This article is an abridged excerpt from The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, published in October 2025 by Verso Books. Buy a copy here.
Imagine that global heating is left untreated. It is rather easy to picture the storm continuing to progress as it has for years now – but for how long, before something larger breaks? One day, it might reach a pitch of intensity that makes the inert order of capitalist society snap.
People in charge could suffer a panic attack: something has to be done, immediately, to get this situation under control. We can imagine the activation of a tipping point having this effect – perhaps an ice shelf too large to ignore breaks off, or the permafrost sends clouds of methane billowing over the north, or, come to think of it, the Amazon bursts into flames.
It could be a localised avalanche that pushes policymakers over the edge. Imagine Los Angeles is consumed by a firestorm larger than that of January 2025. Or Miami is lost to the waves after a hurricane of indelible force.
Climate fiction and science contains no small number of scenarios, and ripples and cascades may sally forth from each: the loss of Miami induces a financial meltdown. Or – nothing can be ruled out – the ever-expanding circles of climate suffering usher in a revolutionary situation and send the spectre of capital destruction marching through the streets and setting off panic in the palaces.
Any number of combinations of events may bring it about. No one can tell beforehand which disaster will cause a fit of terror in high places. All that is needed is for the heating to keep progressing and then something will, sooner or later, create what we might call a control emergency.
Emergency is old news in climate change. From Canada to Korea, authorities have declared ‘states of emergency’ when some province or other has been destroyed by fire or flood. Movements circling the globe at the end of the 2010s demanded official declarations of a ‘climate emergency’; in an achievement of sorts, the Oxford Dictionary picked this term as the word of the year for 2019. Its use had jumped by 10,796% over one single year, testimony to the influence of the Greta Thunberg generation. When she and her comrades spoke of ‘emergency’, what they meant was, to put it crudely, that things were now so bad that business-as-usual must be broken. They called for a rupture with the status quo.
A control emergency would have another logic, more akin to a branch of government reacting to disaster, but projecting that reaction to the planetary scale. Here the purpose would be to restore and conserve the status quo, minus the destructive heat – to get back to the way things were before the bad tidings. A control emergency, in other words, is one in which dominant classes experience an imminent loss of control over society, and look around for an instrument by which to reestablish and prop up control before it is fully lost. What might they find?
Negative emissions technologies would not be suitable at this moment. Scientists proposing lamps over the rainforest had the temerity of calling it “an emergency solution if society relies heavily on carbon removal to adjust the Earth’s climate,” but there is nothing to suggest that it would work at the speed required.
Direct air capture technology (DAC) would be a more serious contender. From the one modelling of emergency DAC to date, we learn that an acute climate crisis – so perceived from on high – would rally people to the mission of containing it. But this would happen “in ways that reinforce existing interest groups such as industrial producers,” so that “big emitting industrial practices could remain in place.”
Governments would be so agitated as to pay almost anything for what must now be a truly quick fix. They would gladly print money for DAC. A no-holds-barred wartime-like mobilisation could commence in 2025. Nevertheless, the machines would take time to construct, and time to draw down CO2, and time to cut actual temperatures, so that by 2100 the global average would be between 0.1°C and 0.2°C lower than without this whole effort – one paltry tenth or fifth of a degree Celsius. (On the assumption that DAC capacity hits close to 30 gigatonnes by the end of the century.) In a rapidly warming world, few would notice this as even a breath of fresh air.
DAC would operate too much like a gradualist machine in the moment of catastrophe. Whatever negative emissions technologies can possibly accomplish, it would take decades, perhaps more than a century, to empty the atmosphere and cool the Earth measurably. In an all-out control emergency, there would be no patience for such a long wait.
Iron Dome for the planet
In the warehouse of technologies, only one has a known capacity to give instant relief. Block incoming sunlight. Shoot or spray soot into the stratosphere. Erect a parasol around the Earth, so that less heat from the sun makes it here. Geoengineering alone can cut temperatures from one month to the next; if temperatures are rising and spiralling uncontrollably, geoengineering and geoengineering alone has the potential to subdue them.
