COP 27 – Energy: Back to the Future, local democracy, public ownership and social inclusion.

In his third talk on the Climate Crisis, Alan Simpson tackled the issue of energy production and distribution in a shift away from fossil fuel and towards green energy. Importantly, this is not simply a technological question of new inventions. This is about how to organize socially the production and distribution of energy differently, challenging directly the private ownership of the big energy companies.

 

COP 27 – Feeding the Future

In his second talk on the Climate Crisis, Alan Simpson focused on how to ensure sufficient, sustainable production of food for the future. The global food production system, based on ‘free’ trade and tightly controlled by a few large transnational corporations, results in one-third of what we produce being wasted. At the same time, offloading our surpluses in developing countries destroys the local food production there. In short, the problem is not growing enough food, the problem is how to ensure that food is produced sustainably and locally reaching everybody.

 

Neoliberal strikes for the neoliberal university!

UCU has yet again called for industrial action of academics and Administrative, Professional & Managerial (APM) staff over drastic – and unjustified – cuts to pensions, eroded pay and deteriorating working conditions. Indeed, considering the more general cost of living crisis across the UK at the moment, the situation for action has become even more pressing now than it was a year ago. On last year’s experience, however, it is also clear that striking in the traditional way of everyone out does no longer work. At Nottingham University, management sat out easily 18 days of strike. Considering that learning objectives had not been damaged and students could not, therefore, reclaim some of their tuition fees, management was very relaxed. Only the marking boycott in May 2021 brought them suddenly to the negotiating table resulting in a local agreement (see UCU Nottingham University 2022). In this guest post, Faiz Sheikh outlines what an alternative approach to industrial action in the neoliberal university could look like, potentially overcoming the shortcomings of the traditional approach.

COP 27 – Avoiding the Apocalypse

There is currently no pathway in place to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C, but it is still possible, maintained Alan Simpson at the opening of the first lecture of six on the global climate crisis, a series of TED Talks at Nottingham University. Nevertheless, if we do want to hit this target, everything has to change, including our way of thinking. The Radical is the only Reasonable! In this blog post, I provide a brief summary of the key points of this first lecture.