Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 35

What about half the meat?

“At the risk of seeming unreasonable, may curses rain down on the fair-weather vegan,” began a recent article on meat-eating from a certain national newspaper. It went on to lambast ‘fake’ vegans, or ‘fegans’. Sales of meat alternatives are falling, and “we should have known the vegan-newbies would turn out to be a bunch of flakes.”

It’s a perfect example of the all-or-nothing, black-and-white approach that so many take to eating meat. “People like me are lifers,” boasts the author of the art...

Book review: Tiger Work, by Ben Okri

“When they asked me
To come up with
Words that could speak
To a world on the verge
Of environmental collapse,
I had a crisis of my own.”

That’s the beginning of one of the poems in this collection. Across its selection of stories, essays and poetry, the Nigerian Booker Prize Winner wrestles with the threat of catastrophe, our inability to face it, and how to respond as a writer.

Sometimes the truth is easier to get at sideways, so there are parables and allegories about denial, consumerism, an...

What we learned this week

Placemaking is an under-appreciated philosophy in planning and design, and could play a much bigger role in an emerging wellbeing economy. So I’m pleased to see that the government is instituting a new Office of Place, and I hope its remit and powers prove effective and useful.

More details are emerging of the deal that will see Liberia cede 10% of its land to the UAE, that I wrote about a few weeks back. It’s not looking any better.

I wrote about the Climate Majority Project recently, an...

The global fight to end fossil fuels

You and I both know that fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change, right? It’s a very basic fact, and yet to look at the global response to the crisis, you wouldn’t know it. The Paris Agreement doesn’t mention fossil fuels. Year after year, international negotiations fail to agree to phase them out. With a handful of exceptions, governments talk about their net zero ambitions while still planning to exploit their remaining reserves of oil, coal and gas.

Just last week at the G20, UK...

The planetary boundaries in 2023

The planetary boundaries were first formulated by the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2009, as an answer to the question of whether or not nature had any identifiable limits that we couldn’t exceed. The idea of ‘limits to growth‘ has been both influential and controversial, and the planetary boundaries attempted to draw up a definitive list of thresholds that couldn’t be safely exceeded.

It was a pioneering project that gave us some new ways of thinking about sustainability, including providi...

What is emissions based parking?

Drivers in the English city of Bath may have noticed new parking charges this week. The cost of parking a car in one of the council’s car parks now varies depending on what you drive.

Electric cars and small cars with low emissions pay the current price of £1.70 an hourMost petrol cars will pay £2 an hourDrivers of diesel cars will pay £2.30The biggest diesel SUVs face the highest charges at £2.50 an hour

That’s a snapshot of what is quite a complicated set of variable price...

Saying to to a Farm-free Future, by Chris Smaje

One of the noted environmental books of last year was George Monbiot’s ReGenesis, which I reviewed positively here. In it, he argues that farming is the biggest driver of the biodiversity crisis and a major contributor to climate change – without ever managing to provide a secure and healthy diet for everyone. He then explores a variety of different solutions, and concludes that “we can produce more food with less farming.”

I thought it was a provocative but thoughtful book – but then I’m...

What we learned this week

Oxfam have launched ‘Second Hand September‘ to encourage more people to shop secondhand – and to promote their own stores as a place to do it of course.

Investigative climate journalism podcast Drilled returns for series 10, this time looking at the corporate lobbying behind a widespread global crackdown on protesting.

It can be easily missed in the genre’s obsession with conspicuous consumption, so it’s good to see Grist highlight the hip-hop artists that have used their platform to talk...

The biggest obstacles to climate action

I know not everyone has time for Al Gore, but I wanted to share his latest TED talk, delivered at a recent event called TED Countdown Summit. It’s interesting both for its content and for its tone. If you remember Gore’s influential movie An Inconvenient Truth, you’ll know his measured style as he explains climate science. Here, he’s furious.

The object of his ire is the fossil fuel companies, and the way that they have used their power to prevent climate action, including the way that an oi...

Why it’s helpful to charge EVs on the go

I’m aware of four different ways to charge electric vehicles without stopping to plug in. All of them have been trialled and some are being adopted more widely. I’ve written about all four at some point:

Overhead cables – somewhat obvious, given that trams and trolleybuses operate on this system already. Not something that cars will use, but a real opportunity for trucks and coaches on highways. There are plans to use this in Sweden, while a proposed trial in the UK has gone strangely silent...