Wake up, lefties, and reject wokeness
Clive Hamilton It’s time the left pushed back against woke. Afraid of being branded a racist, misogynist or transphobe, the left has been browbeaten into silence by woke activists, even though the left enabled the modern movements for black rights, gay rights and feminism. Left politics are about capitalism’s structural inequalities – corporate power, state […]
Climate Policy’s House of Cards
There are the pragmatists willing to compromise to get at least something, and then there are the idealists who stick to their principles and end up with nothing. Or so the argument goes. This tired old binary has been used by various pundits to frame the division within the Climate Change Authority that saw the […]
Why I’d Vote for Donald Trump
Every decent person looks on goggle eyed as Donald Trump continues his unlikely march to the Republican Party nomination. We are mesmerized by how he goes out of his way to flout every rule of “political correctness”, from calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and flirting with the Ku Klux Klan, to dismissing women he does not […]
Political Correctness: Its Origins and the Backlash Against It
Please note: This article contains a word some find offensive. Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.” In response to outrage at his statements like this one, Donald Trump replies: “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct”. On this vague platform Trump has made himself a serious […]
Australia’s Kyoto Escape Hatch Now Exploited
In the saga of mendacity that is the climate policy debate, no claim has been more audacious than the one now being told by the federal government about Australia’s “success” in meeting its Kyoto emissions target. Environment minister Greg Hunt now routinely makes statements like this: We are one of the few countries in the […]
Will China Save the World, Or Destroy It?
China’s greenhouse gas emissions now surpass the combined total of the United Sates and the European Union. When measured on a per person basis, the average Chinese is responsible for more damage to the climate than the average European. The gaps will become wider. Unless China soon stops and reverses the rampant growth of its […]
The Dirty Dozen: Australia’s biggest climate foes
Who are the 12 people doing the most to block action on climate change in Australia? With a new government in place, and Australia’s emissions stubbornly high, we name and shame a fresh Dirty Dozen … Who has been most responsible in recent times for preventing progress in the reduction of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions? […]
Abbott and co can’t ignore climate change forever
Published on The Drum, ABC, 26 August 2013 Six years ago, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was 90 per cent certain that human activity was the main cause of climate change. That percentage has since risen to 95, according to a new draft report leaked last week. Try as climate deniers might, they can’t […]
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 […]
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 […]