Paul Mees, passionate campaigner for public transport and researcher into transport planning, is back with his most cogent, convincing work yet, Public Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age. After being sacked by Melbourne University for criticizing Victoria’s archaic, petrol-focused transport bureaucracy, Mees has found a home at RMIT, and a real sense of peace [...]
Before Bill McKibben started 350.org, his grassroots organization (he makes quite explicit it’s for young people, implying us older folks have dropped the ball) campaigning to roll back global warming, he asked climatologist James Hansen what number he should choose. Having just read James Hansen’s compelling semi-memoir Storms of My Grandchildren (see my review), as [...]
Of course one should read books by one’s heroes, both as homage and for inspiration. James Hansen is that rare scientist, brilliantly geeky yet driven by conscience to enter the fields of politics and persuasion. In spite of his own preference to stay in the lab, he was one of the first scientists to leap [...]
Jonathan Hiskes at Grist enumerates recent coal and oil disasters, which don’t include the Barrier Reef oil spill. Unfortunately, my experience is that the world has learned to look the other way. We’ve become acclimatised to the normal damages caused by the fossil fuel industries. I remain convinced that the key to cutting out fossil [...]
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Hugely disparate in impact and quality: Books that change one’s life are rare (by definition!), so I’m privileged to report the second such in the month of April. Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change, by Australian author and think-tanker Clive Hamilton, is a tour de force of compression and [...]
Check out this post on Grist about the unheralded advances wind energy made last year in the United States.
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Paul Krugman’s long NYT article ‘Building a green economy’ has aroused tons of debate. If like me you’re a layperson, it’s well worth reading carefully as a wonderfully clear overview of environmental economics (let along climate change itself). What impressed me most is his claim that there is a ‘rough consensus’ among economists on the [...]
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Like most ordinary citizens, energy news bewilders me. It’s arcane, complicated and irregularly analyzed by reporters. Despite my intrinsic interest in energy from a climate change perspective, energy news mostly slips past me in a blur of half-comprehension. My lack of a basic grasp of energy in my home state of Victoria, Australia was highlighted [...]
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A US senate committee publicly questioned four coal execs a few days ago on ‘clean energy,’ etc. This is not something I can recall occurring before. Read the varying accounts (NY Times, Mother Jones, Grist) to get the flavour, but what I’m certain of is that we’ll get more societal inquisitions of the industry that [...]
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I’m a great admirer of James Hansen, though not in agreement with all his prescriptions for the planet. His call to arms - Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (what is it with never-ending titles these days?) – came out last December, so why [...]