Tag: climate change
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The death march into crisis
This is a typically astute piece from Richard Seymour on the intersection between social failure and environmental change generating the current crisis in Texas. He offers a disturbing analysis of the (attempted) creation of “mobilised political constituency that is ready, even morally energised, for quite a lot of death”
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The unsustainability of 5G and the growth of tech nationalism
The sustainability implications of 5G are increasingly recognised, as this overview from GSMA makes clear. Note that this is the industry’s own trade body rather than a pressure group external to it: Energy is becoming even more important due to climate change and sustainability considerations. The potential increase in data traffic (up to 1,000 times […]
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Did oil prices cause the financial crisis?
I’m a little wary of the causation here but it’s a provocative claim. Perhaps it does constitute an INUS condition, as J.L. Mackie put it, with the oil price spike igniting a precarious system which could have gone up in flames for other reasons. From Societies beyond Oil, by John Urry, pg 34-35: But this […]
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The liquid powering liquid modernity
From John Urry’s Societies beyond Oil pg 9: Leading social analyst Zygmunt Bauman famously described the twentieth-century development of all this movement as a ‘liquid modernity’. But what he did not examine was how there was in fact a literal liquid –oil –that made this modernity, oiling the wheels of a globalizing society. It seemed […]
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Professionalisation as capture
From Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything pg 203: These are the tough tools with which the environmental movement won its greatest string of victories. But with that success came some rather significant changes. For a great many groups, the work of environmentalism stopped being about organizing protests and teach-ins and became about drafting laws, then […]
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Fast movements struggle with slow issues
From Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything pg 158: Because this is a crisis that is, by its nature, slow moving and intensely place based. In its early stages, and in between the wrenching disasters, climate is about an early blooming of a particular flower, an unusually thin layer of ice on a lake, the late […]
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Why the EU matters for the future of the climate
I’ll add this to reigning in big tech as the best argument I can see for supporting the EU. Could any other power structure in Europe achieve this outcome? From pg 137 of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: A 2012 report by the German National Center for Aerospace, Energy and Transport Research (DLR), for instance, […]
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Can capitalism survive climate change?
From The Uninhabitable Earth pg 162-163: The question is a prism, spitting out different answers to different ranges of the political spectrum, and where you fall on that range probably reflects what you mean by “capitalism.” Global warming could cultivate emergent forms of eco-socialism on one end of the spectrum, and could also conceivably produce […]
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Neoliberalism: the ideological wall blocking climate action
From This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, pg 72: Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age—privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending—are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our […]
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Climate change as doorstep politics
A few months ago James Meadway, advisor to John McDonnell, predicted on Novara media that climate change would soon become a doorstep issue in the UK. If unpredictable weather events become a regular part of life for people, the recognition of their underlying cause is immensely significant. However this passage from Naomi Klein’s This Changes […]
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Climate change and digitalisation
I’ve been thinking a lot in the last couple of weeks about climate change and digitalisation. For instance the climatic significance of digital technology is increasingly recognised, as well as the resource constraints this implies for some of the wilder claims made about the coming frontiers of digitalisation. This also represents an ideological tension as one emerging grand […]
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Should climate change be a master narrative?
Should climate change be a master narrative? It certainly has competition from neo-conservative narratives of the Chinese century, techno-dystopian narratives of the ‘rise of the robots’ or populist narratives of the great revival. But I find David Wallace-Wells very plausible here in The Unhabitable Earth on pg 53: In this way, climate change appears to […]
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Why doesn’t technocrat have an antonym?
My notes on Hudson, M. (2018). Ending technocracy with a neologism? Avivocracy as a conceptual tool. Technology in Society, 55, 136-139. What does it mean to call someone technocratic? In this intriguing paper, Marc Hudson observes that the term is “thrown about as a term of abuse, but without a clear alternative other than ritual(istic) invocations of […]
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The Climate Agenda of Elites
From Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, loc 234-246: the key question surrounding climate change is not whether climate change is occurring, but rather who will survive the change. Even in the worst-case scenarios, scientists are not arguing that the Earth will become totally uninhabitable. What will happen—and is happening—is that struggles over space and resources […]
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over-reach by unelected technocrats
This is the debate which the Financial Times says has been prompted by Mark Carney’s intervention on climate change earlier in the week. His point seemed rather incisive to me, observing that “Since the 1980s the number of registered weather-related loss events has tripled” and that furthermore “Inflation-adjusted insurance losses from these events have increased from an […]
Mark Carrigan 