‘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”.