Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 31

What if we left gold in the ground?

‘Leave it in the ground’ is a rallying cry among climate activists, demanding that fossil fuel reserves remain untapped. Occasionally a government listens. Usually they don’t. In the UK, the Conservatives even made maximum extraction of fossil fuels a legal duty. It would be breaking the law to stop if there was more to burn.

The rights and wrongs of leaving fossil fuels in the ground are fairly familiar. In Christopher Pollon’s book Pitfall, I came across a more radical idea: leaving gol...

Ocean farming in community sea gardens

As you will know if you’re a regular reader, I’m an advocate of ocean farming. The big challenge for growing ‘sea vegetables’ is getting it to scale and proving it can make a significant contribution. But what about the other end of the scale – having a go yourself, on a DIY basis?

I wouldn’t know where to start with such a thing, and not just because my home is about as far inland as you can get in England. But maritime gardens are a real thing in Denmark. It started in 2011 in a harbour cal...

Do citizens even understand GDP?

Every serious politician loves GDP. If you don’t clap like a seal at rising GDP, you won’t get anywhere near senior leadership. Every Prime Minister since Gordon Brown has at some point declared growth to be their most important priority.

So will Keir Starmer. In fact, he’s more blunt about it than most. “We’ve put a lot of work into this and we know: growth is the answer,” he said in a speech recently. “Growth – it’s the only show in town.”

The problems with growth as a measure of progre...

A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

“The richest people in America are funding a new space race,” wrote a commentator in the Guardian, because the billionaires “are making plans to get the hell out of here.” It’s a story I’ve heard plenty of times: the wealthy want to escape earth. Their space programmes are their own private lifeboats and the rest of us will go down with our climate-ravaged planet-shaped Titanic.

If there is any reality to this story, it is both an unlikely and an unwise plan. The reasons why are all set o...

What we learned this week

Over half the world’s electric vehicles are in China, and the Chinese firm BYD is the biggest manufacturer of battery vehicles.

Political conservatism is a strong indicator that you won’t try cultured meat, according to a review of factors affecting consumer attitudes to the idea.

Modvion is a company that builds wind turbine towers out of wood. Having proved the concept a couple of years ago, their first commercial tower is under construction right now.

Dutifully following the talking...

How Quezon City is tackling plastic waste

The UNEP granted its Champions of the Earth awards this week. Among the winners are the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and a business called Blue Circle that pays fishers to catch plastic off the coast of China. The one I want to mention is Josefina Belmonte, the mayor of Quezon City in the Philippines.

She won the award for policy leadership, as Quezon has several progressive measures in place to address plastic pollution. Of particular concern is the plague of discarded sachets that clog wate...

No More Fossils, by Dominic Boyer

Forerunners is a series of short books from the University of Minnesota Press, where authors can offer “thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead.”

No More Fossils is part of that series, probing the ‘fossil’ aspect of the term fossil fuels. What is a fossil? How do they form, and what sorts of ideas does it provoke when we think about climate change and our current oil dependency?

Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist in the envir...

Extinction Rebellion five years on

Yesterday was XR’s fifth birthday, which means five years ago today I posted this article on the launch event. I took photos and my wife did the radio reporting for a short audio series. We sat in the road outside Parliament with George Monbiot. We interviewed Greta Thunberg, who was 15, monosyllabic, and just days away from global fame.

I came away from that first event with a thrilling sense of possibility. Civil disobedience hadn’t been tried in the climate struggle in Britain at that poi...

When will refills hit the mainstream?

Yesterday I wrote about Britain’s long-awaited national standards for recycling, which will hopefully put recycling targets back on track from 2026 onwards. Those are good and necessary, but one thing that they don’t do is help to reduce plastic use in the first place. We’ll divert more packaging from incineration and towards recycling, but we’ll still have the same amount of plastic to deal with.

So here’s another solution we’ve been waiting a long time for that may have also taken a step i...

Britain to get recycling standards – finally

I was at an environmental training day for a local school last week. I did the climate bit, and then a council officer from the waste team did the bit about recycling. She spent her entire time answering questions about what could and could not be recycled. Plastic bottles? Yes. Plastic anything else, no.

Yes, including yoghurt pots – only bottles here. Yes, including meat trays – only bottles here.

One reason for the confusion is that many staff worked in Luton but lived elsewhere, and ...