Clive Hamilton

Clive Hamilton AM is Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. He has held visiting academic positions at the University of Oxford, Sciences Po and Yale University. He has a first-class honours degree in economics from the University of Sydney and a DPhil in the economics of development from the University of Sussex with a thesis exploring capitalist industrialisation in South Korea.

Prior to his appointment at CSU, Clive was for 14 years the executive director of the Australia Institute, a progressive think tank he founded in 1994. In 2005, with funding from the Poola Foundation, he established the Climate Institute. From 2012 he was a member of the Climate Change Authority of the Australian Government, until he resigned in protest in 2017. In 2009, Clive was the Greens candidates in a by-election for the federal electorate of Higgins, receiving 40% of the 2PP vote.

Clive has written a number of controversial and best-selling books. They include: Growth Fetish (Allen & Unwin); Earthmasters: The dawn of the age of climate engineering (Yale UP); Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change (Earthscan, Allen & Unwin) and Defiant Earth: The fate of humans in the Anthropocene (Polity Books). In 2015, the National Library of Australia published his book What Do We Want: The story of protest in Australia, which drew on the NLA's image archives.

In 2018 his book Silent Invasion: China's influence in Australia was published by Hardie Grant Books. It was followed by Hidden Hand: Exposing how the Chinese Communist Party is reshaping the world. Co-authored with Mareike Ohlberg, it was published by Hardie Grant and Oneworld in London. Both books have been best-sellers and have been translated into several languages.

In September 2022 his memoir, Provocateur: A life of ideas in action was published by Hardie Grant.

In June 2024, he published two books, Living Hot: Surviving and thriving on a heating planet, co-authored with George Wilkenfeld (Hardie Grant) and The Privileged Few, co-authored with Myra Hamilton (Polity Books).

His opinions have been published in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Le Monde, Nature, Scientific American and the Guardian.