Phil Shannon

  • Greenhouse effect: business adds to the hot air

    To listen to the Business Council of Australia (BCA), one could be forgiven for thinking that the greenhouse effect is just a load of hot air. At the high profile summit meeting on June 16 between representatives from

  • Oppenheimer: father of the Atomic bomb

    Awestruck by the power of the atomic bomb during its test bombing in the New Mexico desert, J Robert Oppenheimer nevertheless set the coordinates for the first atomic bombs to be used in war, to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki three weeks later, writes Phil Shannon.

  • The Great Feudal Relics Show

    The world's richest woman is about to disgrace our shores again. Royalty worshippers are ecstatic. Australian republicans and socialists, on the other hand, hold no brief for these "people of the past" (as Trotsky called them).

  • Can nuclear fusion solve our energy problem?

    The announcement of the world's first sustained nuclear fusion reaction in England on November 10 was greeted with silence on the left, but it is worth asking whether it deserves our plaudits or placards. Nuclear fission

  • On Jesus and social justice

    Christmas seems an appropriate time to turn to the question of the relationship between Christianity and social change. Do pacifism and non-violence, and social change through personal change — which are among the values shared

  • In favour of forgetting

    Vietnam Days: Australia and the Impact of Vietnam Peter Pierce, Jeffrey Grey, Jeff Doyle (eds) Penguin, 1991. 323 pp. $19.95 Reviewed"The struggle of people [against power]", wrote the Czech author Milan

  • Passion, wit and platitudes

    New World New Mind: Changing The Way We Think To Save Our Future By Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich Paladin Grafton Books/Collins. 302 pp. $15.95 (pb) ReviewedWhen humanity was a young and hairy species just

  • Finding 'poetry' in pollution

    Biospheres: Metamorphosis of Planet Earth By Dorion Sagan Arkana/Penguin. $18.95 (pb) Reviewed"It would be difficult to wax poetic about medical waste, CFCs and carbon dioxide. Yet ... " this is what Dorion

  • The science and politics of Gaia

    NASA probably didn't intend it, but those early space flight pictures of "Spaceship Earth" galvanised an environmental consciousness and movement. As the astronomer Carl Sagan put it, many environmental activists were "stimulated

  • Blood and Oil Forever

    Blood and Oil Forever(Lyrics adapted from "Stars and Stripes Forever" by J.P. Sousa) From the forests of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq We will fight for good old Uncle Sam we will pillage, loot and sack We have liberated