Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 12

How Climate Trace maps global emissions

In order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, we need to know where they occur. The richer our understanding of emissions, the more targeted we can be in our actions. We can identify the biggest sources and prioritise.

That’s easier said than done, because working out carbon footprints can be complicated. It’s especially difficult to calculate the climate impact of complex and dynamic things, such as cities or transport infrastructure. There may not be any single body responsible for t...

What we learned this week

Arielle Samuelson investigates the missing emissions from meat in UN calculations, over at the Heated newsletter.

Housebuilding is a political priority in many parts of the world, including the UK. A report from the Wildlife Trusts explains how to create housing developments that are good for wildlife.

If you’re reading this in the UK you’re probably not far from a SPAR cornershop. Here’s how the logistics division that supplies them cut emissions by optimising their delivery runs and re...

The green rooftops of Milton Keynes

I don’t usually have much business there, but for various reasons I’ve had to make multiple trips to the city of Milton Keynes this month, 45 minutes up the road. On the last trip, for a conference on climate change and health, I met a man named Chris Bridgman who installs green roofs. Milton Keynes, it turns out, is home to several of them.

There are green roofs on a school, a community centre, the Open University. The mall has one, and there’s particularly large and impressive roof garden...

Growth: A Reckoning, by Daniel Susskind

There is no political spectrum when it comes to growth. There is one God and one creed. In her brief tenure as Prime Minister, Liz Truss declared that she had “three priorities for our economy: growth, growth and growth.” In opposition that same year, Keir Starmer set out his radical alternative: “We need three things: growth, growth, growth.”

Economic growth can be transformational in the right circumstances, and it’s easy enough to see why politicians want to champion it. And yet we know...

What we learned this week

Desmog have a deep-dive into Saudi Arabia’s Neom programme and the PR agencies behind the country’s futuristic greenwash strategy.

The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service predicts that 2024 will beat last year to become the hottest year on record, and the first with temperatures over 1.5C warmer than the pre-industrial era.

This week I was having lunch with a colleague and we were discussing whether or not the charity we work for should continue a presence on X/Twitter, now that we kno...

Book review: Planet Aqua, by Jeremy Rifkin

For someone who has made a career out of big and bold ideas, this must have been an irresistible one: pitching a new name for the planet. That is indeed the proposal here. Humanity has misjudged the nature of our planetary home. We had always thought of it as terra firma until we saw it from space for the first time. Seeing it whole and from a distance, it’s clearly a water planet – uniquely in the solar system. Plenty of planets have solid ground. It’s water that makes it special, and so we...

Will there ever be a global power grid?

Sometimes when I give talks about energy and carbon, I use the Energy Dashboard website to talk about live energy sources. We get to see how much electricity is coming from wind, nuclear and gas. I point out the red coal label, now joyously obsolete. And usually someone will hear about energy imports for the first time, seeing the electricity coming in from overseas.

The British Isles have a number of interconnectors with other countries, allowing us to share power and balance our respect...

What we learned this week

I was never very far from a rice paddy where I grew up, farmed the traditional (and exhausting) way. So it’s interesting to see how rice farmers in Vietnam are using new tools such as AI and drones.

My wife was assigned the news story and I was puzzled by it, and so there’s been quite a lot of discussion in my house this week about Britain’s high speed rail line HS2 and why a tunnel to protect bats somehow costs £100 million.

Great to see that Britain’s first major low carbon heat netwo...

Futures of the Sun, by Imre Szeman

Over the past 200 years, political power has become deeply entwined with fossil fuels. The energy transition is now troubling the peace, and those alliances are shifting. As renewable energy takes over from fossil fuels, there is a tug-of-war underway to control the narrative. There are already competing stories, “each trying to be the first to make sense of what a politics anchored on renewable energy and climate action might look like.”

That’s what Imre Szeman’s short book Future of the...

Isn’t it time British Gas rebranded?

Last week I had British Gas round to inspect my home’s old gas boiler, which happens every year as part of the home insurance package we have with them. It’s probably the last time it will happen, as we hope to have an air source heat pump in place by next winter. But it made me wonder: how long can British Gas continue with that brand?

In an age of climate change, being named after a fossil fuel isn’t a great look. It’s particularly awkward if your marketing leans heavily into family and hom...