Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 2

What we learned this week

In a significant first for the country and therefore the world, China has announced a climate target to reduce emissions (previous targets have only pledged a date for peak emissions). China tends to be a conservative target-setter and then beat them, so I would hope that will actually do better than its goal of a 7-10% decline by 2035.

An invitation to something “subversive and transformational — which is trying to end culture wars rather than win them.” Alex Evans writes about what churche...

The landscaper of the climate age

How many landscapers are there who are household names? Others will have names that come to mind, but in the English speaking world it’s a pretty short list. There’s basically room for one per century, starting with Capability Brown. He seems to have designed the grounds of every other stately home in the nation, and made a well-kept lawn the foundation of all English gardens to come.

The 19th century entry would probably be Frederick Law Olmsted, co-creator of New York’s Central Park and fo...

Book review: Designing Hope, by Sarah Housley

In 2021 a survey asked 10,000 young people in ten countries how they felt about climate change. 75% said the future was frightening and 55% thought humanity was doomed. “People are not excited about the future any more,” notes design futurist Sarah Housley, and that has consequences. Without a vision for the future, it’s hard to summon the will to change what’s broken and create anything better. There’s an Old Testament proverb that captures this: “Where there is no vision, the people perish...

Marching for and marching against

There are two big climate marches this weekend. Reading their respective press releases, it struck me that there’s an interesting contrast between them that’s worth reflecting on. Since neither of them are particularly active in the UK, we can observe them from a distance and see what we can learn from them. Here they are:

First, Draw the Line. This is a global protest with events taking place all weekend. The map shows large clusters of events in Germany, the US, West Africa and Indonesia...

China’s clean tech turning point

China is still regularly used as an excuse for inaction on climate change: if China isn’t doing its bit, then anything we do is pointless. This line became popular about 20 years ago and it had some validity at the time. It hasn’t been a serious argument for a while, as China has been doing far more than most people realise. It hasn’t necessarily been visible in their carbon emissions reporting, but 15 years of climate action in China is beginning to bear fruit.

As a reminder, China has been...

Book review: A different kind of power, by Jacinda Ardern

I don’t generally read political memoirs. In the 18 years I’ve been posting reviews here, I can only think of a handful of politicians whose books I’ve featured. But I’ve got time for Jacinda Ardern, former prime minister of New Zealand and a politician who was different in many ways. Chief among those is that she didn’t harbour any great ambition for power, and didn’t consider herself politician material – too sensitive, too thin-skinned. Still, she ended up holding the highest office in th...

What we learned this week

I did a bit of a double-take this week when I read that both Dale Vince of Ecotricity and Greg Jackson of Octopus – two leaders in green energy in the UK – had followed the Conservatives’ in calling for support for oil and gas production in the North Sea. One of the main arguments for this is that domestically produced gas is cleaner than imported LNG. So here’s your regular reminder that 77% of our gas comes from Norway, which is not LNG.

A while back I posted a list of 10 climate podcasts t...

What is plug-in solar?

Earlier this year I wrote about alternatives to rooftop solar, and all the many ways you can benefit from solar power without investing in a full scale installation. The most intriguing of those alternatives is balcony solar, which has been booming in Germany over the last couple of years. Known as balkonkraftwerk, there are now millions of balcony solar installations across the country.

Solar balconies have now spread to Spain, the Netherlands and France. Belgium recently legalised them and ...

Five roles you can play in climate action

What can I do about climate change? That’s a very common question, and it’s an important one. Climate change is a global phenomenon that is unfolding over decades. It can be hard to find a useful role for individuals when the problems are so clearly systemic. Some climate campaigns directed at individuals feel shallow at best and at worst like self-serving misdirection from corporations or governments. So here’s something more positive: the SHIFT.

Working with Drawdown, SHIFT is a project fro...

How war drove Moldova’s energy transition

Moldova is surrounded on three sides by Ukraine, with Romania to the West. Like many countries in Eastern Europe, its energy systems are a legacy of the Soviet era. Infrastructure runs East towards Russia. For decades Moldova has run on Russian gas piped through Ukraine, and cheap gas provides both heat and electricity.

You can probably guess what happens next, but there’s a twist. Within Moldova’s territory is the contested region of Transnistria, an unrecognised quasi-state that is mainly ...