Temperatures are a function of the amount of solar radiation striking the surface of the Earth and the amount trapped in its atmosphere as it tries to depart. Positive and negative emissions change the latter variable – the heat that is held up in transit – while ‘solar radiation management’, as the term indicates, tinkers only with the former. It leaves CO2 and other greenhouse gases in peace. Bypassing the proximate drivers of global heating, it aims for a background condition that never had any role in fomenting it: the luminosity of the sun itself, as seen from Earth.
Geoengineering alone has the power to break the causal link between temperatures on the one hand and atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and its lesser peer gases on the other. Deploy it with sufficient pressure and perseverance and these concentrations may well continue to rise without temperatures doing so – something truly new under the sun, a change of the basic equation of climate politics. Or so it would indeed seem.
A control emergency ending with the deployment of geoengineering would fit only too well into the modus operandi of twenty-first-century capitalist society. When a crisis breaks out, it is never treated below the level of symptoms.
The financial crash of 2008 was papered over with trillions of dollars from central banks. Dominant classes were in a state of panic after Lehman Brothers and swiftly corralled the necessary funds for bailouts and other measures to bring things under control, without dealing with the underlying causes of instability, rather left to fester and mutate.
In early 2020, another exigency exploded in their faces, and the reflexive reaction was to conjure up a technology with immediate effect: apart from the lockdowns, a vaccine. Covid-19 could have been an occasion to deal with the drivers of zoonotic spillover, notably tropical deforestation, but nothing was done to rein it in (in fact, logging soared to new heights during the pandemic).
Whenever migrants would try to cross into the EU or the US in ‘waves’, as they were referred to, the invariable response was further fortification of the borders. Bring out the patrols, the surveillance, the walls. The misery driving people onto boats and treks was as, a matter of course, never addressed.
When the crisis in the Gaza Strip erupted into open conflict and the resistance fired projectiles towards the ethnically cleansed homeland, a first response was to switch on the Iron Dome – an advanced technological system for detecting and intercepting rockets in the troposphere, plucking them like fruits fizzing in the air – followed by the whole machinery of kinetic superpower for stomping Palestinians back into the ground. The occupation became more entrenched every passing year.
Examples of this logic could be multiplied on end. In each mentioned, we can discern something approaching a control emergency: a stress factor that must be managed; little time to lose; a balance of forces skewed so heavily in favour of the dominant classes that they can pick the instrument most solicitous of the status quo. 21st century society appears constitutionally incapable of solving any problem. All it can do is to expunge symptoms.
Perhaps capitalism has never been capable of correcting its own manners, but there have been times when the balance of forces compelled it to accept the shutdown of at least some root causes – decolonisation in the 1970s being one of the last cases. Because it now succeeds to excess, it keeps producing symptoms of crisis and stays unqualified for anything other than their most superficial treatment. In its excremental stage, capitalism is so bloated from victory, so unable to exercise any retention or restraint that it swims from one pool of its own shit into another and has to design new hazmat suits to keep going.
Geoengineering would be the latest, arguably the most all-embracing, model. It would slot the climate problem into the standard-operating high-tech procedures of contemporary capitalism. A desperate and blanket attempt to take down the symptom, rather than a desperate and precise attempt to take down the cause.
We are thus likely to confront geoengineering. It has been sitting in the back of the consciousness of climate politics for some time, like an Iron Dome to be rolled out if the fire becomes unbearable.
In 2006, Paul Crutzen published an editorial in Climatic Change that famously broke the taboo on the topic. It was not so much shrill sponsorship that pushed geoengineering to the fore over the next two decades. Rather, this option gained force for every year of unrestrained business-as-usual and exacerbated impacts. There was a sense that every season of disaster brought it one step closer to the arena: how many more heatwaves or hurricanes, droughts or deluges before someone called it up?
Geoengineering has been a – the – deus ex machina waiting in the wings. Fewer than two decades after Crutzen’s editorial, it has made something of a leap out into the open, and reached the phase of startup companies.
This article is an edited excerpt from ‘The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late’, published in October 2025 by Verso Books. Buy a copy here.
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, including in 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, including How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown with Wim Carton, and White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism with the Zetkin Collective.
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