Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 10

What we learned this week

Most Americans don’t support the Trump’s energy and climate policies, according to research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. 73% think it’s important to stay in the Paris Agreement.

As I’m trying to keep a focus on solutions on the blog, I’ve resisted the urge to whine about the government’s economic growth rhetoric and airport expansion. I will however post a link to the New Economics Foundation and their investigation into whether or not expanding airports actually de...

What can you do about the climate crisis?

This week I’ve been reading Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s book What If we Get it Right?, all about climate solutions and imagining the positive side of change captured in the title. One of the things she mentions early on is the importance of finding our personal place in climate action – not the general sense of what must be done, but a contribution that is specifically ours.

I know people who have struggled with this, because they want to do something but aren’t drawn to the most visible forms...

Islands of Abandonment, by Cal Flyn

From slag heaps in the Lothian to the ‘urban prairie’ of Detroit, Islands of Abandonment is a nature book of a different sort, seeking out resurgent nature in ruined places.

There are four main types of landscapes, Cal Flyn suggests. There is pristine land untouched by human activity, land that has been reshaped for production, such as agriculture or forestry, and ornamental landscapes. Flyn’s interest lies in the ‘fourth kind’, those that emerge by themselves after being abandoned. The ...

What we learned this week

It’s been going on for years now, but this investigative short documentary from Deutche Welle lifts the lid on dodgy carbon offset schemes in Kenya, and how they displace and even kill nomadic people.

“Tax the rich – do it now” is easy enough to say, but it’s more unusual for someone to follow up with “start with me”, as Dale Vince does in his piece in the Guardian.

Regardless of national energy policy under the new US regime, Hawaii may follow Sweden in using eco-labels on pumped fuels. ...

Climate influences on weather in 2024

A few weeks ago I read the new book by Friedericke Otto, one of the pioneers of weather attribution science. It’s an important field, because it allows us to understand when weather incidents are related to climate change and when they’re not. There have always been big storms, droughts and extremes. It is easy for people to shrug off weather incidents as the way it has always been, and not notice the underlying trends.

The team at World Weather Attribution are able to model weather incident...

Why Dakar won the Sustainable Transport Award

Every year the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) presents its Sustainable Transport Award, choosing one global city that is doing good things on greener travel. This year the award went to Dakar, capital city of Senegal.

The centrepiece of the city’s sustainable transport strategy is a bus rapid transit system, a technology that I have written about a few times before. As a recap, BRT systems succeed by treating buses like trains. Passengers go to stations, buy their...

What we learned this week

In case you missed it, 2024 has been named the hottest year on record and the first to breach the 1.5 degrees C of heating limit. The press release from NASA explains the contributions from other factors beyond climate change, such as El Nino.

Ashden has one of its videos in the Smiley Charity Film Awards and we need your votes. It’s a great mini documentary about indigenous land rights in Tanzania and it’s up against some much bigger charities, so we’d appreciate your support!

A poll for ...

How Paris makes climate-ready school grounds

I get to visit a lot of schools with my job as a Climate Action Advisor, and so I get to see a lot of school playgrounds as well. It’s a mixed bag. I’ve seen schools with exceptional play facilities and brilliant ideas, such as a mini-golf course, BMX track, a bouncy hopper arena, or a quiet writer’s shed full of books, paper and pens. Other school playgrounds can be a little depressing, especially in urban settings.

It wouldn’t be fair to blame the schools for this. School budgets are tight....

What a gravity battery looks like

People have been tapping the force of gravity for centuries to get work done. The area where I live had a number of water mills in the medieval era, all running off the power of falling water. Hydropower uses the same logic, generating electricity from water running downhill.

There’s an important role for gravity power in the clean energy transition too. As we all know, wind and solar are intermittent, and so we need energy storage to see us through periods of low production. There are mult...

What we learned this week

Shareable have published a toolkit for those interested in setting up a Library of Things. Lots of practical advice here for getting them started and growing their user base.

Hannah Ritchie on the famous bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon on whether resource prices would rise or fall. What would have happened if the bet had taken place in a different decade? And was it a useful exercise?

China added over 200 gigawatts of new solar power capacity in 2024. To put that figure in cont...