Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 15

What we learned this week

The Science Based Targets Initiatitive verifies climate targets to see if they are in line with what actually needs to happen to reduce emissions. This week they verified Aldi’s climate targets, making them one of very few retailers to have acheived the standard.

I mentioned this week that most electric car owners charge them at home, which is much harder if you don’t have a driveway. So it’s good to see the results of a study by UK Power Networks into charging from lamp posts. They’ve conclu...

Cheaper, Faster, Better, by Tom Steyer

Tom Steyer is one of the world’s more interesting billionaires. He made his fortune as an investor and then sold up to become a full time climate campaigner. He worked on the carefully targeted ’50 by 30′ campaign that helped to normalise renewable energy targets in US states, and founded the youth democracy organisation . He even ran for president in 2019 to push climate up the agenda, because any you can do that in America if you have a spare billion or two.

Now his experience ha...

What petrol and diesel drivers don’t know about EVs

I had a conversation with a friend in the pub the other week in which he told me at great length why he couldn’t have an electric car. (I hadn’t asked – people just tell me these things.) The charging infrastructure wasn’t there. They don’t go far enough. They’re too expensive. Much as he would like to support electric vehicles, he planned to drive his diesel until ‘they’ came to take it away.

I nodded politely and challenged gently, but these are familiar talking points and they only have a...

What we learned this week

My friend and co-author Katherine Trebeck has been writing about the role of compassion in a new economy, an important angle on the wellbeing economics that she has pioneered.

Drawdown has added more jobs to their project on climate solutions at work, showing how you don’t have to be fitting solar panels or planting trees to have a ‘green job’.

Flight Free is a small charity that relies entirely on small donations, and that is running its annual fundraising week right now. Can you chip in ...

Which climate policies actually work?

Around five years ago now there was an explosion of net zero declarations. After years of stalling and ‘I will if you will’ negotiations, suddenly a string of countries were prepared to commit. Climate emergencies were declared across governments, cities and businesses.

Setting a target is only step one of course. After that you need a plan, a set of policies that will reduce carbon emissions. Then you need to deliver on that plan, and it’s only then that we begin to see carbon pollution fal...

Co-designing greener fashion with Unfolded

The fashion industry is a low profile climate conundrum. While all the attention goes on big ticket carbon problems like power stations and cars, the clothing industry has a big enough carbon footprint to derail the world’s climate targets all by itself. A commonly cited figure is 8-10% of global emissions, once you add up the impacts of growing cotton, producing fabric, manufacturing, consumer use and laundry, through to final disposal.

One of the mad things about this situation is that the...

Book review: The Burning Earth, by Sunil Amrith

“I can no longer separate the crisis of life on Earth from our concerns with justice and human freedom that inspired me to become a historian in the first place,” says Sunil Amrith. His book The Burning Earth traces those threads over the last 500 years, showing the interweaving of progress and disaster.

It’s hard to argue with ‘human freedom’ as a worthy goal, but one of the most successful routes to that has been the way that fossil fuels have provided an escape from nature. “In the pu...

What we learned this week

It’s great to read about America’s first hydrogen powered train, profiled in the Guardian and hopefully the start of a trend.

Lots of inspiring people to read about in the Grist 50 for this year, “50 people across the U.S. who are tackling some of the most pressing problems of today in innovative and exciting ways.”

Meanwhile in the UK, steps were finally put in place this week to end the 700 year practice of hereditary peers and stand down the last 92 of the landed gentry that still have...

How Colorifix make sustainable colours

I’ve just finished a rather good book called The Secret Lives of Colour, by Kassia St Clair. It tells the background stories of dozens of different colours, from woad to khaki to avocado green. It’s full of fascinating stories, but a couple of things jumped out to me.

One of them is that we take vibrant colours for granted. Most of history was considerably less colourful, with a very small range of reliable dyes for fabrics or paints, often at horrendous expense. Some of them were reserv...

What will it take to restore Britain’s biodiversity?

Last week I was reading the Wildlife Trust’s plans to bring beavers back to England. It’s a scheme that has been described as controversial or even irresponsible – usually by anglers, admittedly. But it’s only putting back something that should have been there all along. Beavers have been absent from England since the late medieval era, and would bring plenty of benefits to our waterways.

It’s easy to forget just how nature-depleted Britain is, and England in particular. The idea of a ‘green...