Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 33

Pitfall, by Christopher Pollon

The world needs more metals, especially the ones necessary to the clean technology revolution. And yet “mining is one of the planet’s most polluting and deadly industries”. That’s the conundrum at the heart of Christopher Pollon’s book Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places.

Because it’s so damaging, and because the most valuable resources have been used already, mining is turning to ever more remote and inaccessible places. “Most of our future metals will have to c...

Personal climate actions that matter

There’s a lot of confusion over which climate actions make the biggest difference – or even whether personal actions make any difference at all.

They do – about a quarter of climate emissions can be dealt with through personal actions. The rest is beyond our control as individuals, though of course we can campaign and advocate for it. In other words, other things matter much more, but we don’t get to a sustainable world without individual action.

So where should we focus?

Here’s a li...

The road to zero carbon glass

I’m in my co-working space today in Luton town centre. I have a lovely bright room to write in on the first floor of an old hat workshop. The hat workers needed lots of natural light to see what they were doing, so the room has windows on three sides. I can see 86 individual panes of glass from where I’m sitting and that makes it as good a place as any to write about the material.

It’s not hard to see why glass would be an energy intensive material. It starts with the mining of sand, which i...

The true scale of solar panel waste

“Energy experts are calling for urgent government action to prevent a looming global environmental disaster,” warned a BBC news article earlier this year. The potential ‘environmental disaster’ they refer to is waste solar panels, and stories about them are very common.

You’ve probably seen them. If the journalist is being lazy, they probably called it ‘clean energy’s dirty secret’ – a headline that practically every news outlet has run at some point as if they were the first to think of it....

What we learned this week

PEN America have just run Banned Books Week, highlighting the wave of censorship and paranoia in America’s schools and libraries. Take a look. Opposing book bans is about the freedom to think for yourself, to encounter new ideas. Book bans are a tool of totalitarianism.

Pope Francis has published a new encyclical, the first that is specifically about climate change. “Eight years have passed since I published the Encyclical Letter Laudato si’,” he writes. “With the passage of time, I have rea...

Mapping Britain’s fossil fuel sites

This summer my family made three different visits to England’s South Coast, for one reason or another. During our travels we saw the coastline from a variety of angles, and at one point I was struck by a strangely industrial site on the horizon. My son and I were looking at the view from a castle rooftop, and these spiky gantries looked very out of place amongst the greenery and the middle class holiday homes. We were in a national park, so it was particularly unexpected.

Had we just spotted ...

The Ballad of Rishi Sunak

In a break from my usual programming and in honour of National Poetry Day, here’s an epic poem about the Prime Minister, written in the style of Beowulf.

If you missed what is being satirised here, this post will fill you in.

Friends, gather round,
for the tale I have to tell,
of the hero long awaited,
whose victories were fated.
The one now celebrated
by our people liberated.
You know of whom I speak.

Mighty of hand and stout of heart,
Wise and kind and relatable.
Kind of relatable.
Some s...

How MagRail could upgrade the railways

There has been controversy over railways in Britain this week. About half an hour ago Prime Minister Rishi Sunak scrapped parts of HS2, the country’s already rather modest second high speed rail connection. Announced in 2013 and due for completion far away in 2040, it’s become an almost mythical project in its longevity and its infinite budget – currently estimated at somewhere near £100 billion.

For comparison, Indonesia announced the first high speed rail connection in the Southern Hemisphe...

The seasonal stresses of consumerism

Last week I was thinking about how different anti-consumerist movements have waxed and waned in the last few years – things like new materialism, experientialism, collaborative consumption, etc. Out of curiosity I ran a Google trend search on ‘consumerism’, and I found an interesting phenomenon:

There’s a pattern here, reliably repeating over this ten years of data from Google. The number of people searching for ‘consumerism’ leaps in November. It dips during Christmas and picks up again ...

The first sustainable generation?

I usually post a book review on a Monday, but the book I read last week isn’t out until January and so I’ll write about it then. It’s a good one – Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World.

If you’re not familiar with Hannah Ritchie, she’s a Scottish data scientist who works for Our World in Data. In the last couple of years she has emerged as one of the most interesting new voices in the climate conversation, and you should sign up to her Sustainability by Numbers newsletter and follow her ...