Is it Really Too Late? On Recent Debates About the Climate Crisis, Capitalism, and the Question of Transition

2024 was the warmest year ever recorded with a 1.6°C global average temperature increase while emissions are still rising. Compared to the first Trump presidency, the second feels like a tectonic shift with regards to how the unfolding climate crisis is portrayed in Western political discourse and politically dealt with under heavy influence of almost a decade of Trumpism and the rise of the far right. The liberal political agenda of ‘green growth’ has been watered down under nationalist pressures to encompass energy security and autonomy–as in the EU–or even completely abandoned–as in the US. Yet, it would be misleading to read this shift as the ascent of ‘climate denialism’ into the echelons of power. It rather resembles a situation of intentional neglect of the ruling classes with regards to climate mitigation. In fact, despite the ‘anti-climate science rhetoric’ of Trump, the unfolding climate crisis has increasingly moved to the heart of his nationalist agenda; it is just read through the racist articulations of immigration swarms, bordering, and militarism. Recall that one of the main reasons behind Trump's obsession with Greenland was that the melting arctic would open frozen sea corridors with Russia and new sites for mineral extraction. This agenda is backed by an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power at the US American Tech-Finance-nexus within the core of global capitalism, where a small fraction of the capitalist classes holds significant control over unimaginable financial resources and the digital communication infrastructures spanning the planet. In other words, we find ourselves in the unstable world of escalating wealth inequalities and capitalist competition where proposals of ‘green growth’-style climate mitigation are increasingly sidelined against the backdrop of military expansion and nationalist rivalries. Against this backdrop, another approach has taken centre stage: ‘adaptation’. This essay discusses two books that speak to the question of whether ‘it is too late already’ to do anything about the climate crisis, albeit from very different perspectives. Both books foreground the need for a realistic political outlook by grappling with ‘the question of what makes up meaningful politics when catastrophe is already a fact’ (Malm and Carton 2024, 52). While the authors agree that what remains of effective mitigation would require a revolutionary overhaul of capitalism and that ‘green growth’ is an impossibility (in line with a large body of work in fields such as in eco-Marxism, e.g., Burkett 1999; Foster 2000), they identify different causes of the problem and come to very different conclusions of what is to be done. However, this review argues that the question of whether ‘it is too late already’ for climate mitigation is distracting because both possible answers can be used to justify almost any political agenda (revolutionary or reactionary) from maintaining to overthrowing capitalism. It is a co-opted question that represents defeatism disguised as ‘scientific’ debate. Part of the problem is that the political implications that follow from both answers are often justified by reference to the (im-)possibility of the ‘revolution’. When we ask ‘if it is too late’ and answer with ‘yes’, it is easy to rule out radical change by declaring a revolution to be unrealistic and thus impossible. If the answer is ‘no’, a political project that corresponds to the urgency of the unfolding crisis is difficult to imagine as anything but the necessary and desired Revolution–used as a shortcut, a placeholder for the messy and complicated question of how to make radical social change happen. This kind of magical thinking is fed by an abstract idea of revolution as a singular event of a mass uprising overthrowing the existing social order. The Revolution becomes the necessary and easy way out of the conundrum of what is to be done about the climate crisis. In other words, what is to be done is implicitly foregrounded at the expense of the crucial issue of how to make a revolutionary transition to overcome capitalism happen. Instead, I argue that sociological research should centre the question of ‘how’ when thinking about a revolutionary overhaul to address the climate crisis–in other words, thinking revolution as a concrete social and political process of transition–and suggest that durable democratic political organisations are part of the answer. Beckert’s (2025), How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change, suggests that ‘it is too late’ for effective climate mitigation. Its title hints already at the author's pessimistic outlook on the questions of what can and should be done about climate change. In an intellectual linage that goes back to Talcott Parson's systems theory, Beckert's structural functionalist account does not identify any possibilities for transformative social change to overcome capitalism, and it remains sceptical that any alternative social system could be built on a less destructive relation to nature. This idealist account of capitalism as an economic system based on competing future-oriented narratives erases the material dimension of class conflict and instead reads social struggles as conflicts between different, all-encompassing abstract ideas. While the book recognizes that radical social change through the articulation of ideas about a more just and equitable society alone is impossible, it remains blind to the limits of its own theoretical assumptions premised on social stability. That is why, instead of the question of social change, the main concern of Beckert's book is the question of how to maintain social order under capitalism within the unfolding climate crisis. Taking a more optimistic outlook than it seems from the book title, Malm and Carton’s (2024) Overshoot: How the World surrendered to Climate Breakdown draws on a historical materialist framework that understands capitalism as based in a historically specific set of social relations and centres class conflict as the driver of history. Against this backdrop, the book explores ‘overshoot’ as an ideology legitimating the status quo based on the idea that a certain temperature limit (e.g., 1.5°C) could temporarily be exceeded because non-existent technologies would eventually help to remove emissions from the atmosphere and bring the temperature back down again within the initial limit. Since this reasoning renders all debates about temperature limits ad absurdum, the authors stress the necessity of a socialist revolution for which it could never be too late. This is because overthrowing capitalism is a historical necessity that has (if anything) become ever more urgent, particularly from the perspective of people in the peripheries who are suffering the most from the unfolding climate crisis. Accordingly, the book is concerned with finding revolutionary political possibilities to fundamentally challenge (and overcome) the current social order. ‘No, it can't be too late because it will only get worse’: despite the already unfolding disastrous consequences of the climate crisis, those will only get worse the longer the concentration of GHG in the atmosphere increases. ‘Yes, it is, too late because it cannot be avoided anymore’: climate change is already an unfolding crisis that will literally lead to more severe catastrophes the longer emissions continue (and even if emissions would be reduced to zero tomorrow, there is a time lag effect between the existing concentration of emissions and temperature response). The seeds of the main political implications of both books are already contained in the functionalist dimensions of their (albeit very different) theoretical frameworks. While both books agree with (1), they ultimately slip into (2) to justify their opposed political implications: Beckert's book argues that it’s too late for a revolutionary overhaul of capitalism because (2) it is too late for effectively mitigating the climate crisis. Malm & Carton argue that it’s too late for anything but a Revolution conceived as an event or rupture because (2) would imply that there is no time left for seeking a process of transition to overcome capitalism. By foreclosing the possibility of a radical transition–not in a liberal sense of ‘green transition’ but rather in the form of Poulantzas’ (2000) ‘democratic road to socialism’–both books sideline the pressing question of how to (re-)build mass movements on a democratically run, durable organizational basis that confronts the dominant classes and could enable the radical transformation of the state with the aim of overcoming capitalism. I argue that such a foreclosure is unhelpful and problematic (in the case of Beckert) or premature (in the case of Malm & Carton), and that the functionalist dimensions of the theoretical frameworks that help the authors to establish that foreclosure remain unconvincing. The structural functionalist interactions of society's subsystems in Beckert's account can only lead to political compromise because its theoretical framework neglects social conflict by default, and thus (in a self-defeating manner) also the possibility of a collective political subject that could radically challenge the capitalist order. In contrast, the functionalist dimension of Malm and Carton's account is characterized by a highly deterministic reading of global finance as an abstract and automatically unfolding process of money capital circulation depicted as serving the function to facilitate the breakdown of That is the authors centre the ultimately misleading question of how to politically in the global financial system to bring down capitalism. 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