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."