Climate, Politics, & Tea

Over the last year, I have had ample time to think about various topics and ideas that I would like to cover more thoroughly, and I think it is time I put these down somewhere so that I don’t lose track of them.

• Free and Open Source: I am currently working 2 days a week for a webdesigner who uses exclusively open source tools, and I am getting more and more into the whole Free and Open Source set of mind. One idea in particular that interests me is to figure out (a) how some open source projects work and (b) how to coordinate various organisations that would benefit from some tailored OS tools. Of this, the latter interests me a lot more. For instance, there are a whole bunch of organisations that have the same need for databases and sending out invitations to events, yet all of them use a combination of rewriting forms, sending them out in word documents, sifting through the answer emails and typing the details up manually. Yet there already exist solutions to these tools, that automate the “Send out mass email with link to form and automated entry in database”. At other times, there exists no solution, but the same need exists across various organisations. If these decided to go for an open source option, they could – if well coordinated – potentially pay for some developers to custom develop the tool for them, at a price that is still cheaper than the commercial products. How to do the coordination and spreading the information about these tools is something that interests me quite a bit.

• Economics and Heterodox economics in particular: right now, I am sitting through a master’s course in Economics in Brussels and it is very illuminating. Not so much on economic topics, but rather on the nature of economics. I never had a particularly high opinion of economists, as they seem to hide their confusion under a glossy varnish of high-level mathematics (which seems to be their understanding of what a science is about, maths…). This will be the main topic I will write about. A few concrete one’s:

1. why are cost-benefit analyses in particular and the measuring fetish in general so misplaced, wrong, misguided etc. I have certainly not yet come to a conclusion for this myself, except that there is something deeply, deeply unsettling about many cost-benefit analyses.
2. “Decroissance” and the Growth Fetish: why growth is such a stupid thing to care about (this obviously also falls under general measuring fetishes)
3. Homo Economicus: “I, Robot” (Excellent, this will definitely be the title of one of the posts, as it summarises selfishness and rationality of homo economicus. This just occurred to me, so I am very happy!)
4. The detrimental effects of full-time work and advertisement: While advertisement is at least accepted as having some limited negative impact – although usually belittled -, work is almost exclusively seen as a “good” thing. If you suggest otherwise, you will immediately be challenged “So would you rather be unemployed, you slacker? You can’t always be on holiday!!”. In my opinion, full-time work is one of the most destructive features of our current society, for once because working-time reductions are part of the solution to getting off our Growth Fetish

• Media and its bias: See Medialens.org, Chomsky-Herman Propaganda model and http://therealnews.com/t/index.php
• New ways of learning. See learning sciences.
• Climate change and how to communicate really effectively on this. Identitycampaigning.org is really interesting for this
• And finally: What I call my “Big Project”, which is a mixture of many of the above, as a real project, rather than just intellectual ramblings. It is half university/school, sustainable open source firm and society. But enough for now.

See you offline!

The multitude of users scanning this blog will be confused today to see a new face on this blog… mine.

Cathy and I thought that it would be a good idea to pull our forces together to blog, rather than fail both for lack of motivation, absence of feedback and long breaks between blogging. Hopefully, this will lead to us actually writing more often and at least commenting on each others blogs! Some others will hopefully join us soon in this endeavour.

Just to warn you in advance: while we will still be using climatepoliticstea, the scope of the topics will often stray further afield than hot air – both climate and politics – or hot drinks. Not that anyone will read this, really.

I am a graduate student and activist working on climate policy – motivated to do this because I think stabilizing the climate is crucially important and we are running out of time. This blog is primarily a place for me to explore and make sense of ideas that come my way. Much of the content will focus on (surprise!) climate change and politics and probably less so on tea. Tea made it into the title because my housemate and I have both lived in England and have frequent conversations about climate change, politics, and other interesting topics over tea. If you get something out of this blog, that’s great. Constructive criticism will be appreciated.; destructive criticism will be deleted.