Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 110

The stories that countries tell themselves

In The Economics of Arrival, Katherine Trebeck and I write about the importance of stories in politics. Humans understand their place in the world through stories, and major national turning points tend to have a story behind them.

To take a couple of more negative examples, ‘Make America Great’ again and ‘Take Back Control’ are not just political slogans. They are narratives in a nutshell, stories that seem to be mostly about entitlement. They aren’t true (in what ways is America not great? How...

Infographic: can we clean plastic out of the ocean?

I’ve posted two infographics from Surfrider Foundation Europe, one on recycling and one on bioplastics – two apparent solutions to plastic pollution that aren’t all they seem. This third one addresses the projects that hope to extract plastic from the oceans, which is also only partly useful.

All three of these ideas are useful and should be done. They’re not being highlighted in order to dismiss them. The point is that they are not enough. Recycling, biplastics and ocean cleanups are insufficie...

Four ways to make a solar highway

Last week I mentioned solar roads as a (so far) failed sustainable transport innovation. Specifically, I was talking about projects that have attempted to embed solar panels in the road surface. This is obviously a huge technical challenge, if they’re going to be durable enough to be driven over by heavy traffic. It’s also unnecessary, as there are other ways to make a solar highway.

Solar power along roads can power street lighting and signage, as well as export surplus power to homes and busin...

Book review: To Cook a Continent, by Nnimmo Bassey

I’ve been searching around recently for books on climate change written by African writers – let me know if you’ve got any recommendations. Here’s one I came across: To Cook a Continent: Destructive extraction and the climate crisis in Africa, published in 2012. It’s by Nnimmo Bassey, a Nigerian writer, poet, activist and the chair of Friends of the Earth International.

The book demonstrates how Africa suffers in both the short and the long term from fossil fuels – first by the destruction of th...

What we learned this week

Ocean farming is going to be a major growth industry of the 21st century, and it’s only a matter of time before ‘sea vegetables’ are available in the supermarket. Here’s one more step in that direction, a Faroese ocean farm that has just secured $1.5 million in investment, including $850,000 from WWF. (Insect farming is one to watch too, more on that next week)

Speaking of oceans, does anybody know anything about mining deep-sea polymetallic nodules? Deep Green suggest this is a very low impact ...

Building of the week: electric forecourts

This autumn, if all goes to plan, the first all-electric forecourt in Britain will open in Braintree, Essex. Like many forecourts, it will have a shop and a cafe, and the facilities to top up your car. The difference here is that it will have 24 fast charge points for electric cars, and no fuel pumps.

This notable charging point is being built by Gridserve, who are planning to spend a billion pounds building 100 of them around the country. They’re also the company behind Britain’s most advanced...

The unequal impact of heatwaves

It’s raining as I write, bringing a welcome dose of cool air after several days of high temperatures. Our house has a tendency to overheat since our neighbour cut down a shading tree, and the family has been taking refuge from the heatwave in nearby woods and rivers.

When we Brits talk about heatwaves we mean temperatures that reach as high as, you know, 34 or 35 degrees celsius. These are not temperatures that will illicit much sympathy from readers in more Equatorial regions. To put things in ...

Which sustainable transport innovations are moving forwards?

A few years ago I recognised that CO2 emissions from energy were falling while those from transport were standing still, and that transport would soon leapfrog energy to be Britain’s biggest source of climate emissions – something that was confirmed in 2018. I realised that I ought to be writing a lot more about transport, and challenged myself to feature a ‘transport innovation of the week‘ for every week of 2017. Which I did.

I recently noticed that one of the least significant of these ideas ...

Book review: China Goes Green, by Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro

The future of the planet depends on what happens in Asia, as anyone following developments in climate change knows all too well.  China has been the world’s largest emitter for over a decade, and progress there has been mixed. The country leads the world in both renewable energy and coal power. Its leaders talk about ‘ecological civilisation’ while continuing to fund fossil fuels among its international partners. Optimists and pessimists bat facts back and forth, but ultimately China is a parado...

What we learned this week

Some potentially significant good news in the latest stats from the FAO – global meat consumption has fallen for the second year in a row. Have we reached peak meat, wonders Nathaniel Bullard at Bloomberg Green.

Speaking of meat, Jelmer Mommers writes about aviation, and how one trans-Atlantic flight is equivalent to 1,000 Big Macs.

31% of Black-owned businesses are successful when applying for a loan, compared to 49% for white-owned businesses. The micro-loans platform Kiva are prioritising Bla...