The author reports on a lecture at Melbourne University of the noted author Clive Hamilton in which he gave a recent history of the "research and investment in geo-engineering solutions to global warming." His most recent book is entitled Affluenza, Scorcher and Requiem for a Species.
This book is about why we have ignored those warnings [about global warming], and why it may now be too late. It is a book about the frailties of the human species as expressed in both the institutions we built and the psychological dispositions that have led us on the path of self-destruction. It is about our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our penchant for avoiding the facts. It is the story of a battle within us between the forces that should have caused us to protect the Earth—our capacity to reason and our connection to Nature—and those that, in the end, have won out—our greed, materialism and alienation from Nature. And it is about the 21st century consequences of these failures.In his lecture entitled, “The Return of Dr Strangelove” he reviews the recent efforts to solve the climate crisis through the geo-engineering of nature by...
investors, such as Richard Branson and Bill Gates, who have a vested interest in business-as-usual growth, but also seem to have a vision of themselves as saving the planet in a unilateral way — a messiah complex.Hamilton's view is that such efforts are extremely reckless with many unforeseen consequences and explains that...
Hamilton described these men as “so out of sync with modern attitudes to nature that they seem like a throwback”.
...the world’s apparent inability to make the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is due to the profitability of fossil fuel use, it is probable that, rather than buying time for such a transition, geo-engineering would become an incentive for business to continue polluting as usual
