Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 19

The culture of waste in fossil fuels

Looking at the world around us, it can be hard to imagine ever transitioning beyond fossil fuels. In a zero carbon world, every car and bus and train is electric. All heating is electric, all industry and aviation. It’s hard to believe that we can ever build enough renewable energy to meet all of those needs, or that the grid could handle it all.

The answer is that we don’t have to.

First of all, the change should include a modal shift rather than a straight swap in technology – so activ...

Book review: Left Behind, by Paul Collier

In the 90s there was a proselytising novel called Left Behind that was very popular in American evangelical circles, all about how the faithful would be raptured into heaven as the planet collapsed behind them. This is not that book. This is about Paul Collier’s Left Behind, an altogether more useful book that might make a difference in the here and now.

Collier is an economics professor in Oxford and a specialist in development. I’ve reviewed his previous books Plundered Planet and The ...

What we learned this week

I’ve grumbled in the past about the absence of climate change in Britain’s national curriculum (there’s one mention of it in the entire secondary national curriculum, and none at all in primary). UNESCO have just released an analysis of curricula in 100 countries and we’re not alone: 47% didn’t mention it.

From the Volts podcast we learn that in many parts of Africa, the population is growing faster than access to electricity is expanding, meaning that the number of people living without cle...

A just transition for transport

There are lots of different ways to address climate change, and not all of them are fair or ethical. How we reach a low emissions future is just as important as the goal itself, which is why ‘just transition’ principles matter. A just transition is one that asks the right people to take action, that doesn’t leave anyone behind, and that doesn’t place the burden of change on those at the margins.

There’s a good example of this from the thinktank IPPR, who last week released a report into trans...

Why ugly buildings are bad for the environment

When I lived in Stoke on Trent, there was a notorious 18 storey building in the town centre that was known locally as ‘Gotham City’. It was built for the council in 1973 and it never quite worked. It had ‘sick building syndrome‘ and was a miserable place to work. The council occupied it for 20 years, and then it sat empty and derelict for a decade. Unity House, as it was officially called, stood for a grand total of 32 years before it was torn down.

Meanwhile, the old Stoke on Trent Town Hal...

10 reasons to take cultivated meat seriously

There are a host of unanswered questions about cultivated meat, produced in factories without having to kill an animal. Is it commercially viable? Does it further break our relationship to the natural world? Is it necessary? How will it affect farming and farmers? This post isn’t about those questions. Drawing on figures from the book I reviewed last week, Cultivated Meat to Secure our Future, this post is specifically about why the idea can’t be dismissed. It’s no silver bullet and there’s a lo...

What we learned this week

I like what the organisation Wild Card are doing. They are calling on some of the UK’s most established land owners, such as the royals and the Church of England, to use their land for wildlife better.

If the world’s SUV fleet were a country, it would be the fifth largest emitter, according to the IEA.

For those who have wrung their hands at the many different EV charging networks in the UK and all the apps and memberships, consider the Electroverse from Octopus, which brings them all tog...

Book review: Cultivated Meat to Secure our Future

It’s a tricky time to be writing about food sustainability. The issue seems to be strangely divisive at the moment. On one side are those who see our future needs being met through small scale organic farming. On the other are those who see no way to produce enough for all the world’s population that way, and are open to more technological solutions.

I resolutely believe we can have both (and get told that this is naive*), and so I read books from both perspectives. This book would sit v...

Citizen science with Bugs Matter

Insect life has been in decline across much of the planet in recent decades. It might not be something many of us have noticed, as the change is slow and we might not pay much attention to insects anyway. But if we stop and think about it, we might realise that what we consider normal has shifted.

When you were a child, do you remember seeing bugs on the windscreen on a long drive in the summer? Is that something you still see today? Pausing to remember how it used to be highlight how baseli...

Circular logistics with The Pallet Loop

Out the front of my house there’s a Little Free Library with a base made out of old pallet boards. In the back garden there’s a planter made from more of the same. There’s another pallet in pieces in the wood store waiting to be fed into the rocket stove. I regularly come by discarded pallets. There are a lot of them around.

Pallets are used to ship bulk goods and building materials, constructed to provide a solid base for easily moving a load. Once the load reaches its destination the palle...