Cedric Knight
In the future, there may be recriminations. Scientists will say that politicians failed to manage the quantified risks of climate change, while politicians will claim that the scientists didn’t shout loudly enough.
Whether because of laziness, corruption or ignorance, the dry facts have failed to prompt anything like adequate implementation of technical solutions. Maybe the idea that carefully nuanced refinements to the science could directly lead to a winding up of the fossil fuel…
Curiosity blows things up. Or at least, it vaporises interesting rocks using a laser designed by the US nuclear bomb laboratory at Los Alamos.
I am here referring not to the intellectual motivation behind much of ‘pure’ science, but rather to Curiosity, NASA’s robotic vehicle that is analysing the chemistry of Mars. This particular sharing of technology between ‘warfighting’ and the frontiers of science is one of the many diverse and disparate facts that you might glean…
I hope to join at least some Extinction Rebellion events. I'd like to add further cautions, though, that aren't in any way meant to reduce enthusiasm but might affect tactics as regards communication, prompted partly by the talk by Dr Gail Bradbrook on the XR website. I'm a layperson but familiar with some of the climate science (less of the general ecology), and also some of the debates in science communication. In brief, we need to reflect the science accurately but also make those…
Tom Morton-Smith’s newly-commissioned play for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) – the story of a great figure brought low by a fatal flaw – has something of the classical tragedy about it.
Watching a previous dramatisation of the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ (the BBC’s seven-part series Oppenheimer, first broadcast in 1980), some reviewers could believe that the defect lay in physicist J Robert Oppenheimer’s early communist sympathies, his adultery and his post-war…
On 5 June 2011, the day after a Peace News 75th anniversary celebration was held nearby in North London, I attended a panel discussion at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival. It was 90 minutes on “The Age of Dissent”, featuring Laurie Penny, Dan Hind and Dan Hancox. Despite the overarching title of the festival, the panel had practically no literary content (other than that the panel were writers and journalists), and only the most tenuous of connections to Stoke Newington.
In the…
On 5 June 2011, the day after a Peace News 75th anniversary celebration was held nearby in North London, I attended a panel discussion at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival. It was 90 minutes on “The Age of Dissent”, featuring Laurie Penny, Dan Hind and Dan Hancox. Despite the overarching title of the festival, the panel had practically no literary content (other than that the panel were writers and journalists), and only the most tenuous of connections to Stoke Newington.
…I recently spent a little time studying “Nonviolent Communication” (NVC), and thought some Peace News readers who had never heard of it would be interested in it as a positive way of hopefully spreading peace and compassion.
NVC is probably easier to describe than to categorise, as I understand it to be more than just one simple approach to conflict resolution or a method of dialogue. NVC claims to have uses “from the bedroom to the boardroom, from the classroom to the war zone…
On 4 June, a jury at Belfast crown court found nine women not guilty of charges including breaking and entering into the Derry offices of arms manufacturer Raytheon during the 2009 Israeli assault on Gaza.
On 12 January 2009, Roisin Barton, Roisin Bryce, Elizabeth Doherty, Goretti Horgan, Diana King, Jackie McKenna, Sharron Meenan, Helen Reynolds and Julia Torrojo had intended to bring down Raytheon’s computer to highlight Raytheon’s supplying missile software to the Israeli Defence…
On 18 February, I represented the ethical internet service provider (ISP) GreenNet at an industry meeting on data retention. From 6 April, the government will be able to require ISPs to retain records for 12 months of every email sent and every website visited by their users. (Phone companies have been required to retain data about calls since October 2007.)
Explaining the justification for retaining internet data, a Home Office representative referred to the desecration of a grave…
The Drax 29, who in June had obstructed a train carrying 1,000 tonnes of coal to be burnt at Europe’s largest coal-fired power station, were sentenced on 4 September. Five activists who had previous convictions were given 60 hours’ community service each, and three were ordered to pay £1,000 in court costs. However, the remainder were all given conditional discharges.
Beth Stratford said she was “really relieved” at the verdict, “but Drax costs £3m [in damage to environment and…
Man-made climate change is scientific fact, but consensus about its social meaning is still a way off. Why are we doing so little about it? Can resource use be uncoupled from quality of life? Is humanity's desire to consume really stronger than its desire to survive?
This activist-academic initiative is welcome, though parts of it are idealistic, polemical and woolly. The editors propose unspecified radical change in response to global warming and do not try to engage with liberal…
