CUTransitions Talks are learning sessions organised by the Centre for Urban Transitions, Swinburne University of Technology. In this session, Professor Paul Burke will discuss fuel prices and ambient air pollution. This talk explores the short-run influence of road transport fuel prices on ambient air pollution over the period 2004–2023 for the case of Sydney, Australia. Using daily and monthly data from nine air quality monitoring stations, we find generally negative effects of fuel prices on ambient levels of several key pollutants, with inelastic effect sizes. Higher gasoline prices are also linked to improved daily visibility levels and a reduction in Google search interest in air pollution. Wind speeds, bushfire incidence, and public holidays are among other key factors affecting Sydney air quality. The findings are useful for air pollution prediction and add to the body of understanding of the environmental benefits of fuel taxes. Professor Paul Burke is Head of the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics (ACDE) and Deputy Director of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. His research is in energy and environmental economics, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific. We look forward to seeing you at the Talk!

Energy transitions are social transitions, shifting existing patterns of everyday life and challenging shared societal values. This is especially evident in Australia’s carbon-intensive regions, where community capacities to cohere and care for each other are being re-shaped. In this paper I draw on the concept of care infrastructures to analyse some of the contemporary social dimensions of regional energy transitions. Care infrastructures are ‘forms that pattern the organisation of care within society’ (Power and Mee 2020: 489). The case study focuses on the Illawarra, a region on the cusp of a new wave of change prompted by imperatives to decarbonise heavy industry, the globalisation of coal capital, and the emergence of new renewables infrastructure, including offshore wind. I identify the care infrastructures that have long underpinned industrial change in the region, noting that capacities to care have always existed at the household and community scale. I examine the challenges energy transitions present for existing care infrastructures and identify where gaps are emerging around support for affected workers and the broader community, before concluding with some implications for transition planning and policy.​ Chantel Carr is an ARC DECRA Fellow in the Discipline of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Wollongong. […]

Peak bodies working to end violence against women in Australia recognise that violence is preventable but condoned and trivialised societally, emboldening perpetrators, and compromising systems of accountability. Amani lost her mother to domestic violence in 2015 and her grandmother was killed in Israeli violence in 2006. Drawing on lived expertise and contemporary conversations around coercive control and primary prevention, Amani will speak about the parallels between interpersonal abuse and state-sanctioned violence. She will examine the way tactics of victim-blaming, gaslighting and DARVO occur at the macro and micro levels and the ways in which survivors engage in creative resistance against these strategies. What are the impacts of these strategies on women and other vulnerable groups? How can feminists engage in more deliberate and meaningful critiques of state-sanctioned abuse in a time of genocide? If both pro-Palestine activists and activists against domestic violence believe that violence can be prevented, what knowledge can be shared across movements to give us a clearer understanding of how power and control is exercised over vulnerable individuals and populations? Amani’s ground-breaking feminist memoir The Mother Wound, published in 2021, explores the effects of domestic abuse and state-sanctioned violence. As an appointee to the DFSV Commission’s Lived Experience Advisory […]

This August, South America experienced a deadly heat wave, topping 40˚C in the middle of winter. Flash flooding, wildfires, and oceanic waterspouts are just some examples of what we might call ‘global weirding’ – weird, extreme weather events are becoming the norm.​​​ Many areas, including here in Australia, are at risk of becoming uninsurable. This talk explores new technology that is promising a financial safety net for vulnerable communities who are dealing with these environmental perils. Parametric insurance uses remote sensing technologies, weather stations, and state of the art climate models, to link policies to the weather itself – if a drought strikes, the insurance pays. And yet for all of their technological sophistication, do these novel financial arrangements actually work for the small family farms they cover? Taking an anthropological approach means we can ask hard questions about competing views of what the “ground-truth” is, how damage is measured, and who is ultimately responsible for making life liveable in increasingly unknowable and unrecognisable environments. Caroline E. Schuster is an Associate Professor in economic anthropology at the Australian National University. Her most recent book, Forecasts: a story of weather and finance at the edge of disaster (2023, University of Toronto […]