Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 16

What we learned this week

The Wildlife Trusts have published a plan for returning wild beavers to England and Wales, after successful re-introductions in Scotland. Beavers have been absent from England for over 400 years.

GoCompare has created a calculator to see how much charging an EV costs for a year. Unless you charge entirely at motorway service stations, fuel costs will almost always be lower than petrol or diesel.

An interesting study on language from the US: researchers found that familiarity is important a...

Luton Airport ads banned for forgetting the planes

Here’s a story that’s been in my backlog after a very busy July, so you might have heard about this already. I wanted to cover it anyway because there are some useful lessons to note from it. In case you missed it, a few weeks ago the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned an advertising campaign by Luton Rising for misleading claims about its green growth plan.

Luton Rising is the council body that owns Luton Airport, and that has been the driving force behind plans to add another term...

Are road markings a source of plastic pollution?

In a training session recently, we were talking about plastic pollution, and I saw something on a graph that I hadn’t noticed before. Here’s a similar graph from the Seas at Risk campaign, showing the main sources of microplastics.

It’s the yellow curve above that jumped out to me: road markings. It hadn’t occurred to me that they would be a source of plastics at all, let alone one that significant. 7% seems really high. So what’s going on there?

First of all, yes, road markings are ...

Greening the city with moss walls

In the Ashden offices in London there’s a living green wall in reception. It’s a tradition for new members of staff to have their picture taken in front of the moss wall.

Moss walls aren’t just for interior design talking points however. A blanket of moss on an external wall serves as a sound baffle in a noisy city. It literally softens the urban environment, reducing the visual and sonic starkness of concrete and its angular surfaces. It improves air quality by catching windblown dust in th...

What we learned this week

I rather liked this project that uses photography to make air pollution visible, comparing indoor and air pollution in various parts of the world.

Bad news for those waiting for nuclear fusion. ITER has reset its forecasts from first plasma next year and now expects to power up somewhere between 2033 and 2036 – and can they have some more money please.

Cycles4Change and Streets4People are two active travel challenges that ran in cities in India over the last three years. Over a hundred c...

Elon Musk completes the journey into climate villainry

Here’s Elon Musk in 2006:

“The overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy, which I believe to be the primary, but not exclusive, sustainable solution.”

And in 2024:

“I don’t think it’s right to sort of vilify the oil and gas industry… I think we should just generally lean in the direction of sustainability.”

In 2015:

“The goal is to exit the f...

The Royal Mint’s circular economy for gold

In his book Pitfall, Canadian journalist Christopher Pollon argues that the world could reduce the damage from the mining industry by calling time on gold production. Gold for investment could continue without ever taking it out of the ground, while gold for industrial uses could be provided through recycling.

Nobody has been bold enough to attempt the first part of that equation, but the recycling part is underway. A new plant opened for gold recycling in the UK just this summer, using a bra...

What we learned this week

China experienced its hottest ever month in July, and simultaneously broke records for rainfall and flooding.

The heatwave that affected the Paris Olympics would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change, according to World Weather Attribution. And while it was hot in Paris, Morocco saw temperatures of 48C.

Some good news from Debt Justice in the form of a victory for Mozambique, which had been expected to pay back a $2 billion loan that was secured through corruption, and ...

Regenerative farming in the Moroccan desert

The oasis is an evocative geological feature – a life-saving island of greenery in an otherwise barren landscape. They have provided stop-over points on trade routes, refuge for political outcasts, and today an estimated 150 million people live in oases.

The reason that an oasis can sustain life in the desert is of course the presence of water. If there’s water, there can be plants, and if there are plants then there can be animals. Including people. Oases occur naturally where there are spr...

Tackling energy poverty with Energise Barnsley

Climate action is often portrayed as a middle class concern. I’ve been told on many occasions that organic food and electric cars are all very well for those that can afford them, but are not for the likes of me and mine. Green issues are at best seen as an indulgence, and at worst an imposition.

Politicians are able to exploit this to delay. Last year former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sorted the country’s climate targets into seven different bins in an ill-fated gamble for votes. He insiste...