Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 13

What we learned this week

The Royal Meteorological Society has just announced the winners of its Weather Photographer of the Year competition, with some striking weather and climate imagery that you’ll want to see.

80% of the carbon emissions from a mobile phone are from making it in the first place, so we should keep them in use for as long as we can. Here’s an open source software project that keeps Android phones going when manufacturers stop supporting them.

Solar power beamed from space has been kicking arou...

The social future of social media

Do you remember that moment when it looked like social media was a powerful new tool for democracy? It could circumvent traditional media censorship, mobilise citizens in new ways, and topple dictators. Big claims were made for and by Facebook about its role in supporting popular revolutions, the ‘Arab Spring’ and the Occupy movement. That feels like a long time ago now.

In the intervening decade and a half, we have learned how Facebook has taken hundreds of millions in political advertising...

The many benefits of a bicycle

We travel the road to human development at the speed of a bicycle, argued Ivan Illich, who saw the humble machine as one of humanity’s finest ideas. You can keep your ChatGPT and your genome sequencing. For opportunity and empowerment, there’s no technology as powerful as a bike and everybody should have one.

That’s what Illich thought, and he’d have been encouraged by the results of a pioneering study in Zambia. Bike ownership has been assessed in a randomised controlled trial for the first...

Free for All, by Dr Gavin Francis

Like most citizens of the UK, I am both proud of and thankful for the National Health Service, while also being frustrated with the general state of it. The principles of free healthcare for all are so sound and incontrovertible that we are willing to forgive a great deal of slowness, inefficiency and eccentricity. But there’s only so much slack we can give it before we should start to worry – is it breaking?

All is not well in the NHS. Waiting lists extend. Junior doctors strike. There n...

What we learned this week

The British Library has installed the country’s biggest solar heat project, with panels providing hot water and heating to their iconic building in central London.

On the subject of solar, Octopus continue their steady string of energy innovations with a pioneering form of philanthropy. Under their new scheme, people with solar panels will be able to donate their surplus to those living in energy poverty instead of selling it to the grid.

The government has confirmed that it will ban sin...

How to reuse an old airport

Here in Luton, we await the government’s decision on whether or not the airport can expand. I fully expect them to wave the plans through, as they did with Stansted last week. Many of Britain’s airports are expanding at the moment, emissions be damned. But for a brief moment, there was a possibility of an exception. Doncaster-Sheffield, also known as Robin Hood Airport, operated international flights from 2005 to 2022 before closing down as unprofitable. As it was wound down, various ideas emerg...

Now is Not the Time, by Brett Bowden

Publishers are wary of short books, as I’ve discovered when trying to pitch them. Apparently they feel insubstantial and subconsciously poor value for money to prospective buyers. But sometimes a short book is exactly what a topic needs, and this extended essay on tempocentrism is a good example. I don’t need 400 pages on it. I need to hear the word for the first time, get a handful of thoughts on the idea and I’ll work the rest out for myself as I reflect on it.

Tempocentrism is the ten...

The injustice of temperature related deaths

As global temperatures rise, the risk of heatwaves will increase. As we know, heatwaves can be deadly, especially to the elderly and vulnerable. At the same time, warmer temperatures will reduce the risk of cold related deaths and that annual winter crisis in the NHS.

There are few who would champion this second fact as a positive from climate change, but you could see it that way. In his book on climate nationalism, Anatol Lieven suggests this is a more common view in Russia. Some politician...

What we learned this week

WWF have released the latest edition of their Living Planet Report, which says that the average size of wildlife populations has fallen by 73% since 1970.

Amazon have announced that they’re supporting the development of small nuclear modular reactors as part of their sustainability plans. Google picked the same week to announce that they too were betting on small reactors, with a purchasing agreement to supply power for its AI systems.

Greenpeace are running a petition to introduce a one...

Book review: Fire Weather, by John Vaillant

Fort McMurray is the heart of Canada’s tar sands production, a remote and wealthy boom-town that grew rapidly in the Alberta forest in the early to mid 2000s. With higher oil prices making the tar sands profitable, there was lots of well paying work, despite it being one of the most damaging environmental projects on the planet.

Fort McMurray was a city in service to fossil fuels and in defiance of their effects on the climate. And then in 2016 it burned to the ground, in a fire so apoca...