CACOR Live | Dr. Raymond Murphy | What is Undermining Climate Change Mitigation? | 27 Nov 2024 | 13:30 EST

Speaker: Dr. Raymond Murphy

Topic: What is Undermining Climate Change Mitigation?  How Fossil-fuelled Practices Challenge Low-carbon Transitions

Time: Nov 27, 2024 13:30 Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Summary:

Why are fossil fuels stuck at eighty per cent of global energy despite impressive rollouts of wind and solar energy and increased efficiencies?  This investigation documents that the reason is the accelerating treadmill of energy demand based on fossil-fuelled practices whose enormous scale nullifies advances in efficiency and clean energy, making mitigation of climate change exceedingly difficult.  Humans are advancing innovative efficiency and green energy just to stay in the same place of emissions.  Proportionality of greenhouse-gas emissions by emitters is central.  How much emissions can be attributed to particular social practices and their huge growth?  The talk proposes two hypotheses for further research: i) widespread unawareness of the harmful consequences and scale of specific fossil-fuelled practices, and ii) awareness as a necessary condition for mitigating climate change.

Biography

Raymond Murphy is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Ottawa, Canada and Past-president of the Environment and Society Research Committee of the International Sociological Association.  He did his Honours B.Sc. (physics) at the University of Ottawa and MA and PhD (sociology) at the University of Toronto.  He is a member of the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome.  He has authored multiple books including Social Closure (Oxford University Press 1988), Rationality and Nature (Westview Press 1994), Sociology and Nature (Westview Press 1997), Leadership in Disaster (McGill-Queens University Press 2009), and The Fossil-Fuelled Climate Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan Springer Nature 2021).

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