CLIVE: The Story of Clive Palmer by SEAN PARNELL

CLIVE: The Story of Clive Palmer
SEAN PARNELL
HarperCollins, 2013, 328 pages, $39.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

When the local council denied planning permission for the Queensland National Party’s media director, Clive Palmer, to build a sixty-six townhouse development on peaceful rural land in Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast in 1984, Palmer’s party and state government mate, Russ Hinze, helped the rich guy out by overturning the council decision.  Shortly after, Palmer made the second largest donation ever to the Nationals, writes Sean Parnell in Clive: The Story of Clive Palmer, “directing $15,000 from his company that had purchased the property”.  Palmer well knew the utility of politics for personal business.

The lure of money governed the business family that Palmer was born into in 1954.  Anti-communist, conservative Catholics, they stamped their son with the same template.  At the University of Queensland in the early 1970s, Palmer took on the campus socialists and feminists, most vigorously through the Right To Life Association and its anti-abortion ‘pregnancy counselling’ front, and he became close to the Liberal and Country Parties and their state government headed by the authoritarian, anti-democratic Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Dropping out of university into a law firm, Palmer’s potential legal career came to a rapid halt when he complained to a Liberal politician of police verballing of suspects which he had uncovered.  An anonymous death threat soon after led to Palmer harbouring a lingering bitterness towards the police-protecting Liberals whilst remaining reliably conservative, and avaricious.

Palmer became a self-made real estate millionaire during Queensland’s interstate-migration-driven property boom on the Gold Coast where he bought cheap and sold dear, a strategy which was to deliver him billions during the mining boom, beginning with iron ore deposits in Western Australia followed by the promise of even richer returns from coal in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.

If Palmer, a lavish donor to, and life member of, the National Party thought that he owned the new Queensland Liberal National Party government then he was disillusioned as he ran into a government speed-bump.  His new China-export coal project lost its Labor-ordained ‘significant project status’ when his claim to favoured state support for rail and port infrastructure was out-lobbied by Galilee Basin competitor, Gina Rinehart, and her coal export deal with India.

The taste of sour grapes infused Palmer’s deteriorating relationship with the conservative parties.  His opposition to the new state government’s public sector job cuts was a pretext (he had sacked a hundred workers at his Queensland nickel refinery) for a swipe at a government which had materially harmed his business interests.  Seen as destabilising or splitting the ruling conservative party, Palmer was jettisoned by the Nationals and went on to form his own, eponymous, conservative party.

Lest anyone think that this latest political venture is a merely a continuation of protecting Palmer’s profits and conspicuous consumption (high-end cars and boats and planes, racehorses, soccer clubs, Club Med Resorts, replica Titanics and robotic dinosaurs), Palmer presents a front of selfless generosity through philanthropy and gifts to his employees.

The climate change denialist doesn’t, however, bother with any green camouflage about global warming from his coal exporting, exposure of the Great Barrier Reef to pollution from his nickel refinery’s tailings dam, or the threat to the protected dunes and bush posed by a massive expansion to his luxury resort at Coolum on the Sunshine Coast.

Whilst Palmer can only speak ill of environmentalists, he will hear nothing bad about his former National Party idols and mentors convicted of, or who narrowly dodged, corruption charges for misappropriating taxpayer funds and accepting bribes from developers.  These noble souls (Bjelke-Petersen, Hinze, et al) are, according to  Palmer, persecuted innocents, ‘brave and courageous’ all.  Legal prosecution, however, is a course of first resort for the highly litigious Palmer towards any person or entity which threatens his profits or reputation.

One outcome of Palmer’s legalistic aggression is that voices critical of Palmer are, for fear of being sued and bankrupted, under-represented in Parnell’s book.  The result is an overly benign portrait of Palmer, the celebrity miner-politician, in a book that is fascinated by the “colourful Queenslander’s” every new venture but which is short on analysis of Palmer’s political philosophy, ethical values and social policies, which, like Palmer, offer nothing to those not love-struck by money and power.

BIG COAL by Pearse, McKinght & Burton

BIG COAL: Australia’s Dirtiest Habit
GUY PEARSE, DAVID McKNIGHT, BOB BURTON
Newsouth Publishing, 2013, 257 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

You don’t have to look far to see why Australians are locked in an absurd and vicious circle of climate change, burning more coal to, for example, run more air-conditioners to cope with the more severe heatwaves from the global warming resulting from burning more coal.  The reason why Australia is hooked onto such coal-mad absurdities, say Pearse, McKnight and Burton in Big Coal, is because the economic and political power of Australia’s coal industry has pushed a more than willing political elite to support the mining and export of coal in a country which is the world’s 4^th largest producer, and 2^nd biggest exporter, of the largest single source of global greenhouse gases – coal.

