Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 34

What we learned this week

The most polluted city in the world is now Lahore, Pakistan, according to a list of the 12 worst cities for air pollution. Ten of the 12 are in Asia and six of them are in India, making this a real priority issue for the region.

Carbon Brief ran a week-long focus on offsets this week, looking at how the history of offsets, how they’re supposed to work, the unintended consequences, and lots more. Really useful series.

The Orkney Islands in Scotland are going to trial electric ferries for th...

The West is missing the seaweed revolution

A couple of months ago I reviewed the book The Seaweed Revolution, which describes the mighty potential of ocean farming – something I’ve been talking about for several years now. One of the things the book points out is that seaweed farming is well established in certain countries, and almost completely unheard of in many others.

China, Indonesia, South Korea and other parts of Asia farm seaweed, in some cases with mechanised processes. In the whole of the West it is harvested wild. Outside...

How Twitter changed sides on the climate

17 years ago Elon Musk wrote the very first blog post on the newly launched website of his car company, Tesla. It’s still online today, and it’s called The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me). In it, Musk explains how Tesla is a means to an end. The elite sports car they had just released was a tool for changing perceptions on electric cars, and there was a bigger goal in mind:

“The overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help ...

Start your own Green New Deal

If the government is dragging its feet about delivering a Green New Deal, what if you make it yourself? Not all at once, but for your street? That’s what Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell are up to on their road in Walthamstow, London. And as they do it, they want to document it all so that you and I can do it too.

I’ll let them explain in the video, and all the links you’ll need to follow along are below.

Here’s the website, instagram and my review of the book about their last projec...

Zero Carbon Luton newsletter

I won’t make a habit of this, but once or twice a year I’m going to re-post my Zero Carbon Luton newsletter here. It focuses on the local stuff, some of which I’m involved in, and you can subscribe here if you’re so inclined. In this edition:

Luton’s Climate Action Teacher ChampionsHow one local home-owner went zero carbonTen years of the buswaySustainability features at Lidl’s enormous new warehouseClimate Action Teacher Champions

The first group of teachers have...

Book review: The Nutmeg’s Curse, by Amitav Ghosh

“Do not tell yourself that you already know its contents, because you don’t,” says the Naomi Klein endorsement on the back of The Nutmeg’s Curse, by Amitav Ghosh. It made me smile, because I read a lot of books about climate change and they do tend to fall into a pattern. Man runs the numbers and tells us what we should do; journalist visits a series of vulnerable places, etc. Klein is entirely right about this one. In terms of content and of depth, there’s nothing quite like it.

Ghosh i...

What we learned this week

The American beef industry has launched a certification for ‘climate-friendly’ beef. The first product to be certified is branded the Brazen Burger, which is entirely apt when you look into their claims.

At a time when most governments are still resolutely behind fossil fuels, it’s extraordinary that the State of California is suing five big oil companies who “intentionally suppressed” what they knew about climate change to protect their profits.

This happened last week, but I didn’t get...

We’ll all have 20mph speed limits eventually

There were a lot of headlines over the weekend as Wales introduced 20 mile per hour speed limits across all of its residential streets. It’s prompted a lot of debate, though it is not new to many of us. Twenty is common across London, several counties and cities, and many other places have district or street-by-street limits lower than the official 30. I live on a 20mph street myself.

Residential streets in Wales will now be 20mph by default, though local authorities can apply for an excepti...

10 lies Rishi Sunak is telling about net zero

“We need sensible, green leadership,” Rishi Sunak told the country last night, and “a better, more honest debate about how we secure the country’s long-term interest.” He used the words ‘honesty’ five times during a speech which contained dozens of falsehoods about climate policy. So, in the interests of an honest debate, here are ten of the lies I spotted.

1: Sunak is standing against short-term thinking for political gain.

“Motivated by short term thinking, politicians have taken the easy wa...

Is climate action unfair?

Visit a climate protest, and you are likely to hear about future generations. They’ll be there on signs, in speeches. References to children and grandchildren. Failure to act is a betrayal of the future. It leaves the world in a worse state, and leaves our children to clean up our mess. Inaction on climate change is profoundly unfair.

In his book What is Intergenerational Justice?, Axel Gosseries asks a question that troubles the water. Climate inaction may be unfair on the future. But is cl...