Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 26

The Pentagon’s green makeover

President Jimmy Carter famously put solar panels on the White House, only for Ronald Reagan to take them off again in a deliberate rejection of clean energy. Obama put them back, and now under President Biden, a host of other US federal buildings are getting a green refurb.

Among them is the Pentagon, the beating heart of America’s military-industrial complex iconic headquarters of the Department of Defense. It was completed in 1943 in response to the Second World War, with a remarkable 16 m...

The psychology of climate action

I’ve been working with schools and teachers in Luton recently, as part of a scheme called Climate Action Teacher Champions. It was developed in partnership with the Climate Action Unit at University College London, which is headed up by the neuroscientist and climate communicator Kris De Myer. His particular field of study is understanding what motivates people to take environmental action, and what does not. We use his insights in helping teachers to bring their leadership teams on board, and s...

Edible Economics, by Ha-Joon Chang

When I was an International Relations student I took some modules in economics to try and understand more about poverty and development in Africa. They told me almost nothing useful, and it was in Ha-Joon Chang’s book Kicking Away the Ladder that I found the reasons why.

I had been told a heavily redacted history of development that emphasised free trade, and ignored the more complicated policies that actually made wealthy countries rich. For decades institutions such as the World Bank a...

What we learned this week

The Sustainable Transport Award goes to just one city each year, and this year’s winner is Tianjin in China.

Lego Replay, the scheme where you can donate bricks you’re done with to be redistributed in new free sets for schools, has launched in the UK. It’s been available in the US and elsewhere for a while.

This idea to turn CO2 into a powder that can be indefinitely stored, is an interesting one that I’d like to hear more about.

The latest issue of the Zero Carbon Luton Newsletter c...

Oh look, a new Pringles can

When I was at boarding school in Kenya, there was a memorable moment when Pringles arrived in the student snack shop. They were imported and cost the equivalent of a month’s pocket-money, so I never bought any. Richer friends did, and they kind of blew our minds. Nothing tasted like them. Fake, naturally, but industrialised food was very exciting when there was so little of it around.

Pringles were new to me, but familiar to my American friends. They were launched in 1968, with their distinc...

Peak ICE: the decline of petrol and diesel cars

Here’s something I hadn’t really thought about in these terms, and learned about in Hannah Ritchie’s book Not the End of the World: we are witnessing peak ICE. Sales of cars with internal combustion engines peaked in 2017. That’s highlighted by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, who track such things in their annual Electric Vehicle Outlook.

As the graph shows, sales of electric vehicles have boomed in the last five years. Electric cars are a bigger segment of overall sales each year, meaning...

What is ‘arrival’ anyway?

The Economics of Arrival, the book I co-authored with Katherine Trebeck, is five years old this month. A lot has happened in the world since then, but a lot of things have remained the same. Politicians are still beholden to economic growth above all else. GDP remains the one metric to rule them all. Economies dependent on growth remain as vulnerable as ever to its disruption.

Which means that if you haven’t read it yet, why not? Pick it up from Earthbound Books UK or US.

In honour o...

This is Not Propaganda, by Peter Pomerantsev

This is Not Propaganda is a book that caught my eye a couple of years ago, and not just for its fantastical front cover. Pomertantsev is a Russian born expert in disinformation and online manipulation, based at London School of Economics. In this book, he explains how information has been weaponised and deployed to purposefully destabilise society. It’s one of those books that is shocking in its implications but understated in its tone – rainbows and unicorn notwithstanding.

We have ente...

What we learned this week

I made the comparison between the government’s ‘stop the boats’ rhetoric and luxury yachts this week, and Aditya Chakrabortty made the same point in the Guardian: “The tories are right, we should stop the boats. Just not the ones they’re talking about.”

Could you (or your school) take part in the Big Plastic Count this year? It’s a citizen investigation into waste plastic which informs campaigns, and it runs from the 11th to the 17th of March.

Having recommended Hannah Ritchie’s book It’s ...

The climate backsliding of the British press

There’s a scene in Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s book The Wind in the Willows where the wise Mr Badger rebukes the wayward Mr Toad. Badger takes him into the smoking room for a lecture, and then brings the repentent Toad out to tell his friends that he has seen the error of his ways:

“Toad, I want you solemnly to repeat, before your friends here, what you fully admitted to me in the smoking-room just now. First, you are sorry for what you’ve done, and you see the folly of it all?”

T...