Clive Hamilton on climate engineering
Theories of Climate Change
“In the end Koch‘s retro-Marxism, Beck‘s utopian internationalism and Giddens‘s climate third way cannot come to grips with the planetary scale and millennial lifetime of climate disruption. In the Anthropocene, political analysis can no longer be grounded in an environment that can be taken for granted, a natural world that provides a mere backdrop for […]
Cory Bernardi is right, in Peter Singer’s world
Senator Cory Bernardi has been reviled for associating homosexuality with something repugnant, bestiality. Yet Australia has just awarded its highest civilian honour to a philosopher who provides a moral defence of sex with animals. Professor Peter Singer, the renowned Australian philosopher at Princeton University, believes that the taboo on bestiality is an anomaly, a prohibition […]
Rio+20 and the New Sorcerer’s Apprentices
Scientific thinking has changed radically over the last two decades, so that what we used to think of as “the environment”-the natural world spread around us-no longer exists. So the default position is no longer how to minimize our impact on the environment, but how best to intervene. The goal can no longer be to […]
Science Under Siege
When the denial machine goes after climate scientists it is, as one of them said, like the marines going into battle against boy scouts. The brutality of the attacks has once again been confirmed by the release of some of the emails sent to Phil Jones, the University of East Anglia climate scientist at the […]
The Philosophy of Geoengineering
Geoengineering can be understood as the fulfillment of the entire technological project, because, in geoengineering, the Earth as a whole is represented as an object available for human regulation. The thinking that gives rise to geoengineering is the same thinking that first creates the world as an object suitable for technological manipulation. A contribution to […]
The Heretic: Melbourne Theatre Company goes over to the dark side
Who would have thought the Melbourne Theatre Company would get into bed with Andrew Bolt? The Conversation, 9 May 2012
ABC Should Be Fair to the Truth
Because it falls for the deniers’ tactic of doubt-mongering, ABC TV’s program “I Can Change Your Mind…About Climate Change” is a victory for climate denial even before it goes to air.Crikey, 26 April 2012
What we do in Woolies matters more than what we do in bed
Affluence rather than population growth is mainly responsible for the climate crisis.The Conversation, 23 April 2012
Love Your Scapegoats
A response to Bruno Latour’s “Love Your Monsters: Why We Must Care for Our Technologies As We Do Our Children” [1] If Frankenstein is to serve as a parable for “political ecology” then Mary Shelley’s plot must be reworked. In the revised version Dr Frankenstein is no more than an inquisitive but anxious assistant to the […]