Opinion

Trump & the climate

What seemed morally impossible has happened. So what does a second Trump Administration mean for global heating? Obviously, it will mean U.S. carbon emissions will be higher in 2030 and beyond than they otherwise would have been, and the world will become hotter as a result. Trump has said climate

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Should Peter Singer Be De-Platformed?

At the Byron Writers Festival last week, I overheard a conversation between two writers in the shuttle bus. “I’m going to the Peter Singer session ,” said one. The other, an Indigenous woman, replied, with some bitterness: “I’ve no interest in listening to him, he’s a eugenicist.” I turned to

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How do we prepare for life on a hot planet?

There has always been a sense of unreality about our climate change predicament, especially through the long years of denial, disputation and delay. More recently, Australia seems to have jumped from the delusions of denial to faith in increasingly implausible”solutions”, bypassing sober assessment of the seriousness of the reality we

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‘Neo-nature’ and the new world of the Anthropocene

Do you, like me, hesitate when you refer to floods or bushfires as natural disasters? When Earth’s atmosphere is warmer and moister because of human-induced climate change, all weather events have a human fingerprint. The now well-developed field of ‘attribution studies’ calculates the increased likelihood and severity of extreme weather

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It’s just not cricket: rich kids win at the expense of everyone else

The opening on Friday of Radford College’s multi-million dollar cricket facility—described as ‘better than Lords’—draws attention to the fundamental unfairness of our education system. Elite private schools are engaged in a kind of arms race to build the most lavish facilities for their already privileged pupils, which not only highlights

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