Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 36

A story about structural injustice

Over the last couple of years I’ve spoken to many different audiences about my book, Climate Change is Racist: Race, Privilege and the Struggle for Climate Justice. Of the various difficult things that I tend to say in these presentations, the one that is most often misunderstood is the idea of structural racism.

Most of us in the UK are used to thinking of racism as prejudiced actions and opinions. That is only one layer of racism, and structural racism – or structural injustice of any kind...

Ultra-Processed People, by Chris van Tulleken

Ultra-Processed People is a book that I’ve heard a lot of people talking about this year. Not least my wife, who has been reading the small print on food packaging and pointing out things I don’t understand. On her recommendation, I read it too.

I didn’t expect to review it here, where my focus is on sustainability, social justice, and the new economics that will support such things. The book turned out to have to a lot to say on those themes, and so here we are.

If you don’t know C...

What we learned this week

‘Put the sun to work’ is the slogan of French solar company Solarbox, whose new TV adverts feature ‘sun king’ King Louis XIV turning up at people’s homes to power their appliances on an exercise bike. It’s silly, but there’s a nice thought behind it about energy democracy – where the historical king Louis used the sun as a symbol of his ultimate power, today the sun belongs to everyone.

Speaking of the sun, ‘la sombrita’ is a controversial new sun shade installed on bus stops in Los Angeles ...

Five examples of building with seaweed

Last week I reviewed the book The Seaweed Revolution, which I very much enjoyed. It mentions a vast range of uses for seaweed, some in detail, some in passing. One that caught my eye was the use of seaweed as a building material. It only gets a couple of paragraphs, so I bookmarked it to go and look up some examples.

Seaweed has been used as a building material in several different traditions. One of the most impressive is Japanese Shikkui, a lime-based plaster and render that uses seaweed e...

Ecuador votes to leave oil in the ground

A few months ago I wrote about the small number of countries that have chosen not to exploit their fossil fuel reserves. It’s not a long list. New Zealand and Ireland are the only two countries with proven reserves that they have chosen not to invest in them. Others might have them and have chosen not to explore.

We can now potentially add another entry to the list: Ecuador. Following a referendum, the country will not develop any further oil production in Yasuni National Park, and will wind...

Which forms of energy are getting cheaper?

“One of the foundation stones of thriving economies is access to cheap, abundant and reliable energy” says the UK government’s energy strategy. It was published in March this year and so I expect the Conservatives have put it in the bin already, but for now it’s the clearest indicator of their energy priorities. And at the top of that list is “delivering Great British Nuclear”.

This is an interesting choice for a strategy that aims to deliver cheap energy. Here’s a chart from Our World in Dat...

Left is not Woke, by Susan Neiman

I heard a comedy piece recently where a radio host asks who the ‘woke people’ are that his guest refers to. The phoner then ploughs through an increasingly irate list that begins with The Guardian, takes in pronouns, lawyers, children’s books, the RNLI and much else besides, and ends with avocados. It’s no more or less sensible than most conversations that use the word, which has become highly toxic.

If we were to take the original meaning, to be woke is to be alert to injustice. That’s not ...

What we learned this week

I’ve been saying it for years, so it’s interesting to see the New York Times run an article asking if degrowth would be good for Japan. Not sure how the communism comes into it, but I’m looking forward to the English translation of Kohei Saito’s book Slow Down, out next year.

On a related note, Australia is taking steps towards measuring wellbeing, an important precursor to reducing dependence on the fundamentally flawed concept of GDP as a marker of progress.

A new kind of sail is gett...

The jump in G20 fossil fuel subsidies

Of all the crazy things to be doing in an age of climate breakdown, subsidising fossil fuels is among the craziest. It prolongs the problem, undermines the development of clean energy alternatives, and rewards the wrong things. And so at COP26, the G20 countries made a (qualified) pledge to phase them out.

We’re not off to a great start, according to a new report from the International Institute of Sustainable Development. The year following COP26, subsidies rose to a new record of $1.4 tril...

Book review: The Seaweed Revolution, by Vincent Doumeizel

I was on holiday on the South Coast this summer, and when I’m by the sea I like to read about it. This time I chose Vincent Doumeizel’s The Seaweed Revolution, which is a book I have been anticipating for some time. I expect ocean farming to be one of the big stories of this century, an increasingly obvious opportunity that is scarcely recognised in some parts of the world. Up to now there hasn’t been a book for a popular audience that explains it, but here it is.

First published in Fren...