ICS Seminar Series - James Goodman

Date: Thursday 18 August 2016
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EE.G.36, Western Sydney University, Parramatta South campus

James Goodman

(UTS)

The Coal Rush and the 'Climate Dialectic': India, Germany

Abstract

Coal is said to be a 'legacy' fuel. It is the main driver of climate change and is ostensibly the main target for climate policy. Climate campaigners now focus on coal as the primary form of 'unburnable carbon'. Yet coal has undergone a renaissance, fuelling both 'emerging' and established capitalist economies. This paper investigates the contest between drivers for coal and forces for a post-coal future across three countries, taken as contrast cases: industrialising India; post-industrial Germany; and extractivist Australia. It focuses on contestations over coal, fought out between corporate sectors, within the state, and between NGOs and movements. It finds the meaning and legitimacy of coal increasingly destabilised, with various contests over whether coal is a viable commodity or stranded asset, a strategic resource or resource curse, a foundation for prosperity or a threat to humanity. In the context of advancing climate change, coal's persistence creates new political forces and brings new models for post-coal society into view. As such, the paper discusses the three cases in terms of an unfolding agenda, a 'climate dialectic', of realising the social transformations that are required for effective climate agency.

Biography

James Goodman is Associate Professor in the Social and Political Change Group of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, conducting research into social change and global politics. He is co-author of Disorder and the Disinformation Society (2015), Climate Upsurge: The Ethnography of Climate Movement Politics (2014), and Justice Globalism: Ideology, Crises, Policy (2013). He currently works on the politics of climate change.