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Hudson, Marc: Who tilts at windmills? Explaining hostility to renewables

Marc Hudson

Who tilts at windmills? Explaining hostility to renewables‘, The Conversation, 29 May 2017

Looks at the history of why Australian policy makers have opposed solar and wind energy options.

In a search for explanations for this, my paper looks at what we academics call “material factors”, such as party donations, post-career jobs, blame avoidance, diminished government capacity to act, and active disinformation by incumbents. I then turn to ideological factors such as neoliberalism, the “growth at all costs” mindset, and of course climate denial. Where it gets fun – and possibly controversial – is when I turn to psychological explanations such as what the sociologist Karl Mannheim called “the problem of generations”.