The climate change cost of coal to Australia (devastating weather extremes, bushfires, droughts and floods) is the latest pricey instalment of the addiction to coal, following that fossil fuel’s grim history of lung-blackened, maimed and dead workers, and toxic landscapes and poisonous air in mining communities.

Whilst Australia’s coal-fired power stations produce one third of the country’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions, it is the $48 billion coal export industry which is Australia’s main contributor to global warming.  Whether burnt in Mumbai or Shanghai for electricity generation or steel-making, Australian coal is at the forefront of catastrophic climate change.

Unconcerned with planetary survival, whilst lavishly enriching themselves from the coal rush, are the mining nouveaux-riche, billionaires like Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer and Andrew Forrest, who have mastered the art of picking undervalued coal reserves that can then be on-sold to multinational mining companies at many times their initial value, in turn rewarding the giant companies’ owners - the big banks and large institutional investors - with bloated profits.

Greasing the money-making wheels with $9 - $12 billion in subsidies are coal-friendly Australian governments.  State governments further assist with a genial mining lease approval process, compulsory purchase of prime agricultural land for mining, public funds on tap for private company rail and port infrastructure and obedience to coal industry lobbyists’ commands to hamstring renewable energy alternatives such as cutting household solar-panel feed-in tariffs and tightening the regulatory screws on wind farms.

In return for governmental services rendered are the royalties paid by the coal mining industry to state government coffers (plus occasional personal enrichment along the way for corrupt ministers).  These royalties, however, mask the long-term cost to the states of climate change - one major natural climate-change-related disaster can wipe out several years of royalties (cyclone Yasi cost the Queensland public purse $7 million in 2011).

The federal government also chimes in through winding back mandatory renewable energy targets, and the tried-and-failed market mechanisms of emissions trading schemes and carbon taxes with their generous and self-defeating industry compensation.  Where any sign of government resistance is met (through mining super-profits taxes, for example), the industry’s propaganda power and deep pockets are mobilised for poll-damaging “big budget advertising blitzes to turbo-charge their behind-the-scenes lobbying campaigns”.

Corporate-government harmony is always maintained, however, in the public spruiking of the grossly exaggerated economic benefits of coal mining.  The coal industry’s 46,000 employees is a tiny percentage of a total labour force of over 11 million, whilst the industry’s self-portrait of itself as an altruistic job creator is undermined by its programs for driverless trucks and trains, and automated drilling rigs, loaders and shipping operations.  Sucking up valuable capital, infrastructure and government funds, as well as labour, the coal mining industry results in a structural distortion of the economy away from job-rich economic sectors towards an environmentally dead-end industry.

This is not, however, the message delivered by governments, which act as Big Coal’s public relations hacks.  State Premiers and Treasurers have been quick to dismiss as a ‘politically correct debate about climate change’ any concern that the bushfires, droughts and floods of recent years may be related to coal-burning in favour of stump-speeching the economic credentials of their state’s coal-fired power stations and coal export markets.

Close behind government on the image management is the coal industry.  For fiscal peanuts, coal corporations and peak mining bodies buy good-will and a permanent stake in the community through funding local, state and national groups.  Recipients of the don’t-mess-with-the-sponsor goodies include sports of all kinds, helicopter rescue, kindergartens, universities, hospitals, koala habitat restoration and many more.  Xstrata Coal is typical, providing $14 million to fifty community organisations in 2012, a barely visible half a per cent of its $2.2 billion profit.  Such cheap philanthropy is a common corporate strategy but the coal industry’s calculated benevolence is of grave concern because “no other industry in this country has ever threatened to cause harm on the same global scale – not asbestos, nor tobacco, not even uranium”.

The soothing corporate syrup flows with added sugar-coating from the public relations barrel with reassurances that coal’s carbon can be rendered harmless through technical fixes.  Carbon capture and storage (CCS) still has its hymn-singing corporate zombies and political droids, despite decades of fanfare having been muted by commercial reality (carbon-scrubbers are expensive), time constraints (even if CCS works it would be deployed too late globally to avoid critical climate warming), practical hurdles (distant storage sites requiring a vast network of pipelines) and health risks (in high concentrations, CO2 is a toxic, potentially fatal, gas).

