I used to teach Labour and the Environment and assigned Andreas Malm's Fossil Capital as the text. If I was teaching today, I would structure the course around Dr. Stranglove. We have moved on from history and analysis to farce. The notion of the "doomsday machine" comes from Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War. It is instructive to pay attention to the footnotes:
> > While I would not care to guess the exact form that a reasonably efficient > Doomsday Machine would take, I would be willing to conjecture that if the > project were started today [1960] and sufficiently well supported one > could have such a machine by 1970. I would also guess that the cost would > be between 10 and 100 billion dollars. … The mechanism used would most > likely not involve the breaking up of the Earth, but the creation of > really large amounts of radioactivity or *the causing of major climatic > changes* or, less likely, the extreme use of thermal effects. > I have added emphasis to one of Kahn's conjectured mechanisms. Back in 2016, when I was teaching Malm's text, I wrote a blog post ( https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2016/04/zero-sum-foolery-2-of-4-doomsday.html ) about Dr. Strangelove, Kahn's footnote, Anatol Rapaport's critique of strategic thinking and game theory, and Thomas Schelling's thought on nuclear strategy and climate change. Amazingly, they are all interconnected as, for example, Kubrick began to get the idea for the movie after reading a review of the novel, Red Alert , by none other than Thomas Schelling! Schelling was skeptical of emission reduction targets. In a 2008 discussion, responding to Nicolaus Stern's enthusiasm about prospective global emission reduction targets, Schelling observed that, "announcing a radical target for the future won't be taken seriously..." -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39173): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39173 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116189291/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
