Should probably turn this into some think piece for some paywalled academic journal that nobody reads. Citations are the currency blah bah. In the meantime - it occurred to me today as I shlepped into town (a useful 15 minute walk) that there are some interesting (ymmv) parallels between "Artificial Intelligence" and "carbon capture and... Continue Reading →
Everybody knows (or chooses not to). On climate denial, Trump’s tariffs and what links them…
Another slapdash post (fixing a transcript of a great interview, but there's only so much you can do before you get, er, slapdash). As per that song by Leonard Cohen "everybody knows" - that we're heading for 3 or 4 degrees. That's been clear to numerate people with even a cursory understanding of how the... Continue Reading →
Curiosity cheered the cat – of climate, community and facilitation in Glossop
Thursday 30th January found me in Glossop, catching up with an old (in every sense) friend. And then being one of the old white men in front a sizeable audience. I enjoyed myself, not (I hope) at the expense of 30 people, but in collaboration with them The event was the latest Curiosity Club in... Continue Reading →
Letter to the Guardian abt CCS and George Monbiot (unpublished)
Last week George Monbiot had an article in the Guardian on Carbon Capture and Storage, which he isn't a fan of (for entirely justifiable and well-backed up reasons). The same day I sent in this letter below. It seems not to have made the cut. The Guardian did however publish three letters here that largely... Continue Reading →
Seeing things that aren’t there (yet): “The promise and peril of sociotechnical visions of the future”
A Looting the Ivory Tower on Sovacool, B. 2024. The promise and peril of sociotechnical visions of the future. Nature Reviews Physics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-024-00774-5 Not all academic work is self-serving word-spinning helpfully quarantined behind paywalls and verbiage walls. I wouldn’t want to hazard a percentage, and it varies from a) field to field and b) taste to... Continue Reading →
We don’t wanna talk about it, how we broke our hearts: climate, failure, “democracy” and all that jizz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwTP9AJObSY Ever get the feeling nobody wants to talk about what you want to talk about? (1) Ever get the feeling that there are herds of elephants in the room, and everyone is studiously ignoring their trumpetting, as you would if your boss/king/Prime Minister had just let rip with with a loud and evil-smelling fart?... Continue Reading →
#Awalkinthepark – Radical Institutional Change? Bin juice!!
The sixth lap is usually fairly unproductive, from a reading point of view, but probably where the calorie burn comes from. Somehow I only managed to finish one article – (and tbf, most of another) Lorenzoni, I. and Benson, D. 2014. Radical institutional change in environmental governance: Explaining the origins of the UK Climate... Continue Reading →
Of Monbiot, Manchester and miserable ‘feral’ futures.
Nature as redeemer, nature as escape, nature as the solace for our "gridded, controlled, mannered urban lives." So far so romantic. Well, nature is on the road, and she’s gunning for the lot of us. We’ve poked the beast, and now it really is waking up. On a quiet day, you could hear it snoring.... Continue Reading →
Our #climate – personal stories, global change; #excellent art on despair and hope
At its best our species does courage, creativity and trust. At its worst it excels at greed,stupidity and violence. Last night Melbourne Playback Theatre Company (MPTC) displayed enormous quantities of the former to illuminate one symptom of the latter - climate change. The event's format captured our dilemma nicely. The first half was taken up... Continue Reading →
#climate, Kevin Anderson and the smoke-filled planet/room
Professor Kevin Anderson is what they call a mensch. For years he has been fearlessly reporting on what we are actually tipping into the open sewer we call our atmosphere. Not what we are promising to emit, or what we would like to believe we are emitting, but what is actually going up. He ties... Continue Reading →