As CCS has been shown to be a mirage, however, so, too, is its ‘green’ cousin - carbon capture and recycling (CCR).  For algae, CO₂ acts as a growth steroid and feeding them in algal ponds adjacent to power stations and steel mills can turn the green weeds into bio-fuels, fertilisers, soil-enriching biochar and food for cattle and fish farms.  The process, however, depends on a non-renewable fossil fuel, releases the carbon when consumed, and only works in sunlight, therefore, at best soaking up only a half of its CO₂ food source.

The book’s authors have done a superb job in digging up the dirt on coal.  Ending the world’s addiction to this dangerous product starts here in Australia, in King Coal’s castle.

THE BRACEGIRDLE INCIDENT by Alan Fewster

THE BRACEGIRDLE INCIDENT: How an Australian Communist Ignited Ceylon’s Independence Struggle
ALAN FEWSTER (with a Foreword by Humphrey McQueen)
Arcadia/Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013, 173 pages, $39.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

In 1937, Ceylon’s British Chief of Police reported that ‘it is clearly dangerous’ to allow the Australian Communist, Mark Bracegirdle, to remain in the country ‘stirring up feelings against employers of labour and against the British Government’.  Ceylon’s top cop found a willing listener in the colony’s Governor who authorised Bracegirdle’s deportation.

As Alan Fewster recounts in his account of the ‘Bracegirdle incident’, the deportation was technically bungled, setting off a political crisis in Ceylon and igniting “an altogether more systematic and aggressive attack on British rule”.

The English-born Bracegirdle had left  Australia for Ceylon in 1936, ostensibly to become an apprentice tea-planter.  The working conditions of the 600,000 imported, bonded Indian Tamil labourers appalled him – living in dismal barracks unfit for cattle, subject to fines and corporal punishment, bending their backs even if sick with malaria, and denied education - literacy ‘will give them ideas in life above their station’, said Bracegirdle’s superintendent, who soon sacked his ‘rather Communistic’ protégé for ‘fraternisation’ with the labourers. 

Joining Ceylon’s small communist party, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), Bracegirdle played a highly effective role, as a first-hand witness of, and defector from, the planter class.  This made him an ‘undesirable’ to Ceylon’s imperial authorities, too, but their attempted deportation of Bracegirdle overstepped the mark by demonstrating Britain’s absolute power over everyone, including the compliant indigenous elite (the Sinhalese aristocracy, rich land owners and others collaborating, for their own gain, in the administration of British governance) who had been granted limited authority via a restricted suffrage local parliament.

When this tame assembly of conservative nationalists and moderate reformists recognised that Britain’s colonial power could potentially be used not just against white communists but Ceylonese worthies like themselves, they protested with fist-waving, sarcasm and a resolution opposing Bracegirdle’s deportation.

The Supreme Court decision that Bracegirdle’s arrest was illegal capped a huge political humiliation for British rule and a significant propaganda, and membership, victory for the now-800 strong LSSP which went on to become the “dynamic new force” in Sri Lanka’s independence struggle.

Fewster, a former diplomat, is most focused on the ructions in the colonial governmental apparatus in Colombo and Whitehall whilst Bracegirdle the Marxist is more insubstantial, mainly because his motives and deeds (reported, inaccurately at best, by police spies) were sparsely recorded.

So, whilst Fewster is on sure, if rather dry, ground in the upper civil service strata, the rest of his political analysis is somewhat unconvincing speculation, namely that Bracegirdle did not come to Ceylon to radicalise the tea estate workers but, as a Stalinist agent, to pull the Trotskyist-leaning Ceylonese Marxist leadership into pro-Moscow orthodoxy.  That Bracegirdle actually succeeded in the former and failed in the latter suggests, rather, that loyalty to Moscow for the communists of the 1930s could nevertheless coexist with a genuine commitment to revolutionary activism.

No definitive answers are presented in the book on Bracegirdle’s ‘ulterior motive’ but what is clear is that he continued his left wing enterprise until his death in 1999, including smuggling refugees from Nazi Berlin through fake marriages to young Jewish women.  From Sri Lanka to Germany, Bracegirdle lived and breathed true internationalism and solidarity.

THE PASSION OF BRADLEY MANNING by Chase Madar

THE PASSION OF BRADLEY MANNING: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower
CHASE MADAR
Verso, 2013, 181 pages, $19.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The issue in the trial of Bradley Manning, the source of tens of thousands of US military and state secrets leaked to Wikileaks, is, in some eyes, simple.  ‘He broke the law’, lectured President Obama, conveniently overlooking, as Chase Madar comments in his book on Manning, the routine violation, when it suits the political upper crust, of the principle that ‘rules are rules’.

