As we prepare for another Climate Change Conference of the Parties, and all the activist organizing around it, it’s important for us to come to terms with exactly what we are dealing with. This post approaches climate change from a somewhat oblique, exo-planetary perspective. I have given a few talks recently in which I propose […]
Search Results for 'climate change'
Solaristics, ETs, and the ontology of climate trauma
Posted in Climate change, Science & society, tagged Andrei Tarkovsky, anomalistics, boundary work, climate trauma, COP26, ETs, Exo Studies, extradimensional, extraterrestrial intelligence, integral theory, Jonny Greenwood, Lars von Trier, Melancholia, NHI, nonhuman intelligence, SANHI, science studies, Sean Esbjorn-Hargens, Solaris, Solaristics, Stanislaw Lem, Tarkovsky, UFOs on October 25, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
Post-pandemic, what will have changed?
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Media ecology, Politics, tagged ClimateJustice, COVID-19, ecojustice, environmentalism, futurism, globalism, green cities, green politics, international green movement, localism, media ecology, optimism, pandemic, post-pandemic, predictions on May 13, 2021 | 2 Comments »
When we look back at this time a few decades hence, what changes will we take the pandemic of 2020-21 to have ushered in? How will it have transformed work, recreation, travel and transportation, food, politics, and everything else? The following are some initial thoughts toward a hopeful eco-justice based perspective on how the world […]
Climate Action Week: What to watch for
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, tagged capitalism, climate communication, climate movement, ClimateJustice, Green New Deal, Greta Thunberg, memetic warfare, UN Climate Action Summit on September 16, 2019 | 3 Comments »
As people around the world prepare for Global Climate Strike Week (Sept. 20-27) and for the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City on Sept. 23, here are some thoughts and sources to help us think about what’s at stake, what’s possible, and what we can do. This blog may be updated as needed, […]
Climate Justice for dummies
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Politics, tagged Anthropocene, carbon capitalism, ClimateJustice, environmental justice on December 9, 2015 | 1 Comment »
Here’s how I would explain the concept of Climate Justice in four easy steps: The wealthiest 1% emit 2500 times more greenhouse gases than the poorest 1%. Those greenhouse gases are in the process of changing the Earth’s climate to render it uninhabitable for the kind of mix of human & nonhuman species that exists […]
The climate connection
Posted in Climate change, Politics, tagged climate culture, Climate Games, ClimateJustice, Paris climate summit, terrorism, UN Climate Summit on November 19, 2015 | 1 Comment »
How connected are the recent Paris attacks with the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP 21 (Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change)? At first glance, the targeting of Paris for ISIS’s act of war on civilian populations would seem to be motivated by other things: France’s role in […]
Climate movement
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, tagged Bill McKibben, ClimateJustice, Naomi Klein, People's Climate March, UN Climate Summit on September 22, 2014 | 7 Comments »
As I write, Bill McKibben is being interviewed left and right, Tom Ashbrook is interviewing Naomi Klein and pushing her to outline a vision that isn’t capitalism-as-we-know-it, Time magazine is saying this could be the largest march of its kind — which raises the question of what kind it is — and the People’s Climate March is […]
Climate denial’s “dark money” smoke machine
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, Science & society, tagged climate denialism, global warming on February 3, 2014 | 1 Comment »
Since I was traveling at the time, I failed to note an interesting story that got covered in the science press about the organizational support and funding behind the climate denial movement. As reported in articles in Scientific American, The Guardian, and elsewhere, a recent peer-reviewed study published in Climatic Science by sociologist Robert Brulle […]
climate denialism as hysteria?
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Science & society, tagged sociology of science, symptoms on February 15, 2010 | 6 Comments »
Dipping once again into the public debate around climate change science — today it’s in the responses to MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel’s op-ed in the Boston Globe, to which no less than 15 comments were added in the couple of minutes it took me to write these first couple of sentences — I’m realizing that it’s not enough to refer to a “climate denial machine” (as I’ve done here before). There is certainly an organized, machinic quality to denialism, with well-funded nodes of misinformation generating the talking points disseminated across the internet/mediasphere by climate denialists. But the intensity of many of the comments has made me think about the virtues and pitfalls of another frame, that of “hysteria,” since it really seems akin to the kinds of hysterias chronicled by historians like Norman Cohn and the more familiar territory of conspiratorial claims and counter-claims around such issues as alien abductions, satanic ritual abuse, or JFK and 9-11 conspiracy theories.
At the same time, there’s a risky irony in suggesting that climate change denial is a hysteria, since to deniers it’s precisely the claim of anthropogenic global warming that appears hysterical and millennialist. Hysteria, both the diagnosis of it and the thing itself, relies on a reading of “signs” or “symptoms” as indicative of a cause much larger than what one can easily deal with. There’s a monster lurking behind those markings on one’s skin, or in the body politic. And just as conspiracy theories aren’t wrong by definition (and my listing of those in the previous paragraph wasn’t intended to suggest that those ones were), so hysterical reactions aren’t necessarily unproductive — they are a response to something that one cannot respond to in a more direct and appropriate way. The politics of climate change, in any case, carries something of the “paranoid style” that Richard Hofstader identified in American politics back in the 1960s. But since then, we’ve moved more deeply into a kind epistemologically unmoored world, a world in which we rely on experts to inform us about basic risks that are not directly perceivable by us (such as those from nuclear radiation, environmental contaminants, and the like) but in a context where the structures of epistemic authority are no longer holding up well at all, in which common sense is undecideable and skepticism extends “all the way down”, as Jodi Dean has put it. This is especially the case in societies characterized by wide cultural divides, such as that of post-Bush II America. [. . .]
Swift/climate/boating the media
Posted in Climate change, Media ecology, Politics, tagged Climategate, ecopolitics on February 11, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Having published the results of its 12-part investigation into the leaked/hacked climate scientist e-mails at the University of East Anglia, the Guardian is now inviting “web users to annotate the manuscript to help us in our aim of creating the definitive account of the controversy.” It’s a kind of public version of peer review for […]
climate rage
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, tagged Climategate, ecopolitics on January 12, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Just a quick follow-up to the previous post… After the East Anglia flare-up, Paul Krugman was right to ask what fuels the rage behind climate denialism. Anyone who has perused any popular web site on environmental and climate issues will be struck both by the numbers and the utter vehemence of the denialist community. Looking […]
“Climategate” follow-up
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Media ecology, tagged Climategate, ecopolitics on January 12, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Asked by an old and dear friend what I make of the recent “Climategate scandal,” I thought I’d do a quick check on sources summarizing the effect of the hacked East Anglia e-mails on climate change science. To my surprise, the Wikipedia article on the topic is probably as good a place to start as […]
Copenhagen: changing the climate of democracy
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Politics, tagged ecopolitics, Hardt & Negri, left politics, Politics on December 17, 2009 | 7 Comments »
What makes COP-15 a turning point is that a new set of connections are being forged in the heat of the confrontation of active citizens from around the world with the reality of global political-economic power structures. Paul Hawken’s “largest movement in the world,” the movement of movements made up of environmental, social justice, and indigenous rights civil society organizations — which isn’t a movement yet until it begins to move and act in a coordinated manner — and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s “multitude” — the multiple and internally differentiated force that is, or that can become, capable of acting in common toward a global democracy — are both being born today, in the stark meeting of global justice activism with ecological reality.
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