Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 23

The Islamic case for degrowth?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Al-Mizan, a ‘covenant for the earth‘ that has been recently published by Islamic scholars. It aims to present a Muslim response to climate change, and call people to action around relevant principles of faith.

I live in a town with a significant Muslim presence and work regularly with Muslim colleagues on climate change projects, so I’ve found it useful to reflect on some of the theology in the document. There is a lot of overlap with my own Christian fait...

Book review: Fevered Planet, by John Vidal

“Throughout history,” writes John Vidal, “advances in civilisation – agriculture, domestication, urbanisation and globalisation – have all been accompanied by increasing disease risk. But never before has the human population been so large, so hyper-connected and living at such high densities. We are now approaching a storm of spiralling disease risk.”

That’s the argument made at the start of Vidal’s extraordinary book, Fevered Planet: How Diseases Emerge When we Harm Nature. Looking back...

What we learned this week

The Third Pole describes some important intersectional research into the effects of heatwaves on pregnant women and unborn babies in Pakistan. (The ‘third pole’ is the Himalayan glaciers.)

One for the Madagascar watchers: the government has announced a substantial solar strategy to bring electricity to the two thirds of the country still without reliable power.

How to run a car on waste plastic. Low Tech Magazine tells the story of a Dutch engineer who runs an old Volvo on plastic, and a...

Energy in a box for refugees

This week the 2024 Ashden Award nominees were announced, and it’s always worth a look. The award goes to innovative climate solutions that serve the margins, with nominees from the UK and from the global south. It’s nice to see Power Station included in the UK list, a project I’ve written about and visited. The one that caught my eye this year though is from Rwanda, and it’s called OffGridBox.

OffGridBox make all-in-one boxes that provide essential services to refugees. They can deliver clean...

Have you noticed the UK’s falling emissions?

In my box of climate communication tools for workshops and talks, I have an activity where I get people to guess the trajectory of Britain’s carbon emissions. I have a series of columns of different sizes that represent Britain’s emissions, and I invite people to put them in order. I used it at a conference for science teachers a couple of weeks ago.

Most of the time, people make an ascending staircase. Sometimes they add a small dip at the end, but they almost always underestimate just how ...

Goodbye Globalization, by Elisabeth Braw

Globalization was one of the big talking points of my International Relations degree twenty years ago, when it was discussed with a certain inevitability about it. Despite the protests from some quarters, it felt like history led definitively towards greater integration. Trade would open the doors of the furthest reaches of the globe, and everyone would benefit from the cheaper goods and stability that comes from mutual inter-dependence.

It hasn’t turned out that way. Most of the world’s...

What we learned this week

A study in the United States has looked into the benefits of electric vehicles for children’s health. A full shift to EVs would mean huge reductions in childhood asthma and respiratory illness, and save hundreds of lives every year.

Speaking of EVs, and those cheap ones from China I keep mentioning – here’s the first shipment arriving in Germany. They come on their own ship which is powered by liquid natural gas.

I knew this already, but I was browsing the Global Climate Highlights repor...

The first carbon calculator for schools

As Britain moves towards net zero by 2050, every company, organisation and institution needs to take responsibility for its carbon emissions and come up with a plan to reduce them. The first step is to measure them, and set a baseline against which to measure progress.

Personal carbon footprint calculators are common and there are lots to choose from, despite the mixed legacy of the individual approach*. Institutions are more complicated and many have had to call on specialist support, but i...

Reviving rural railways with Monocab

Britain’s railway network is a fraction of what it was a century ago. With the rise of private motoring and the building of the road network, railways were less important – and less glamorous too in the new age of the motorcar. The network was trimmed and consolidated.

Most notorious was the programme of cuts known as the ‘Beeching Axe’, which cut back services on branch lines. Between the mid-60s and the mid-80s, the country lost a quarter of its rail network and half its stations. The slim...

Al Mizan, an Islamic covenant for the earth

In 2015 Pope Francis made one of the most influential interventions into the global climate conversation. Laudato Si threw the weight of the Catholic Church behind a new climate agreement, set in the context of inequality, poverty and disenfranchisement. It kickstarted a climate movement within the church, including spin-off initiatives such as the Economy of Francesco project.

Islamic scholars have now done something similar with Al Mizan – A Covenant for the Earth. A coalition of partners,...