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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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Are we a consumerist society – or a 'producerist' society?
We are thoroughly used now to thinking of our society as a ‘consumerist’ society, and of ourselves as, above all, ‘consumers’. This seems to many of us now quite simply an obvious truth, and in some ways a good truth: think of ‘consumer protection’ and ‘consumer rights’ organisations, from Ralph Nader to Which? Think of ‘ethical consumerism’. But: what if this self-image were in fact both misleading and disastrous? The term ‘consumer’ summons up images of endlessly-open mouths, waiting to be filled with more and more stuff. It evokes ideas of us consuming the resources of the Earth. It figures us as the problem. But what if thinking of ourselves…
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Emergency talk
Some people think the rhetoric of climate change is too emotive. But faced with a global catastrophe it would be unwise to tone down our language. We are all familiar by now with the shrill voices of climate change deniers. But with every passing week they become more and more irrelevant, as their ‘scepticism’ about the reality of man-made climate change is exposed as risible. The issue now is not whether we are certain that dangerous climate change is real and is happening – the issue is only how we are going to tackle it. So how do we motivate people to act? How do we persuade them not to…
