It's easy to get lost, to feel lost, especially when you're diving into new literature(s). Your supervisors can do just so much (mostly tell your thesis is not up to scratch (yet), or point you in the direction of some really good literature (institutional work, much?) But for the bigger/biggest picture? Well, who has the... Continue Reading →
The problem with studying the rich (well, one of many) is that access is hard. So you end up relying on leaks and whisteblowers. Both can be deeply problematic. But every so often the curtain DOES get pulled back. With Australia and climate change two great examples are a) the leaking of the minutes of... Continue Reading →
What’s a sociotechnical transition? Why should you care? What does history teach us? Why might it be a false teacher? All good questions and they received good (though sometimes, by necessity provisional) answers yesterday as Dr Florian Kern of University of Sussex spoke on ‘Governing Low Carbon Transitions’ (see foot of this post for the... Continue Reading →
What a great event. What an unexpected delight. At the sharp end of a PhD you find yourself going to very few ‘recreational’ seminars. And so often they’re the standard mix of chest-beating, data dumps from those too close to their “facts”, or conceptual hair-splitting from those too far from them. And those are the... Continue Reading →
Whose ego needs are being met? That, imho, is the key question, in almost any gathering, whether it dresses itself up as academic (aka 'intellectual'), activist, capitalist, whatever. If you ask that question (at least to yourself – it's a CLM to say what you think, after all), then a whole lot probably becomes clearer.... Continue Reading →
So, you slave through archives and papers and interviews and more papers and hard hard work. And you come up with a 20 thousand word chapter, full of the very hard-won anecdotes and quotes and... You have ten thousand words, TOPS. Which means you have to kill your darlings, doing away with stuff that cost... Continue Reading →
"Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he will not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or base for what he wants to offer." Reminds me of "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." Albert... Continue Reading →
WHOOP! My second stand-alone article on the excellent reneweconomy site... South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill was in a pugnacious mood at the launch of Climate Wars, the new book by Labor’s shadow climate minister Mark Butler, and let fly at the ‘rightwing f***wits’ (his words) that were keen to use any event to attack renewables. Butler’s book... Continue Reading →
Thursday 6 Around the park five times Two hours at microfiche tracking down crucial newspaper articles for the carbon tax 1994/1995 story. Dead useful, developed a couple of new tricks of how to get the info v. quickly Good meeting with a research librarian, who was super helpful, and put me onto an academic I... Continue Reading →
Friday/Saturday Right, so – flight. Not much to say I guess. It was 5 tonnes of carbon into t’atmosphere… Flew in an A380 the first leg, read a bunch of stuff from the Palgrave Handbook of International Political Economy and energy. Very very good stuff it was. Also read a lit review on transitions and... Continue Reading →
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