Comments on: How risky is climate change?

By: R.K.

R.K. — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 03:09:36 +0000

Interesting Argument About Global Warming

Personally, I always thought the whole global warming thing was a little bit overblown. Got to admit this guy makes a very compelling argument without debating any details.

Not unlike your argument here.

By: .

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 09:29:42 +0000

Vatican to build solar panel roof

Pope Benedict XVI is to become the first pontiff to harness solar power to provide energy for the Vatican, engineers say.

By: .

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 09:11:45 +0000

Oxford taskforce brands government policies an ‘incoherent hotch-potch’

Present UK policy is a hotch-potch of measures unlikely to deliver the government’s vision’, says a report by a high-level taskforce chaired by the Chancellor of the University of Oxford Lord Patten of Barnes, which warns that the government’s current policies on energy security, climate change and development aid need to change. The report, ‘Energy, Politics and Poverty’, published today, argues that all three goals can be simultaneously achieved if they are coherently followed – and spells out how the UK could do that.

By: Milan

Milan — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:36:47 +0000

Antonia,

Lots of actuarial risk assessment is political. Insurance companies have expectations about the operation of the court system and political process (not that the two are entirely separate). Also, there is a lot of insurance that includes risks relating to geopolitics. Insuring your oil pipelines is never an apolitical act.

By: Antonia

Antonia — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 15:21:54 +0000

You are right: only actuarial risk assessment is apolitical.

By: .

Thu, 31 May 2007 19:10:30 +0000

commodified dissent

By: Milan

Milan — Thu, 31 May 2007 17:38:38 +0000

One of the other good quotes from the Maniates piece: “The relentless ability of contemporary capitalism to commodify dissent and sell it back to dissenters is surely one explanation for the elevation of consumer over citizen.”

By: .

Thu, 31 May 2007 17:19:28 +0000

“Mark Dowie, a journalist and sometimes historian of the American environmental movement, writes about our “environmental imagination,” by which he means our collective ability to imagine and pursue a variety of productive responses (from individual action to community organization to whole-scale institutional change) to the environmental problems before us. My claim in this is that an accelerating individualization of responsibility in the United States is narrowing, in dangerous ways, our “environmental imagination” and undermining our capacity to react effectively to environmental threats to human well-being. Those troubled by overconsumption, consumerism and commodication should not and cannot ignore this narrowing. Confronting the consumption problem demands, after all, the sort of institutional thinking that the individualization of responsibility patently undermines. It calls too for individuals to understand themselves as citizens in a participatory democracy first, working together to change broader policy and larger social institutions, and as consumers second. By contrast, the individualization of responsibility, because it characterizes environmental problems as the consequence of destructive consumer choice, asks that individuals imagine themselves as consumers first and citizens second. Grappling with the consumption problem, moreover, means engaging in conversation both broad and deep about consumerism and frugality and ways of fostering the capacity for restraint. But when responsibility for environmental ills is individualized, space for such conversation disappears: the individually responsible consumer is encouraged to purchase a vast array of “green” or “eco-friendly” products on the promise that the more such products are purchased and consumed, the healthier the planet’s ecological processes will become. “Living lightly on the planet” and “reducing your environmental impact” becomes, paradoxically, a consumer-product growth industry.”

By: PhotoBunny

PhotoBunny — Thu, 31 May 2007 16:47:01 +0000

I can see the diffuser you mentioned is still being used. You are losing the plating on the edges, revealing the (brass?) underneath.

By: Milan

Milan — Thu, 31 May 2007 16:38:53 +0000

Oh, and risk assessment is anything but “an apolitical, technocratic process requiring no democratic input.” Risk assessment is a big part of what politics is, fundamentally. This concerns everything from standards of proof in criminal law to the nature of bankruptcy law. Representing risk assessment as something objective and apolitical is a major distortion.

By: Milan

Milan — Thu, 31 May 2007 16:35:36 +0000

Irksomely, Oxford doesn’t subscribe to Global Environmental Politics as an e-journal. As such, I can arrange for people who have a particular interest to see my copy.

The article is called: “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike,Save the World?”

By: Milan

Milan — Thu, 31 May 2007 16:33:23 +0000

Lee,

The dominant position among influential people (Gore, Stern, etc) is that climate change can be addressed at a modest cost. They tend to focus on top-down initiatives, recognizing that people don’t care enormously where the power coming from their sockets is originating.

The personal contributions suggested at the end of An Inconvenient Truth are much more symbolic than actual. The ability of individuals to have a major environmental impact is highly limited. The important factors to consider are generally systemic ones.

I doubt this will be the last time I refer to Maniates.