Bioengineering as a response to global warming
You know the situation is getting desperate when three bio-ethicists propose genetically modifying humans to reduce our environmental impact. In a bizarre paper titled ‘Human engineering and climate change’, Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache argue we should seriously consider technologies to engineer human bodies to reduce carbon emissions. One leading idea is genetic […]
Defamation
Why did the Australian, a newspaper that has heavily criticised use of the defamation laws, launch legal action to force the ABC to take down an article by Robert Manne? The Conversation, 8 March 2012
Shadowy World of IPA Finances
The secret funding of the Heartland Institute once again focuses attention on the financing of the Institute of Public Affairs and particularly its sustained attacks on climate science and all policies aimed at cutting Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Despite its refusal to divulge, we can make a good guess at where a large part of its recent […]
Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change
Global warming science has become a battleground in a wider cultural war, particularly in the United States where rejecting climate science has been seamlessly adopted by right-wing populism—notably by the Tea Party, the movement of those who demand their fair share of injustice. In these circumstances scientific facts are trumped by beliefs, so that climate […]
Ethical Anxieties About Geoengineering
Three main justifications are used to defend geoengineering research and possible deployment—it will allow us to buy time, it will allow us to respond to a climate emergency, and it may be the best option economically. Against these a number of ethical risks intrude: we may use the possibility of climate engineering to blind ourselves […]
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
This article (published on “The Conversation”) is a commentary on Adam Curtis’s three-part documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, which was braodcast on SBS TV in October-November 2011.
Women in combat and the death of feminism
“With women now to take on combat roles in the military it is time to sound The Last Post over the rotting corpse of feminism.” An opinion article published in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, 30 September 2011.
Big Porn Inc.
“One of the more bizarre accusations made against people like the authors who appear in this powerful, new book, Big Porn Inc., is that they are anti-sex. This accusation is made by post-modern academics who style themselves pro-sex. Of course, the authors are not anti-sex. They are anti-degradation, anti-exploitation, anti-coercion and anti-trafficking. In truth these are […]
The Ethical Foundations of Climate Engineering
In the standard consequentialist view of climate ethics, the question of whether it is ethically justified intentionally to shift the planet to a warmer or cooler climate depends on an assessment of the costs and benefits of the new state compared to the old one. In this view the natural world is framed as a […]
Environmentalism: The Way Forward
A talk (by videolink) to the National Climate Action Summit University of Melbourne, 9 April 2011 The difficulty and importance of the global warming campaign is many times greater than every other environmental struggle. Controlling carbon pollution requires a wholesale industrial restructuring and defeat of the most powerful industry coalition ever assembled. Yet in the […]