Canadian Association for the Club of Rome
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Dr. Raymond Murphy – CACOR Zoom – 2022-03-02 The Accelerating Treadmill of Fossil-Fuelled Practices and Assessing What to do about it
March 2, 2022 @ 13:30 - 16:00 EST
Topic: Dr. Raymond Murphy | The Accelerating Treadmill of Fossil-Fuelled Practices and Assessing What to Do about It.
Time: Mar 2, 2022 13:30 Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Summary:
The natural sciences have definitively documented that contemporary climate change has been caused by humans, and don’t shy away from revealing the depth of the threat of global warming. Neither should social science. What are those human causes? Since the industrial revolution, fossil fuels have provided the energy for most of the activities people engage in to meet their needs and do what they enjoy, but they have perilous long-term consequences when combusted. An informed citizenry needs a practical understanding of how deeply the problem is embedded in their normal fossil-fuelled practices and of the scale of those practices. Knowledge is the basis of adequate solutions, even if decision-makers and populations don’t like to hear troubling news. This presentation will translate the science of global warming into everyday units applied to normal activities to make the source of the threat more meaningful to non-scientists. Their understanding is a necessary condition for mitigating the climate crisis, especially through their consuming and voting practices. This social science analysis is based on my new book The Fossil-Fuelled Climate Crisis: Foresight or Discounting Danger?
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 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).