climate change policy, science, and activism; photography; cartography and mapmaking
A group from Singapore called Students for a Fossil Free Future has a new report: “Fossil-Fuelled Universities: A Call for Universities to End Links with the Fossil Fuel Industry.”
There is also a summary.
They found linkages between the fossil fuel industry and universities in terms of endowments; board members; donations; professorships and fellowships; scholarships, bursaries, and student awards; on-campus career events; and industry-linked professional programmes.
I didn’t hit my self-imposed goal of producing 50 page versions of my four core chapters by the end of January, with all comments from two committee members taken into account.
Nonetheless, the idea of the deadline served its purpose. Two of the four chapters are now done (except for a last check-through of length and successful incorporation of all committee comments as the last step before sending it back to them). I have hand-annotated the third and need about half a day to incorporate those comments into the Word version. Then I just need to hand annotate the final chapter, incorporate those changes, and check over the whole set for flow, length, and full adherence to committee member comments.
Between major progress on 3/4 core chapters and the American Political Science Association publishing my counter-repertoires section as a pre-print, this has been a good week for dissertation completion.
One challenge in the dissertation process has been repeated entreaties to only talk about Canadian campus fossil fuel divestment (CFFD) campaigns, not those in the US and UK.
I think Karen Litfin’s 2005 article “Advocacy Coalitions Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Globalization and Canadian Climate Change Policy” may be helpful for making my case that divestment is a transnational movement and that more is lost than gained by imposing national borders on its analysis. Litfin argues that “the twin phenomena of economic globalization and the internationalization of environmental affairs are blurring the distinction between some policy subsystems and the international arena.” I would argue that this is especially true for climate change activism, for several reasons. The politics of climate change are inherently bound up in international relations, since unilateral actions can’t solve the problem in the absence of cooperation between states. Furthermore, in North America the highly integrated energy systems — and the everpresent concern about Canadian economic competitiveness compared to the US — contributes to the transnationalization of climate politics, as do influences between ideologically similar political parties in both countries.
In addition, the strategies of broker organizations which have promoted divestment — including 350.org, the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition, the US Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network, Canada’s Divest Canada Coalition, and the UK’s People & Planet — are based around providing a “campaign in a box” with coordinated objectives, branding, and messaging. Since the CFFD movement is focused on non-government actors, governments and national policy environments have a secondary importance for the movement.
After working eight hours straight on the counter-repertoires section this afternoon and evening I think the terror necessary to get the dissertation done has been rekindled.
If I keep at it, I should have that section ready to go before I go to sleep.
[Update: 2022-01-31] The extract is now available as a pre-print.
I can’t recall ever feeling as stuck with anything as I do with the dissertation. There are so many ‘to do’ items, so many of them depend on others being finished in order to be possible to complete themselves, and there isn’t any day-to-day or week-to-week pressure to keep me focused.
To rekindle the terror which is so often the basis of writing projects being completed, I have promised a 200 page version of my four core chapters edited down by the end of the month. That should address my committee’s most significant comments, and at least leave a text of the write length for any future changes.
The CBC has some interesting reporting on the medical ethics of triage in relation to the voluntarily unvaccinated:
Udo Schuklenk, Ontario Research Chair in bioethics at Queens University and co-editor of the journal Bioethics, questions the argument that vaccine refusers are victims of misinformation.
“There’s many people in my field who go on about equity considerations, and [how] these people don’t know better and they have been misled,” he said. “And my view is, they have made their autonomous choice.”
“And if you’re telling me that they are unable to make a sensible choice, then we should take this choice away from them. But we should not, on the one hand, give them this choice, and then not hold them accountable for it.
“The vast majority of people in my field of bioethics would disagree with me on what I just said. They’d say there’s many people who don’t know better and have been misled. And my point is, that may well be true, but then this should have a consequence on the kind of choices that these people are permitted to make.”
I understand and can broadly applaud the ethics of doctors treating everyone equally based on the severity of the risks they face, without consideration of whether they brought on those risks voluntarily. At the same time, public health measures in the face of an epidemic are an ancient and appropriate authority of the state and it seems totally reasonable to restrict the activities of people who refuse to comply.
Surely one of the big injustices of the pandemic has been all the people who need non-COVID treatment suffering worse outcomes because the voluntarily unvaccinated are absorbing too many of the resources of the medical system.