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 →

October 14, 2024 0

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 →

July 23, 2024 1

James Rockford and sustainability in the twenty-first century, or “the reel of the desert”

James Garner was a cool American actor. He had starred as ‘Maverick’ in a 1950s comedy-drama Western TV series. In the 1970s he was James Rockford, a private-eye (“two hundred dollars a day plus expenses”) in a genre-shifting TV show called ‘The Rockford Files’ (1). What the hell has this got to do with sustainability in... Continue Reading →

December 3, 2016 0

Environmental #IST2015 – of ‘sustainability transitions’ and (beyond) the ivory tower

There's nowt as practical as a good theory, as we sometimes say up north. If true, this would make the University of Sussex one of the most practical places in the world about now. The sixth International Sustainability Transitions' (IST) conference (the main event of this network) is taking place over 3 and a half... Continue Reading →

August 27, 2015 0

The politics of socio-technical transitions #03

Here's the third post on this topic, ahead of a symposium on Monday. You can read the first one here and the second one here. Mostly I'll be extolling the virtues of; Newell, P. and Paterson, M. (1998) A climate for business: global warming, the state and capital. Review of International Political Economy Vo.. 5... Continue Reading →

April 26, 2015 0

Outa tuna with the natural world: On corporate concentration and environmental governance

A rather intriguing and canny seminar at Manchester Business School… Ever stand in the aisle, lost in the supermarket, and wonder what went into getting the products on the shelves? The tin mined for the cans, the oil drilled for the plastic packaging, the lives lost and the futures mortgaged for our present convenience? I... Continue Reading →

November 17, 2014 2

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