Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 30

E-bikes are better for the climate than EVs

Electric bikes and scooters are making a bigger difference to global emissions than electric cars.

That might seem counter-intuitive to readers in the UK, where there is lots of attention on EVs and the infrastructure for them. It would be less of a surprise to people in countries where scooters and motorbikes play a bigger role in transport – take this Saturday evening street scene in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

China leads the way here with 201 million electric two-wheelers, most of...

The climate crisis and the 1%

The carbon emissions of the richest 1% of humanity are the same as the poorest five billion people. That’s according to the latest report from Oxfam into inequality and climate change. Climate Equality: A planet for the 99% updates their statistics and outlines again how the climate crisis is caused by the richest and suffered by the poorest.

As this graph from the report shows, the wealthiest 10% of the world’s population account for half the climate pollution. The richest 1% hoard a va...

What we learned this week

Kenya is the latest country to sign over millions of hectares of land to Dubai as part of its massive African land-grab. It joins Liberia, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe – with the latter signing over a fifth of its land without any global outcry.

David Roberts of the Volt podcast talks to Ólafur Teitur Guðnason of Carbfix, who do carbon capture and sequestration by carbonating water and putting it underground. Yes, carbonating water, like fizzy drinks.

When we’re retrofitting homes in the...

What difference has a home battery made?

Around this time last year I wrote about how we had got a battery system installed in our house. It was discounted as part of a community buying scheme, and we bought it to support our solar installation. With a year of data, I can now see what difference it has made to the amount of our own energy we can use.

The graph below shows the amount of free electricity we get from the solar panels, before and after installing a battery.

Before fitting the battery, we were getting around hal...

The Future of Foreign Policy is Feminist, by Kristina Lunz

When I was an international relations student, there were entire lecture series on ‘political realism’. Realism holds that all international politics is and can only ever be competitive, and the key to success is power. The very word ‘realism’ pushes everyone else “into the naive corner”, to borrow Lunz’s phrase. Idealists, liberals, feminists, pacifists – whatever you want to call them, these are the people who don’t get it and who would make the world more dangerous if we listened to them....

Climate solutions at the Ashden Awards

Last night the annual Ashden Awards took place, celebrating pioneering climate solutions and the people working on them. If you’ve ever come across Ashden’s work before, you’ll know that they have a certain way about them. They’re global in scope, and they’re not dazzled by showy start-ups or advanced technology. You won’t get the kind of ‘hydrogen fuel-cell toilets for the poor’ distractions that some awards go for (here’s looking at you Mr Gates.)

Instead, Ashden winners tend to embody com...

What about secondhand solar?

Last month I wrote about waste solar panels, and how the ‘mountains’ of old solar panels are a drop in the ocean compared to the waste from coal and other sources. We still want to reduce it to as little as possible, and invest now in the growing solar recycling market.

But what about secondhand panels? One reader asked what the possibilities were for a secondary market, as we should always try to reuse things before recycling them. My reply was that the price of the panels is only one part ...

No change in fossil fuel production plans

There’s a giant cognitive dissonance at the heart of global climate politics. Almost every country now agrees that it has work to do to prevent climate disaster. The age of scepticism is over and every major economy has set carbon targets. At the same time, those governments all want to maximise fossil fuel production.

According to the recent Production Gap report, the total planned production of fossil fuels between now and 2050 is twice the limit set to keep warming to 1.5 degrees C.

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What we learned this week

What would sustainable luxury look like for everyone? “Could raising our collective ambition for public luxury offer a better quality of life for us all?” Good questions from the Our Lives, Our Planet podcast.

Despite some high profile examples, just 2% of philanthropy is directed to climate change, according to a study by Climate Works.

Did you know you can encourage sustainability in your area by adding relevant information to Google Maps – things like recycling points, walking routes, e...

Building of the week: Edenica

Okay, I haven’t done a building of the week for a while, so the title of the post might be a bit out of place. Here’s a building that deserves a special mention, and not just because it contains my daughter’s name. It has lots of sustainability features and one particularly important innovation.

Edenica is a new office block in central London, 12 floors of office space with generous terraces and outdoor areas incorporated. It looks like a nice place to work, and it’s designed with the fu...