“Washington leaks intentionally as a communication medium between elite officials and their preferred journalists”, much of it top secret, a classification higher than anything Manning released, says Madar.  Laws (against aggressive wars, torture or “mass illegal wiretapping”, for example) are also not laws when broken by the powerful (the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, the federal domestic security bureaucracy).

The perpetrators of these criminal infractions are not arrested and held in abusive solitary confinement for years, facing show trials, life imprisonment or possible execution, like Manning, but “receive solicitous treatment in the media and Sunday morning network gabfests”.

It was the official secrecy surrounding the political elite’s habitual criminality that prompted Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst, to blow the whistle on what his government “has done – and is doing – all over the world”, documented in war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan and in State Department cables which explain through ‘non-PR-versions of world events and crises’, as Manning put it, ‘how the first world exploits the third … from an internal perspective’.

Manning’s intent was “historically informed and political”, says Madar, aimed at, in Manning’s words, ‘worldwide discussion, debates and reforms’ concerning transparency in government.  Manning’s detractors, and even some of his more liberal sympathisers, have, however, done their best to ignore his clearly stated political motive, focusing instead on Manning’s sexual preference, gender identity, a ‘troubled’ psychology and, as a gay, “alienated and brutalised by the Army’s macho culture”, his military dysfunction.

It is tempting, though trite, says Madar, to see Manning’s political dissent as a result of mental health problems.  As Madar argues in response, the numerous gay soldiers in the US military, and its plentiful mentally ill soldiers (“the leading cause of death among active-duty US troops over the past four years has been … suicide”) are not psychologically predisposed to “declassify public records”. Stereotyping information rebels as being a bit weird deliberately devalues their moral conscience and political courage. 

As Manning himself has noted, the red herrings of his personal psychology matter only in the sense that ‘I’m way way way too easy to marginalise’.  His status as a gay, soon-to-be-transgender atheist, says Madar, “unsuits Manning thoroughly to be a poster-child for the cause of transparent government” by allowing the powerful to pathologise rather than politicise him.

Where the real sickness lies, says Madar, is with Washington’s self-interested and paranoid “over-classification of government documents”.  The National Security Agency has just got around to declassifying military documents from 1809, the CIA still keeps documents from World War 1 classified whilst the Department of Defence has finally declassified the Pentagon Papers (which document the secret history of the Vietnam War) a hardly-more-sprightly four decades after they became publicly available in book form.

This government mania for document secrecy, plus censorship of former officials, will continue to “distort and stifle public debate on vital issues of war and foreign policy”, says Madar, whilst a “national panic about leaks”, sauced with “chauvinistic nationalism”, is meant to discourage potential leakers from letting in any sunshine on what the American government gets up to in its citizens’ names.

This anti-leak deterrent has been exercised most energetically by President Obama, who came to office as the “whistleblower’s friend” promising a government Age of Aquarius but whose Department of Justice has launched more prosecutions against leakers, including Manning, than all previous presidencies combined.

Completed just before Manning’s trial verdict which carries up to 135 years jail, Madar’s book is a highly useful, thoroughly spirited contribution to the campaign to free Bradley Manning, the next stage in the task of liberating truth from its jail of government secrecy.

MADLANDS: A Journey to Change the Mind of a Climate Sceptic by ANNA ROSE

MADLANDS: A Journey to Change the Mind of a Climate Sceptic
ANNA ROSE
Melbourne University Press, 2012, 357 pages, $19.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Anna Rose, a climate change youth activist and leader, was warned by her many colleagues in the environment movement of the risks of agreeing to do a television documentary, screened earlier this year by the ABC,  pitting her against the former Liberal Party senator, science minister and climate change denialist, Nick Minchin.

The “whole show will play into the denialists’ strategy of framing the science as disputed when it actually isn’t”, she was told, and it would serve merely to give the infinitesimally tiny bunch of cranks and denialists prime time exposure to market their shonky product, ‘doubt’.

Rose had heard that the respected scientist, Tim Flannery, and the ABC’s science journalist, Robyn Williams, had declined to ‘balance’ the scales on an issue for which the time for weighing up the science is long past.  Nevertheless, the documentary was going ahead, so Rose decided it may as well be her and pinned her hopes on exposing the weaknesses of the denialists’ case to sway the undecided viewer.  Madlands is her account of the experience.

