Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 102

Building of the week: The Wintles

The Wintles is a sustainable housing development that I’ve heard lots about, but I was reminded of it recently and remembered that I’d never actually written about it on the blog. So let’s put that right.

The Living Villages Trust is an organisation that builds villages rather than housing developments, and the Wintles is their best known project. It’s a collection of 12 homes in the Shropshire town of Bishop’s Castle. Each house is built with natural materials, often reclaimed or locally so...

10 quotes on climate and race

The connections between climate change and race are not something that’s well understood, and some people are cynical about the whole idea. “Did you know that climate change was racist?” wrote Rod Liddle in The Sun. “I suppose it had to be, didn’t it? I mean everything else is racist.”

Liddle seems to assume that people want climate change and race to be connected, as if that would be a right on and woke thing to believe, whether or not it’s true. But while the connections are not yet genera...

What to make of the Sky Diamond?

F Scott Fitzgerald, best known for The Great Gatsby, published a novella in 1922 called The Diamond as Big as the Ritz. It tells the story of a family who own a mountain that is made entirely of diamond, and the lengths they go to in order to protect it. One of the ironies of the story is that while they possess something inordinately valuable, it is only worth anything if diamonds remain rare. If the world knew that there was a mountain-sized diamond out there, the value of all existing diamond...

Energy for everyone with GRID Alternatives

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about energy democracy, and how the transition to renewable energy can also create a fairer society. It’s not inevitable. Renewable energy can be large scale and remote from ordinary consumers, operated mainly for the benefit of corporations and their shareholders. Offshore wind power and large hydro would tend to have little democratizing effect, whereas solar PV can be installed at the household level and has the most potential for wide participation.

GRID...

A Bright Future, by Joshua Goldstein and Staffan Qvist

Last week the government announced its Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution, and point number three is “delivering new and advanced nuclear power”. Since it’s happening, it’s a good time to review the whole issue of nuclear power in an age of climate change, and this book is a useful place to start: A Bright Future: How some countries have solved climate change and the rest can follow.

Not that you’d know from the title that this is a book entirely about nuclear power. Nor fro...

What we learned this week

If you had $1,000 to give to help stop climate change, where would you make those donations? Grist ask the question and get part way to an answer.

Pollution is a racial justice issue, and that is more widely known in the US than in Britain. Good article on the subject by the World Resources Institute.

On the subject of justice, half of all global emissions from aviation are from 1% of the global population.

Assembly is the magazine from the Malala Foundation, and the latest issue is...

Do we need solar power from space?

There was a slightly unexpected announcement this month that the British government has commissioned some new research into space-based solar power. It’s not a new idea – Isaac Asimov dreamt it up in the 1940s, writing a short story about a robot that works on a space station “established to feed solar energy to the planets.” (In true Sci-fi blindspot tradition, the story has sentient robots and space-based solar power, but engineers still work out calculations manually with a slide rule.)

Th...

The 2,000 Watt Society

A sustainable future is one that uses clean energy, but that’s not a straight swap from fossil fuels. If we had all the time and money in the world, perhaps it could be. Given the urgency of climate change however, developed countries will have to reduce energy demand at the same time as expanding renewable energy. The more efficient we are and the less energy we require, the easier the transition away from fossil fuels will become.

That is broadly acknowledged in environmental circles, and...

How Indonesia is tackling ocean plastic

Ocean plastic is one of the most high profile environmental issues at the moment, and the main concern behind the wave of action on plastic in the last couple of years. It’s a problem that arises from specific circumstances, often where consumerism has run ahead of waste infrastructure.

In some parts of the world people have gained access to consumer goods, with lots of disposable elements and packaging, and plastic waste is accumulating. But the waste systems aren’t there to deal with it, a...

The highest energy prices in the world

I recently wrote about Turkmenistan, which has the cheapest energy prices in the world – thanks to large gas reserves and a small population. And with those low prices, it has less renewable energy than anywhere else on the planet and is right at the back of the line on the energy transition.

But what about the opposite? Where are the highest energy prices in the world, and how is that affecting the transition to clean energy?

In a list of countries and their energy prices, there is a cl...