it's not doom if it's the best case scenario
Published: April 2021, The Ecologist The lesson of Cop26 will be that governments have run out of time to stop climate breakdown – but we as citizens have not. Here we are, six months out from COP26, the 26th global meeting of the world’s nations focused on addressing climate breakdown. As always there is an…
Published: Environment and Planning E, 2020 Abstract: The only existing plans to arrest dangerous climate change depend on either yet to be invented technologies to keep us below 2 C or on crashing the world economy for decades to come. The political choice appears to be between doing what is scientifically necessary or what is…
Published: October 2019, Viewpoint Magazine What would it mean to implement a Green New Deal? The question is not, what balance of forces would we need (as though we were playing some kind of board game). Not, what policies would we need – we already have truck-loads of plans and proposals. But what would the…
Published: Sept 2019, The Conversation A summer of civil unrest. A global climate strike bringing millions of people to the streets. A stark warning from scientists that climate breakdown is accelerating, and that we must triple our climate ambition at the very least. All of the conditions were there for this year’s UN Climate Action Summit to be a turning point in the…
Edited by Camille Barbagallo, Nicholas Beuret, David Harvie (Pluto 2019) A passionate collection rediscovering the work of two giants of autonomist Marxism and feminism. This collection explores key themes in the contemporary critique of political economy, in honour of the work and practice of Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis – two of the most significant…
Published: April 2019, The Conversation Those least responsible for global warming will suffer the most. Poorer countries – those that have contributed far less to climate change – tend to be situated in warmer regions, where additional warming causes the most devastation. Extreme weather events such as Syria’s prolonged drought, South Asia’s catastrophic monsoon floods, and Cyclone Idai in South-East Africa,…
Author: Nicholas Beuret Published: March 2019, The Conversation American congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently shook up environmental politics by releasing a broad outline of a Green New Deal – a plan to make the US a carbon-neutral economy in the next ten years, while reducing both poverty and inequality. Lauded by many as a radical and necessary step,…
Published: Dec 2018, The Conversation The latest UN climate talks, known as COP24, have just concluded. The supposed story this time was one of a grinding victory by the EU and developing nations over recalcitrant petro-states – Russia, the US, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. These four, condemned as “climate villains” over the past week, worked to…
Published: November 2020, Plan C The Tory government announced plans this week to usher in a ‘green industrial revolution’, off the back of their pledge last year to make the UK net carbon zero by 2050, spurred by the actions of the school climate strikers and Extinction Rebellion, and in preparation for next year’s delayed international…
Published: November 2017, Novara Media It’s ok. You can say it. Everyone else seems to be saying it now anyway. It might even make you feel better. It’s too late. Just as we were all getting to grips with climate change, the sixth mass extinction, super storms and all the other end-of-the-world scientific prophecies –…
Published: July 2017 Novara Media “Yes, obviously, absent any real action to reduce emissions we’re fucked. BUT: That is not going to happen. The actually realistic danger zone is a combination of too little decarbonization, too late, in the context of hardening inequalities of class, race, and gender” – Daniel Aldana Cohen The past few days…
Authors: A Kanngieser and Nicholas BeuretSouth Atlantic Quarterly April 2017 Abstract: This essay establishes silence as an ethical-political response to the Anthropocene. Silence is key to the making of commons, which frames the reinvention of ways of living and relating as a necessary response to the Anthropocene moment. Drawing from and intervening in autonomist Marxist…
Published: Antipode 2017 Abstract: The environmental movement in the global North is in a state of impasse. It appears that despite the renewed international focus on climate change, and the actions of innumerable social movements, a ” solution ” to the problem appears as one, without a viable solution. It is the contention of this…
PhD Thesis, University of Leicester 2016 This thesis explores the role of the catastrophic imaginary in shaping environmental praxis in the UK. Confronted by the threat of a looming climate change catastrophe, environmentalism in the global North is caught in a state of impasse. Despite numerous organising attempts no mass climate change movement has emerged…
Published: Nov 2015 Novara Media The activist part of me is pissed off at the French government for banning the protest marches that planned to target the UN Climate Change conference (known as the COP21) in Paris this December. It would have been amazing to see thousands of people taking to the streets demanding climate…