto How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which Hollywood promptly simplified into an action flick. That predecessor, while not a monkey-wrenching technical manual, was a self-help book of the best kind, one badly needed. Its sequel, though not as provocative, exposes the socioeconomic and scientific underpinnings for why we should be acting boldly and decisively, and it brims with crucial ancillary facts. Readers who — still, despite all evidence — expect fixes from within the current system, will find much to loathe in either book. Malm and Carton aspire to channel those sentiments into direct action: people marching, petitioning, litigating, divesting, sitting in, blockading, and engaging in other forms of resistance.