Paul Hoggett
Monday 27th April 5.00pm
Liberal democracies have gone through the motions of tackling climate change for three decades. Now, as Australia burns and Greenland melts the Trumps and Bolsanaros seem set on wrecking any kind of international effort to constrain carbon emissions. With breath taking audacity some defenders of ‘business as usual’ now say that a major rise in global temperatures is inevitable, the target of limiting this rise to even two degrees is unfeasible and in any case counter-productive. This is an entirely cynical approach to truth peddled by those primarily responsible for the ecocide now underway. By exploring phenomena such as hard and soft denial, cynicism and nihilism this talk will examine the shifting rhetorics of complicity in planetary destruction.
Paul Hoggett helped to set up and was the first Chair of the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA). He is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at UWE, Bristol. Last year he edited a volume of research papers by CPA members called Climate Psychology: On indifference to Disaster (2019, Palgrave).
