Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 24

What we learned this week

A nice bit of mischief here from the Tearfund campaigns team, who are inviting people to send a lemon to the British government. Have a look at their Send A Lemon campaign to find out why.

Remember those cheap electric cars from China that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, and suggested they may be coming the way of North America and Europe? Not if President Biden has his way – Chinese EVs are a security threat apparently.

Of course, your all-American Tesla harvesting data about all your...

What Africa’s Great Green Wall looks like

I’ve written before about the Great Green Wall across the Sahel, aiming to shore up the region and hold back the Sahara desert. Whether or not it is ever completed, it is already one of the most ambitious environmental projects ever attempted. It’s a remarkable feat of international cooperation, and a vast mobilisation of volunteer labour over the course of decades.

The name ‘Great Green Wall’ is evocative and suggests a big line of trees or a band of forest. It’s not quite like that, certain...

Four routes to a broader climate movement

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed the book The Climate Majority Project, which describes the need for a more inclusive and more moderate climate movement. The book includes their theory of change – the way they think change is going to happen. They are focusing on four strands of change, which I think are worth sharing.

Narrative shift – Extinction Rebellion had ‘tell the truth’ as one of their core demands. It’s here too in a demand to shift “climate conversations further towards truthfulnes...

The fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty

“Today we face an immense confrontation between fossil capital and human life. And we must choose a side. Any human being knows that we must choose life.” 

That was Colombian president Gustavo Petro at COP28, announcing that his country would be endorsing the idea of a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. They were the 12th country to join, and over a hundred cities and regions are committed. It’s the kind of statement I’d love to hear from a British Prime Minister, instead of green-lighting...

We Are Free to Change the World, by Lyndsey Stonebridge

A few years ago Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism surged up the bestseller charts, propelled by the online buzz at how appallingly relevant it seemed. Arendt was writing about the collapse of politics that happened in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and there were troubling echoes in the performative cruelty of the new Trump administration.

I didn’t read Arendt at the time because she seemed like a complex and interesting writer, and I wanted to understand her own life and c...

What we learned this week

Over in the UK we’ve heard very little about the Climate Defiance direct action movement that’s been troubling the peace of US fossil fuel interests. This article from Inside Climate News is a good place to catch up.

I really enjoyed reading about Practical Action’s project on regenerative farming and solar irrigation for refugee farmers in Rwanda.

The Fully Charged Show reports on an electric car made by students in the Netherlands that absorbs CO2 as it goes. Yes, an insignificantly min...

The under-reported crises of 2023

For eight years now Care International has commissioned media analysis into the least reported humanitarian crises of the year. The 2023 report is called Breaking the Silence, and for the second year in a row all of the top ten are in Africa. As the Kenyan journalist Zelipha Kirobi says, “Africa is barely visible in the international media.”

To qualify as a humanitarian crisis, over a million people have to be affected by conflict or natural disaster. Many such stories receive plenty of cover...

What is biorecycling?

Plastic waste is a vast and complicated environmental scourge, and the problem is getting worse by the day as plastic-wrapped consumer goods reach a larger percentage of the world’s population. It’s an environmental issue and a justice issue, and so far the most high profile response – recycling – has been unable to stem the tide.

One of the reasons that the plastic keeps coming is that most recycling isn’t truly circular. If it was, then we could imagine a point where we have enough plastic...

Book review: The Climate Majority Project

Having been involved a fair bit in Extinction Rebellion (XR) in its early days, I found myself gravitating towards different sorts of actions after the movement’s peak. As I’ve written about before, a lot of XR folks didn’t recognise the wins they’d achieved. They had demanded that councils and organisations declare a climate emergency, and many did. The government set the groundbreaking net zero target by 2050. It wasn’t the impossible 2025 target that XR was calling for and so they didn’t ...

What we learned this week

Oli Mould looks at how climate themed movies can inspire us in ways that news stories don’t, referencing films such as Don’t Look Up or the new The End we Start From.

Count your Carbon is the first carbon calculator designed for schools, something some of us have been waiting for. There is growing interest in climate action in schools at the moment, with the government announcing that it wants schools to have a climate plan, and this will be a useful tool.

I noticed these ‘let’s eat balanc...