Fossil Capital

Andreas Malm teaches human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. His work has appeared in journals such as Environmental History , Historical Materialism , Antipode and Organization & Environment . He is the author, with Shora Esmailian, of Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War , and of half a dozen books in Swedish on political economy, the Middle East and climate change.

"Malm forcefully unmasks the assumption that economic growth has inevitably brought us to the brink of a hothouse Earth. Rather, as he shows in a subtle and surprising reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution, it has been the logic of capital (especially the need to valorize immense sunk investments in fossil fuels), not technology or even industrialism per se, that has driven global warming."
-Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and Ecology of Fear

" Fossil Capital is a theoretical masterpiece and a political-economic-ecological manifesto. It looks unblinkingly at the catastrophe that could await human society if we fail to act on the words System Change or Climate Change. It is a book that I will return to again and again-and take notes."
-John Bellamy Foster, University of Oregon, author of Marx's Ecology

"The definitive deep history on how our economic system created the climate crisis. Superb, essential reading from one of the most original thinkers on the subject."
-Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine

"A unique reconceptualization of the relationship between nature, capitalism, and Marxism."
- Jacobin

"Remarkable book."
-Benjamin Kunkel, London Review of Books

"This is a denser, wonkier, and more historical survey of the long, ugly marriage between fossil fuels and capitalism-in fact, between fossil fuels and the entire history of economic growth."
-David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine

"Malm builds a deep, insight-packed history of how society came to be in thrall to the twin engines of combustion and capital."
-Barbara Kiser, Nature

"His thorough account of the switch to steam shows quite convincingly that coal did not make Britain great for everyone, and the transition was rooted not in technological superiority or environmental scarcity but in good old fashioned class conflict."
-Dayton Martindale, In These Times

"This impressive book speaks to several emergent areas