Jeremy Williams's Blog

The global appeal of the doughnut

This week it’s the now annual Global Doughnut Days, hosted by Kate Raworth and her Doughnut Economics Action Lab. There are events happening around the world and online, exploring and investigating the ongoing work around doughnut economics. As my own contribution, I thought I’d check in on how the doughnut is being applied around the world.

As a refresher, Doughnut Economics is a way of conceptualising global challenges. It was developed in the NGO world and popularised in Kate Raworth’s 20...

Book review: How to fall in love with the future, by Rob Hopkins

Years ago when I was more involved in the Transition Towns movement, I took part in one of their community training sessions. One of the highlights was an imaginative exercise where we interviewed someone from the future about how they had solved climate change and the energy crisis, and the steps that had got them there. It was a kind of purposeful improvisation that was equal parts silly and moving, unlocking something hopeful in participants who had gathered to think about the world’s big...

What we learned this week

The BBC has announced the winners of its Green Sport Awards. Nice interview with ex-Arsenal, now Real Betis footballer Hector Bellerin, who buys secondhand clothes and rides his bike to the training ground.

Speaking of football, Pledgeball is back for another year, a campaign that gets football fans to compete against each other to see which fanbase is making the most green lifestyle changes. I am sceptical of the lifestyle approach, but it is fun and raises the conversation in accessible way...

Can São Tomé make its entire country a nature reserve?

A few years ago there was an unusual campaign to make London the world’s first national park city. London, especially south of the river, has enough green spaces to just about make that plausible. In 2019 they achieved it, though I don’t really know what difference it is making. Here’s something more impressive however: the first country to declare all of its territory a biosphere reserve.

It was announced by UNESCO recently as part of a new cohort of reserves, and São Tomé and Principe stan...

Book review: The Green Ages, by Annette Kehnel

I’m doing a bit of a reading series on the future at the moment. I reviewed Designing Hope last week, with more to come. The Green Ages is part of that too, despite being a book on history. Written by German historian Annette Kehnel and translated by Geshe Ipsen, it’s written with an eye on the past so that we can apply lessons for the future: “The aim of this book is to help increase our scope for action. I hope that it will spark your curiosity, dispel some fears and whet your appetite for...

Heating homes with seawater

Just outside my office window is a heat pump, which provides our house with low carbon heating and hot water. It’s an air source heat pump, which means it draws heat from the air and channels it into the house. There are other forms of heat pumps, notably ground source, and less well known is the water source heat pump. I’ve written before about a scheme to use London’s underground rivers as a heat source, but it remains a fairly unusual technology.

As the name suggests, water source heat pu...

What we learned this week

“God will ask us if we have cultivated and cared for the world that he created, for the benefit of all and for future generations, and if we have taken care of our brothers and sisters. What will be our answer?” Pope Leo has given his first speech on the climate. He also “noted that some have chosen to deride the increasingly evident signs of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming.”

Meanwhile, the US Energy Department sent an email instructing staff to avoid “terminolog...

Film review: Power Station

When you put solar panels on your roof, the sun pays for them. It might not feel like it when you get the installation quotes in, but those panels will generate more than they cost and the universe pays you back. So why aren’t we putting them everywhere? Why are so many people living in energy poverty when there is such energy abundance right over our heads?

Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell have a refreshingly obvious solution: just get on with it with your neighbours, and turn your street ...

Book review: Waste Wars, by Alexander Clapp

Did you know that during the Cold War, 10% of East Germany’s GDP came from taking waste from West Germany? People couldn’t move across that border, but rubbish could – and it moved from the richer territory to the poorer one.

That’s a pattern that repeats itself again and again in Alexander Clapp’s eye-opening expose of the global waste industry. Trash from the EU is shipped across the world to be burned in East Asia. Obsolete electronics burn in Ghana, after they’ve been stripped for sa...

Racist is a descriptive term

This week we’ve seen the Prime Minister at pains to call out the Reform party’s racist policies, while insisting that people who vote for Reform are not themselves racists. It’s a tightrope walk, with journalists repeatedly inviting politicians to call their opponents racist.

For those ready to milk offense for political gain, the distinction between policy and person is quickly blurred again. Nigel Farage told his voters that “by implication” Starmer was calling them all racists. In a piece...