Until We Confront Capitalism, We Will Not Solve the Climate Crisis

My interview on Truthout, about global warming and my book Burning Up. "... focus on rich-world hamburger eaters ignores the supply chain that produces such fuel-intensive, unhealthy products". Consumption is not a moral issue, and not mainly by individuals: fossil fuels are consumed by and through technological and economic systems."

Moving Away From Fossil Fuels Isn't Separate From Moving Towards Social Justice

My take on the Katowice talks, in an interview with The Wire in India. "Obviously, it would be welcome if more nations adopt and improve on their voluntary targets. But we should not live in a world of false hopes. The talks have failed because they have effectively limited action to the adoption of market mechanisms. They have left the industrial and financial elites that control the world’s economies untouched. Thus, they’ve made, and continue to make, decisions that have ensured huge increases in fossil fuel use."

How We Stop the World From "Burning Up"

A chunk of my book Burning Up, published by Truthout in the US. ... transition away from fossil fuels means "developing sustainable technological systems better to meet human need, and changing technological systems together with social and economic ones".

A Brief History of Not Dealing with Climate Change

My interview with Vice News about my book Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption. "Society needs to take this whole process out of the hands of that very small, powerful group of people who claim to be dealing with the problem, because they’re not dealing with the problem."

Russian gas transit through Ukraine after 2019: the options

Gazprom’s pipeline projects that aim to diversify transit away from Ukraine, Nord Stream 2 and Turkish Stream, are very unlikely to be operating at full capacity by 31 December 2019, when the current transit contract between Gazprom and Naftogaz expires. New contractual arrangements must therefore be agreed – and are being negotiated in an atmosphere of unprecedented friction between the companies. An analysis of the possible outcomes, published by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Technological change in electricity: why history matters

A discussion article in the Trade Unions for Energy Democracy bulletin. … "a future change in the technological system – and decarbonisation implies very sweeping change – can best be envisioned in the context of deep-going social, economic and political transformations".

We need to talk about technology

My article about air conditioning, in The Ecologist, questions some "left" eco-modernist dogma. It argues that a campaign for mass installation of air con is misconceived, that there are better ways to do temperature control in housing, and that the productivist thinking behind the idea is misconstrued.

Climate action means changing technological, social and economic systems

My comment article for The Ecologist: "Thinking about technological systems and their history can sharpen our understanding of how fossil fuel use has risen to levels associated with dangerous global warming – and of how a transition away from the fossil-fuel-intensive economy might happen. The ways in which these technological systems are embedded in the social and economic systems in which we live also matters."

Air conditioning, fossil fuels and history

My article in History Today magazine, September 2018. "Technological systems evolved as they did "because of the social and economic systems in which they are embedded"; transition away from fossil fuels means "wholesale transformation of all these systems."

Plastics and fossil fuels: follow the technological systems

My article in History Workshop Journal, 29 August. … "A sense of many histories – political, economic, social, technological – is needed to appreciate the roots of the rupture, symbolised by plastics, between human society and the natural world of which we are part."

The road away from fossil fuels

My article on the Red Pepper web site, 28 August. ... "Future historians will surely look back at the Rio process as a historic collective failure by the world’s leading states, on the scale of the slide to war in 1914."

Fossil fuel consumption since 1950: the other side of the extractivist coin

Presentation at the World Ecology Research Network conference in Helsinki, 16 August 2018.

How Did It Come to This? Unsustainable fossil fuel consumption in historical perspective, 1950-2018

Here are notes and slides from my presentation at a seminar on 24 May, at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, at the University of Manchester. The room was packed, there were loads of questions, and the researchers and students there engaged with the issues, made me think, and made me welcome.

Let's not exaggerate: Southern Gas Corridor prospects to 2030

The Southern Gas Corridor will by 2030 supply to Europe, at most, enough for an extra 15 bcm/year of capacity on the Trans Anatolian pipeline - and, probably, less than that, I argue in a working paper published today by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

How Russia/EEU economic relations with the EU are reflected in the gas trade

Russian gas exports to the EU; the crisis of the Russia-Ukraine gas trade; and gas markets within the Eurasian Economic Union are covered in this presentation, given at a seminar at University College London (School of Slavonic and East European Studies).

The decline and fall of the Russia-Ukraine gas trade

Article in the Russian Analytical Digest (download here). … The Russia–Ukraine gas trade is being reduced to a shadow of its former self. Contracts between Gazprom and Naftogaz Ukrainy—for the import of Russian gas to Ukraine and the transit of Russian gas across Ukraine to European customers, in 2009–19—remain in place, but have been broken by both sides. This analysis examines the state of affairs after the final ruling of the arbitral tribunal and looks beyond 2019.

After the Gazprom-Naftogaz arbitration: commerce still entangled in politics

In this Oxford Energy Insight, on the big arbitration case between Russian and Ukrainian gas companies, I argue that "Commerce has been unable to disentangle itself from politics".  

Russia: democracy, oligarchy, repression

Russia with its oligarchs, precarious workers, FSB officers and anti-fascists. An interview (9 March 2018) with Tom Rowley and me by James Butler on Novara FM, the Novara Media/Resonance FM show.

How fossil fuel use became unsustainable

A video of a talk I gave, on "How Fossil Fuel Use Became Unsustainable", at the Radical Anthropology Group in London on 20 February 2018, is now available on line.