Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 32

What we learned this week

A bizarre story I’d not heard before: did you know that the inventor of solar panels was kidnapped in 1909, with his captors demanding that he relinquish his patents and close down his company?

From the same era, I enjoyed this Fully Charged Show review and test drive of a 120 year old electric car. Interesting to see the combination of surprisingly advanced ideas (regenerative braking) and unexpected omissions (a steering wheel).

Is it time to start gathering evidence on the connection ...

The Politics of Time, by Guy Standing

This is not the first time I’ve reviewed Guy Standing, radical economist and author of The Plunder of the Commons and Basic Income. But I’ve been particularly looking forward to his new book. I wrote my university dissertation on the commodification of time, and I consider time use to be one of the great unexplored avenues of politics. We’ve needed a book like this one to unlock its possibilities – The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty.

Standing begins with a his...

Repair is a vote winner

It was International Repair Day on Saturday, which means there was a lot of interesting comment about it over the weekend. Here’s something that caught my eye: supporting repair is really popular.

There’s a petition associated with this, so go and sign it. Let’s make sure that politicians of all stripes know that we want it. There can’t be that many policies that over 80% of people would support, so there’s every reason to grab hold of this and wrangle it into a manifesto before the elec...

Britain’s (sometimes) falling emissions

When the Conservative government was junking their own environmental policies a few weeks ago, they offered an unusual reason why: we’re great at this stuff. Probably the best in the world, according to the Prime Minister. Since we are, in his words, “so far ahead of every other country in the world,” the best thing to do is take our foot off the accelerator and coast for a while.

He then went on to delay targets on electric cars, electric heating and insulation. A simple look at the trends ...

What we learned this week

“Countries have never before agreed in UN climate negotiations to gradually stop burning all CO2-emitting fossil fuels, despite this being the main cause of climate change.” Can that change at COP28? Unlikely given it’s being chaired by a petro-state, but the EU are considering pitching for a phase-out of fossil fuels.

I’m a big fan of China’s sponge city idea, which has now spread well beyond China. Here’s NPR looking at whether or not they actually work.

Hurd is a new app that launched...

Book review: Radical Love, by Satish Kumar

Satish Kumar is a fascinating character. Born in 1936, he became a Jain monk aged nine, and then left the order nine years later after reading a book by Mahatma Gandhi. Taking his ideas about nonviolent action to heart, he and a friend completed an 8,000 mile walk of peace at the height of the Cold War, walking from India to the capitals of the four nuclear powers of the time.

He settled in the UK and went on to edit Resurgence Magazine for many years, as well as founding the (currently ...

A just transition for the UK

The current Conservative government are busy feeding Britain’s climate leadership into the shredder at the moment. As always, there’s more going on behind the scenes of government. While the politicians tilt at their net zero windmills, thousands of people are getting on with climate action as best they can in government departments, devolved government and local authorities.

There was a useful example of this yesterday as the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) published a...

Connecting the debt crisis and the climate crisis

It’s been 23 years since the Jubilee Debt campaign’s big push to address the debts of low income countries. Despite some successes, the problem never went away and neither did the campaign. Now operating under the name Debt Justice, their latest report looks at the connections between debt and climate change.

There is something of a vicious cycle going on between fossil fuels and debt, in which they feed off each other. Poorer countries need the income from fossil fuels to pay off debts, com...

The long road to sustainable Lego

This week I’m running two different climate education events where I’ll be using Lego. I have a number of Lego-based climate workshops and I’ll tell you about them another time. Depending on the audience though, I do get a recurring question: isn’t it a bit ironic to be using so much plastic in an environmental workshop?

There are two answers to that. The first is that we should be a bit more nuanced in our opposition to plastic. Plastic is an amazing material. It can last for decades without...

What we learned this week

Today is Bookshop Day in the UK, which seems like a good time to remind you all that I have a dedicated bookshop for this website: Earthbound Books. You can get anything you want there, not just the booklists curated by me that feature on the homepage. The revenues from Earthbound Books pay the hosting fees for this website, so thanks to those of you who choose it over that retail giant named after a rainforest.

Having grown up in a country where malaria was a constant sinister presence for m...