Andreas Malm and Wim Carton have an enemy, and it’s not “climate deniers.” These authors acknowledge that the original Big Oil brand of climate denialism — which rejected the scientific fact that through the burning of fossil fuels humans emit carbon dioxide, which in turn warms the planet — is now less prevalent than a newer denialist argument, asserting that “climate change exists but it is not much of a problem.”

Nor is their enemy as broad or systemic as “capitalism,” although the authors have half-jokingly described their book as a sort of “readable IPCC report of a Marxist nature” and advocate goals like the “infliction of serious material costs on fossil capital.”

For these professors at Lund University in Sweden, the authors of the new book The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, the enemies du jour are the “rationalist-optimists.”