Clive Hamilton Livres

Clive Hamilton has spent a life asking why. In his unique memoir, Provocateur, he shows us why questioning the status quo matters, how powerful arguments can change the country, and how the life of ideas in action actually works. From why climate change matters to how we understand ourselves as Australians and the dangers to us of the new authoritarianism – all this and more has been shaped, for better or worse, by public researchers and writers like Hamilton. His work, and that of the Australia Institute he founded, made him many friends as well as powerful enemies. He’s been denounced in federal parliament, black-handed by the Chinese Communist Party and sued by an angry corporation. He’s had to call in the police after death threats and take a crash course in counter-surveillance techniques. But he has also influenced the quality of the air Australians breathe, the cost of our education and how we see Australia’s place in the world. In Provocateur, we see the passions, the doubts, the strategising, the fears, the victories, the mistakes and the questioning. Here is a blueprint for changing public debate in our increasingly uncertain times – proof that ideas are powerful and that a different way into the future is possible.

Goes to the heart of the unfolding reality of the twenty-first century: international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have all failed and before the end of the century Earth is projected to be warmer than it has been for 15 million years.

This text provides an account of the key issues that affect climate change policy in Australia, detailing the policy failures, the murky politics, the corruption of the policy process, the influence of the fossil-fuel industries on policy makers, and the ethical issues that underpin the debate.

Thoroughly researched and powerfully argued, Silent Invasion is a sobering examination of the mounting threats to democratic freedoms Australians have for too long taken for granted

This book does not set out once more to raise the alarm to encourage us to take radical measures to head off climate chaos. There have been any number of books and reports in recent years explaining just how dire the future looks and how little time we have left to act. This book is about why we have ignored those warnings, and why it is now too late. It is a book about the frailties of the human species as expressed in both the institutions we built and the psychological dispositions that have led us on the path of self-destruction. It is about our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our penchant for avoiding the facts. It is the story of a battle within us between the forces that should have caused us to protect the Earth - our capacity to reason and our connection to Nature - and those that, in the end, have won out - our greed, materialism and alienation from Nature. And it is about the 21st century consequences of these failures. Clive Hamilton is author of the bestselling Affluenza and Growth Fetish, of Scorcher, and most recently Freedom Paradox.

China is a growing threat to democracy and liberal values around the world

Humans have become so powerful that we have disrupted the functioning of the Earth System as a whole, bringing on a new geological epoch the Anthropocene one in which the serene and clement conditions that allowed civilisation to flourish are disappearing and we quail before 'the wakened giant'.

In the first Quarterly Essay of 2006, Clive Hamilton throws out a challenge to Australia's party of social democracy - to both its true believers and right-wing machine men. Will it be business-as-usual and creeping atrophy, or will the Labor Party find a new way of talking to individualistic, affluent Australia?According to Hamilton, Labor and the Left must acknowledge that the social democracy of old - with its strong unions, public ownership of assets and distinct social classes - is dead. Prosperity, more than poverty, is the dominant characteristic of Australia today. Given this, should governments confine themselves to stoking the fires of the economy and protecting the interests of wealth creators? Or is there room for a political program that embodies new ideals but can also withstand economic scare tactics? This is an original and provocative account of our present political juncture by a man of the Left who accuses the Left of irrelevance. Any new progressive politics, Hamilton argues, will need to tap into the anxieties and aspirations of the nation, find new ways to talk about morality, and thereby address deeper human needs."The Australian Labor Party has served its historical purpose and will wither and die as the progressive force of Australian politics." —Clive Hamilton, What's Left?