Her first meeting, with Minchin’s hand-picked right wing libertarian bloggers, “a mum and dad team from Perth” who “had discovered that thousands of climate scientists and all the world’s main scientific academies were wrong”, set the tone for incredulity which was not dispelled by subsequent denialists.

Meanwhile, a stubborn Minchin proved impervious to the patient persuasion of Rose’s chosen climate scientists.  Pillow-punching frustration at Minchin’s smug (‘I remain to be convinced’) irresponsibility is punctuated by Rose’s dawning realisation that his intransigent denialism is not really about the science at all but the implications of the science for the future of, and for the massive profits from, a fossil-fuel-based economy.

Minchin’s claim to be an ‘open-minded sceptic’ is hollow, says Rose, showing how Minchin relentlessly denies scientific fact because of his core conservative political and economic values, especially his opposition to environmentalism as ‘the new religion’ of the ‘extreme left’ and his dread of government interference and regulation of the free market - except, of course, for favoured causes such as government subsidies ($9 billion annually in Australia) that make fossil fuels so much cheaper in relation to assistance-starved renewable energy.

By book’s end, Rose, having despaired of changing Minchin’s politically-shuttered mind but determined to find “common ground” with denialists, joins hands with Minchin in celebrating “competitive economic advantage” through energy efficiency, a solitary policy plank which sidesteps the central issue of replacing carbon-dirty energy with clean renewables.

This not only concedes scientific ground to ratbag denialists but Rose’s concluding plea that the climate change movement needs “people who understand markets”, like Minchin and other free market ideologues (“harmonising the market with the environment” is “what this whole project has been about”, she concludes), is a crippling political concession given  the carbon tax and emissions trading scheme failures of the capitalist market to solve a world-threatening crisis of its own making.

PROJECT REPUBLIC: Plans and Arguments for a New Australia by JONES & McKENNA

PROJECT REPUBLIC: Plans and Arguments for a New Australia
BENJAMIN T. JONES and MARK MCKENNA (eds)
Black Inc., 2013, 251 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

If the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) represents those who wish to make Australia a republic yet the ARM sends congratulations to the Queen in 2012 on her sixtieth year of rule from London, what hope is there for Australia becoming a royal-free zone?  Not much, must be the conclusion, after reading the ARM’s call-to-republican-arms book, Project Republic.

Republicanism has majority public support (48% versus 39% at last count in 2012) despite the defeat of the 1999 referendum when a monarchist Prime Minister and conservative republicans, including the ARM, opted for the referendum question on a republic to decide on the highly unpopular model of parliamentary appointment of a President as Australian head of state rather than direct election by all voters.

When republican ‘direct electionists’ made the politically short-sighted error of advocating a No vote to a republic in the mistaken assumption that a direct-election model would be put at an imminent second referendum, the majority republican sentiment (75% at the time) was split, the referendum lost (45% voting Yes), ushering in a long and continuing period of “indifference and silence on the republic”.

To re-ignite republican fervour, Professor Mark McKenna and comedian Julian Morrow, in their contributions, adopt anti-monarchical irreverence although this is frowned upon by the National Director of the ARM who frames republicanism as being all about patriotism and not criticising the Queen or the rest of the royal bludgers.

Obsequiousness towards the monarchy peppers the book, including the opening salvos by erstwhile political opponents, the Liberal’s Malcolm Turnbull (admiring the Queen for a ‘lifetime of service’) and Labor’s Wayne Swan (loving the Queen for her ‘unfailing record of public duty’).  Both also chummily agree that another word for republicanism is patriotism (Turnbull – a republican is “simply, purely, patriotic”; Swan - an Australian republic will be better positioned to “take advantage” of the region during the ‘Asian Century’).

Quite how this lame royalty-reverence and limp nationalism will help the republican movement to “find a new language that will connect with the electorate” and fire the republican imagination is not immediately apparent.  McKenna notes that today’s republicans have shed their historical image as “radical, atheist, anti-British left-wingers hell-bent on revolution” but, in thus “normalising the republican case”, they have “sanitised the argument to the point of blandness” and narrowed the vision to ‘minimalist’ constitutional change (replacing the Queen with an Australian head of state).

The reaction of many people to this minimalism, says Larissa Behrendt (Indigenous Law professor), is “a collective yawn”.  The republic must be about more than token symbolism, and any constitutional revamp must embody values of democracy, multiculturalism, fairness and equality.

