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Sorry, BBC: I will no longer debate climate-change deniers
As the saying goes: it isn’t easy being green. For starters: Because we don’t get nearly enough air-time (lacking enough rich backers with the ear of the government, perhaps. But this week, when I was rung up by BBC Radio, and they asked me to come on air to debate a climate-change denier, something in me broke. Really?, I thought. This summer? So, for almost the first time in my life, I turned them down. I told them that I won’t be part of such charades any longer. I told them that the BBC should be ashamed of its nonsensical idea of ‘balance’, at a time when the scientific debate…
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Trump's coming ‘climate moment': and why we should be careful what we wish for…
Electoral democracy has largely failed. It has been captured by big corporates, suborned and crudified (de-deliberationised) by the corporate media, and sidelined by neoliberal globalisation (and the consequent minute-by-minute power of ‘the markets’). Perhaps the most spectacular ever instance of the failing of electoral democracy has been very recent indeed: it is the election of Donald Trump to (what is still, even now) the most powerful office in the world. Probably the most dire but predictable global effect of a Trump Presidency is its catastrophic impact on climate-policy and energy-policy. The most senior salient offices in the land are now stuffed full of the most egregious know-nothing climate-deniers. These people…
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The real reason why libertarians become climate-deniers
We live at a point in history at which the demand for individual freedom has never been stronger – or more potentially dangerous. For this demand – the product of good things, such as the refusal to submit to arbitrary tyranny characteristic of ‘the Enlightenment’, and of bad things, such as the rise of consumerism at the expense of solidarity and sociability – threatens to make it impossible to organise a sane, collective democratic response to the immense challenges now facing us as peoples and as a species. How dare you interfere with my ‘right’ to burn coal / to drive / to fly; how dare you interfere with my…