How to be optimistic about climate change

Climate change is depressing. Really depressing. And yeah, I know the apocalypse is like sex because every generation thinks they’ve discovered it. But it does feel a bit end times. Properly end times. We maybe don’t admit this enough, but it really, really is. I think it is still possible to have hope though. Moreover, … Continue reading »

John Hayes MP and the bourgeois

Gove-themed streetart, Brighton. Our energy minister John Hayes seems to enjoy the word “bourgeois”. I don’t blame him, it’s a fun word to say. Back in October, he described the idea of onshore wind farms as “a bourgeois left article of faith based on some academic perspective”, arguing that “We need to understand communities’ genuine … Continue reading »

A Life of Galileo: What Brecht can teach us about the public ownership of science

This post first appeared on New Left Project. The central tourist strip of Stratford-upon-Avon is not the sort of place you expect to find much Marxism. It’s all a bit Ye Olde Costa Coffee, Anne Hathaway fudge, postcards, postcards, postcards and pink fridge magnets quoting As You Like It. The most subversive it gets is … Continue reading »

Should scientists be bolder in public?

I spoke at the London Climate Forum this weekend. This is a rough sketch of what I said. Jeremy Grantham is the investor behind the “Grantham Institute” centres for climate change research at Imperial and the LSE. He recently wrote a provocative opinion piece for Nature, arguing: Overstatement may generally be dangerous in science (it certainly is for … Continue reading »

JD Bernal: the communist crystallographer

A small sign of political protest at the University of Sussex this morning. I was supposed to go to the JD Bernal Lecture at Birkbeck College a few weeks back; given this year by David Willetts. Except it was cancelled after a perceived threat of “disruptive” political protests. So I found myself with a free evening. I had … Continue reading »

March 26

Yesterday, along with many hundreds of thousands of others, I attended the anti-cuts march in London. I think it’s important to record individual experiences of these sorts of events, even if these experiences aren’t dramatic enough to make the national news. Indeed, it’s important to record them precisely because they aren’t dramatic. So here, largely … Continue reading »

Electorial reform demo turns a grey day purple

Today I marched on the Liberal Democrats. Then they came out and said hello. It’s not the weirdest demo I’ve been on, but it was up there. It was also one of the most polite. The BBC said there were about a thousand people there. Apparently the police said two thousand. It’s always hard to … Continue reading »