Decorative symbolism is only important for the substance it adorns, agrees Henry Reynolds who grasps the political nettle - monarchy “cements in place at the apex of the political system the principles of hereditary power and privilege which … are profoundly undemocratic”.  Biology should not decide who sits at the top of the power heap.  The res publica (‘people’s space’) should.

Even at the level of limited democratic reform, republicans need to be bolder and to consider issues of popular, democratic power instead of contenting themselves, as nearly all contributors do, with waffly sentiment about an Australian head of state instilling some variant of nationalism (‘national identity’, ‘national dignity’, ‘national pride’, etc.) to the office.

Whether a hereditary, foreign royal or an elected Australian citizen occupies the post, the occupant should not have the present, coyly termed, ‘reserve powers’, most notoriously the ability to sack an elected government (as happened in 1975).  As head of state, a republican President would still be the head of a state (police, courts, bureaucracy, army, etc.) that serves the Australian capitalist class and will dismiss  a government they fear, rightly or wrongly, will harm those class privileges.

Abolishing the British monarch as Australian head of state, nevertheless, remains an essential, immediate-term, democratic reform.  Wiping out one undemocratic bastion of privilege should, however, be just the overture to tackling other fortresses of class wealth and power in Australia.  The politically tepid Australian Republican Movement, and its book (which often gets lost in arcane constitutional ponderings), can help with the former but not, one despairs, with very much, if any, of the latter.

EARTHMASTERS: Playing God With The Climate by CLIVE HAMILTON

EARTHMASTERS: Playing God With The Climate
CLIVE HAMILTON
Allen&Unwin, 2013, 247 pages, $24.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’ seems to be the philosophy, says Clive Hamilton in Earthmasters, of the fossil fuel companies, the World Bank and the billionaire ‘techno-entrepreneurs’ like Bill Gates and Richard Branson who are funding research into geo-engineering schemes for “large-scale intervention in the climate system designed to counter global warming”.

Geo-engineering advocates are coming in from the ‘mad scientist’ fringe to plug “the yawning gap between the urgent response scientists say is needed and the timid measures governments are willing to take”, says Hamilton, including Australia where coal exports over the next decade will be eleven times greater in CO₂ emissions than any reduction due to the carbon tax.

“If Plan A (persuading the world to cut emissions) is failing, shouldn’t we have a Plan B?”, plead the Earth engineers fondling their blueprints to manipulate cloud cover, change the ocean’s chemical composition, install a solar shield of sunlight-reflecting sulphate particles, sequestering carbon in the soil, and other even more exotic proposals.

Hamilton makes short work of such ideas, diagnosing their many technical defects, unintended consequences and the expensive and vast industrial infrastructure required to implement them.  Pursuing these “highly speculative technologies fraught with political and scientific uncertainties and risks” when “we could just stop burning fossil fuels” is a particularly fraught version of environmental roulette based on unjustified technological hubris. 

There is, says Hamilton, something “increasingly desperate about placing more faith in technological supremacy when it is the unrelenting desire to command and control the natural world that has brought us to this point”.  This faith is particularly marked amongst the leading geo-engineering advocates whose “common institutional and ideological origins” in Cold War nuclear weapons programs has primed them for further big technological schemes to defend free market capitalism.

Conservative politics explains the apparent paradox of fossil-fuel-friendly climate change deniers supporting a solution (geo-engineering) to a problem (anthropogenic global warming) they say does not exist.  For if the science of climate change were to win out against their best efforts at delay and denial, any policy response must involve no “infringement of economic freedom, or require social change  which challenges the structure of economic and political power” of the market economy.  Those who made the climate change mess are to remain in charge to profit from the (illusory) geo-engineering clean-up.

Hamilton cites Naomi Klein’s observation that climate change deniers ‘understand much better than liberals the political implications of accepting the science’, namely the revolutionary changes which would be required to ‘the underlying logic of our economic system’ which is based on continued material growth and consumerism.

Although such radical social transformation is routinely dismissed as utopian, Hamilton notes that it has been part of the “daily discourse of western society from the French Revolution to the 1980s when the neoliberal revolution brought about the ‘end of history’” and that today’s political quietude represents a pause in revolutionary history rather than a finale, a temporary stasis that climate change has the potential to dramatically upset.

In the end, Hamilton doesn’t take the plunge into anything as specific as a socialist solution to human and environmental crisis (he is more comfortable, and highly proficient at, philosophising) but his book sets up a useful platform for others to take the leap into changing the world.