Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 4

What we learned this week

A nice local story that I’ll write more about elsewhere: Luton Town have announced their new shirt for next season, and it’s the first football shirt in the UK to use Reflo, a recycled and recyclable circular economy fabric.

Not local, but connected to the story about coal I wrote earlier this week. Indonesia is another country with lots of coal and rising energy demand, but president Prabowo Subianto reckons they can bring forward their target for 100% renewable energy from 2040 to 2035.

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Selco’s solar innovations for the poor

No, not that Selco, the UK builders’ warehouse with the radio jingle. I’m talking about Selco India, another winner to profile from this year’s Ashden Awards. Selco are, at first glance, a solar company. They provide solar installations in rural locations, including clinics and hospitals – something that can be life-saving when you consider the consequences of child-birth or surgery with an unreliable electricity supply.

They also develop and sell ‘solar powered livelihood systems’, machines...

The complex story of Britain’s food waste

Consumers in the UK spend of a total of £17 billion a year on food that is thrown away, according to the latest figures from WRAP. That’s an average of around a thousand pounds for a household of four. Most of that food waste went in general rubbish bins, which cost local councils a further £500 million to take away.

Despite relatively high awareness of food waste, this means that there has been almost no progress in a decade. Food waste figures today are only marginally lower than in 2012, a...

Europe’s coal phase-out

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll have seen me harping on about the UK’s falling emissions. This isn’t out of misplaced optimism or some kind of climate patriotism. It’s because if we want to fix something, we have to know what works. When we find a climate solution that’s effective, we need to notice and do more of it. And in the UK, the biggest difference has been the phase out of coal.

A decade ago, as much as 40% of the UK’s electricity generation was from coal and less than 10% came fr...

What we learned this week

Scientists have identified a fig tree species in Kenya with a unique ability to turn CO2 into stone. I got the press release for this earlier this week and didn’t know what to make of it myself, so here’s the New Scientist with the story.

Carbon Copy have updated their maps with the latest carbon footprint data for each town and region in the UK. If you want to know what’s happening in your area, it’s a good place to start.

Our World in Data highlights four countries that have bucked the ...

Book review: Moral Ambition, by Rutger Bregman

“Who among you dares to dream of a wildly better future?” asks Rutger Bregman on more than one occasion in his book, Moral Ambition. If you dare for such a thing, then his book is an invitation to think through how you can make a significant contribution to that better world. And don’t do things by halves – make the biggest possible difference that you can.

That’s the heart of the idea of moral ambition. Common garden ambition is generally satisfied by making money, earning respect and i...

Your home has a digital twin

When Russell Smith was retrofitting his own home in 2005, he had a lot of research to do into how his house was performing, what its energy needs were and what the most cost effective solutions might be. As he worked on it and developed a spreadsheet to investigate, he realised that this was useful information for others to learn from. It grew into a business, Parity Projects, now part of a larger company called Cotality.

Cotality provide building analysis to inform retrofits, and they have ...

Climate anxiety needs climate solutions

I recently attended the online launch of a new campaign called Climate Courage Schools. An initiative from the Climate Majority Project, the campaign calls for ’emotionally aware’ climate education in schools. They argue that there is growing disconnect between what children are taught in school about climate change and about the future, and what they see unfolding around them.

“As it stands,” they argue in a launch report, “education in no way reflects the scale or urgency of the challenge,...

What we learned this week

After a good start over the last few years, the huge energy energy needs of AI has punched a big hole in Google’s net zero plans. Emissions have risen by 51% in a year.

For those of us in the northerly climes of the UK, it’s easy to underestimate the global potential of solar power. As a new report from Ember points out, batteries are now cheap enough that whole cities could be run on solar power overnight, and entirely solar cities are possible in the sunniest parts of the world.

Here’s ...

Experiments in heatwave shade

We’ve had a heatwave in the UK recently. Then it moved across the continent, setting new records along the way – the hottest ever month of June in Britain, peaks as high as 46C in Spain and Portugal.

Like many houses in the UK, ours overheats. It’s almost a hundred years old and was built for a different time. The hottest temperature of the year in 1928 was 32.2C. Two decades would pass before the house saw temperatures above 35. The hottest day of the year has been over 35 for seven of the l...