Wim Carton and Andreas Malm’s latest book, The Long Heat, develops their revolutionary climate politics – first articulated in Overshoot (Verso, 2024) – to account for a world without climate transition. They characterise the current conjuncture as one of “too-late-ness” with decarbonisation targets missed, deadlines passed, and tipping points crossed. So where do we go from here?

The authors identify three main responses: adaptation, carbon removal and geoengineering. They show how each has been deployed by reactionary forces to undermine cli-mate mitigation and protect fossil capital from its necessary destruction. One great irony, though, is that each so-called alternative is not actually viable without the mitigation it’s so cynically mobilised against.

Adaptation is considered most briefly of the three, though the authors’ argument is almost self-evident. The hotter the planet becomes, the harder it will be to adapt. They contend that adaptation (e.g. flood defences, Nature restoration, building upgrades, price controls) might be impactful at half a degree of warming but that five or six degrees will surely overwhelm such measures. Existing emissions mean that we must adapt to guaranteed climate shocks, but this on its own is certainly futile. Now that it’s “too late”, revolutionary mitigation and adaptation must go hand in hand as the foundation of climate politics.

The defence of fossil capital is even more starkly the raison d’être of carbon removal, such as direct air capture, and bio-energy with carbon capture and storage. These technologies underpin a strategy of “overshoot and return”, where the ruling class wilfully miss mitigation targets before planning to drag us back from the brink with audacious schemes to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Industrial capitalism can (supposedly) have its cake and eat it: fossil fuel production continues and warming is halted.

Of course, this is a fool’s errand. Climate effects like sea level rises are not reversible through carbon removal. That would require a more profound cooling. It is true, though, that there is already too much carbon in the atmosphere. As with adaptation, the authors’ challenging contribution is to insist that carbon removal must now play a role. The key questions are how and by whom the technologies are deployed. Again, socio-ecological revolution and rapid mitigation are not just ideologically desirable, but structurally necessary to ensure their safe and effective use.

Geoengineering, unlike adaptation and carbon removal, is shown to have no redeeming features. The authors demonstrate how technologies as absurd as reflecting the sun’s light back into space or hanging giant light bulbs over the Amazon rain-forest are fundamentally driven by denial. These technologies are essentially ecologically destructive, with only potential to exacerbate the current crisis the more and longer they are used. The authors conclude with a call to action: geoengineering must become the target of “uncompromising luddite resistance”. No matter how late it comes, revolutionary mitigation remains the core imperative of climate politics.

This argument is a vital corrective to worrying political tendencies, among climate activists to focus singularly on adaptation, and among the wider left to neglect climate politics altogether. Both imply a path to climate catastrophe. By contrast, the political argument in The Long Heat is among the most clarifying distillations of what is at stake and, most importantly, what must be done. We must constantly refocus attention on the necessity of attacking investment in fossil fuel production at every opportunity. As the book’s subtitle attests, it is too late to focus on this exclusively. But it must never be abandoned.

The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late by Wim Carton and Andreas Malm. Verso, 2025. ISBN: 9781836740308

Chris Saltmarsh is a postgraduate researcher studying the climate movement and is the author of Burnt (Pluto Press).