Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 11

My favourite books of 2024

I’m rather late to the party with my end of year book list, but here are a few things I appreciated in 2024:

Not the End of the World, by Hannah Ritchie

Reading the news on a day to day basis, it can feel like everything is moving backwards on climate change. There are certainly plenty of reversals and dangers (see the titles below), but the negative headlines can dominate so much that positive trends often go unnoticed. Hannah Ritchie’s book is a powerful antidote to that negativity, h...

First Nations in the energy transition

One of the most exciting aspects of the transition to clean energy is that it isn’t just a swap of technologies. It’s an enabler of energy democracy. Fossil fuels have always needed big scale infrastructure, such as mines and power stations and the transport connections between them. This kind of scale needs big funders, which has given governments and corporations an out-sized role in the energy market. Renewable energy can be much more local and responsive, which opens the door to a wider set ...

Signing off for 2024

Some links to wrap up the last of this year’s posts:

Over half of all cars sold in China are now electric. They passed the 50% mark in August and EVs have outsold petrol and diesel every month since. The figure in the UK is 18.7%.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Wolfson College and their net zero plans. Here’s another pioneer in Coventry University, who are adding hundreds of PV panels, retrofitting buildings and investing in a heat network.

Around the world, an average 6.3% of env...

Nice Rice: the first sustainable rice brand

Last year I wrote about the out-sized carbon footprint of rice, which accounts for almost a quarter of all greenhouse gases from global food production. Half the world eats rice every day and so that’s perhaps not surprising, but there’s no question that it’s much more damaging to the climate than other staple grain crops.

You can look up my previous article to read up on why that is. You can also see previous posts for the detail on the primary solution, which is an alternative growing tech...

Book review: Life After Doom, by Brian McLaren

When the Trump won a second term in November, a whole lot of ink was spilled over why. Much of it focused on things the Democrats had got wrong, or why Kamala Harris wasn’t quite good enough. I find the simplest and most obvious conclusion more chilling: a majority of Americans want Trump as president. They know what they’re going to get, the paranoia, hate, and open talk of revenge and repression. To this voters essentially said yes, or at least agreed to go along with it.

That’s profou...

Rising Tides, Raising Voices

When I was researching my book on the connections between climate and race, one of the things that struck me is how many dimensions there are to climate justice. I was researching just one of them, and I put in a chapter that explained how climate change amplifies existing disadvantage across a whole range of categories. There are geographical, economic and sociological divides. There are gender inequities to climate change. Children are disproportionately affected, and so are those with disabil...

Arsenal’s pioneering climate target

When I moved to London in 2004 I lived half a mile from the Arsenal stadium. They had just finished the season unbeaten and it was impossible not to get swept up in it all. (Almost literally so – if you left the house at the wrong time on a match day, the crowd was dense enough to carry you away on its red tide.) Although I grew up overseas and was always pretty neutral when it came to football teams, I do harbour a certain affection for North London’s finest.

Even without that personal conne...

What we learned this week

After writing about global grids recently, here’s another update – a UK start-up planning a cable from Britain to Morocco was profiled in the Guardian this week.

Another story I’ve been following over the years is additives in cattle feed that can reduce bovine methane emissions. They took a big step forward recently when dairy corporation Arla announced a major trial, only for conspiracy theories to bloom online claiming that it was a Bill Gates depopulation plot. Sigh.

In other billion...

The return of the battery train

This year there have been two new battery train trials operating in the UK. Great Western Railway has been running a commuter train on a fast-charging battery on a branch line in Ealing, and Hitachi have just tested a hybrid inter-city diesel with an onboard battery. It’s part of global wave of interest in batteries on the railways, with new or retrofitted trains running in France, Japan, Germany and several other places.

There’s a good chance that it’s going to be an important technology. T...

The UK’s first net zero college

As I’m spending so much of my time helping educational institutions get to net zero, I’m always looking out for people who have already done it. There are a handful of schools that have reached zero emissions, and Wolfson College in Oxford claim to be the first to achieve it in higher education.

Oxford colleges evoke ancient quads in honey-coloured stone, and Wolfson College is not that. It’s just out of town in a 1974 build in steel and glass, from noted modernist architects Powell & Moya. ...