Podcaster : Writer : Engagement Specialist
On the day the Government announced it was banning a thing I have called to be banned for very many years, I wrote a blog about the strange feeling of being told you’re wrong while knowing history will judge you to be right. https://powellds.medium.com/the-happy-death-of-petty-idiocy-4c245e649bb1 It always was completely and utterly loopy to say that we weren’t doing things like subsidising …
To coincide with World Mental Health Day, a piece about eco-anxiety. Hopefully does a bit more than just wibbling quietly and saying “cheer up, might never happen”. Thing is it might happen, and it’s OK to be a bit terrified about that. For the love of the planet: for the New Economics Foundation Perhaps it’s not, at root, the vastness …
The problems of thinking about the vastness of climate change as simply one kind of problem. On my Medium blog: https://medium.com/@powellds/what-if-climate-change-was-not-this-thing-but-another-thing-e539868a647a “given no metaphor for climate change will be anything other than desperately partial and constraining, perhaps the most useful thing to do is not to try to pick the ‘best’ metaphor, but to always just be acutely aware that …
What lockdowns can teach us about climate change. For the Rapid Transition Alliance: “sometimes in the rush to point out the policies that should be put in place to deal with the climate crisis it feels like we forget how important it is that we make acting on that crisis feel vibrant, essential, inclusive, and if it entails any whiff of a …
Bringing together the ‘levelling up’ and climate agendas makes sense. I wrote for Tribune in 2019: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/12/why-the-north-needs-a-green-new-deal There is political consensus on the need to address geographic inequalities in the UK, with the Conservatives calling it ‘levelling up’ and Labour ‘regional rebalancing’. But what they’re missing is that the climate transformation is the perfect opportunity to put this approach into …
On the problems of linear thinking – both about climate itself, and how we should respond to it. For NEF: https://neweconomics.org/2019/07/climate-breakdown-think-exponentially (The original name for this piece was ‘Be more virus’, which has been changed retrospectively for obvious reasons.)
When the parks dried up and it hadn’t rained for over a month, I wrote about how strange it all felt to have it dawn on you that this is climate change. https://medium.com/@powellds/in-praise-of-mild-discombobulation-because-christ-what-else-have-we-got-bb3e7d648fb0 Ecological philosopher Timothy Morton argues that our brains are wired to generally not notice most things until they try to bite us or start behaving a bit strangely. Then …
Things have changed now but in the summer of 2018 the UK left was pretty quiet on climate change. In this challenging piece for NEF, I challenged it do to better. http://neweconomics.org/2018/07/climate-breakdown-where-is-the-left “Progressives get it – intellectually speaking. You’d have to be a bit of a doofus not to. Climate change is clearly a problem. A great big, era-defining, ecology-changing, …
If you’re going to scare people about climate change, make sure you give them something to do about it. For NEF: https://neweconomics.org/2017/08/earth_overshoot_day It is scary — make no mistake. Scary today. Scary already. … But scary without feeling like you can do something about it — without agency — is just dull, dead panic: rabbity-headlights time… Portraying the scale of how we’re going wrong compels us …
A tragedy that provoked huge questions about deregulation, and who it is done for. For NEF: https://neweconomics.org/2017/06/grenfell-tragedy-deregulation After Grenfell, commentator after commentator is now talking about deregulation – the government’s war on the principle and practice of telling companies what not to do. It may not be too much to suggest that the bubble that opposed regulation may have been popped, literally …