Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 41

Before the Streetlights Come on, by Heather McTeer Toney

About five years ago, while I was researching my book, I compiled a list of the top 50 climate books. 42 of them were written by men, and 49 by white authors. I started seeking out a greater diversity of voices on climate change, and here’s another book to add to the list: Before the Streetlights Come on – Black America’s urgent call for climate solutions.

Heather McTeer Toney is an experienced environmental justice campaigner, an attorney and former mayor of Greenville, Mississippi. Her...

Storytelling in the wasteland

Agbogbloshie is an e-waste dump in Ghana, and it’s well known as a horrendous case study in irresponsible waste. NGOs and charities send photographers to document it for campaigns, and it is described as a hell on earth, or ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’. It is visually stark, almost unimaginably polluted. As an utterly destroyed landscape, it makes for iconic photography.

“I noticed that they use our photos to tell stories,” says Abdallah, a local youth worker, observing all these visiting photographe...

Fairphone’s modular headphones

I often listen to podcasts while I’m walking down to my town centre workspace, or when out and about on errands. Although I’m careful with them and I try to buy quality, earphones don’t tend to last very long. Give them a couple of years and I usually find one side starts cutting out or going crackly, and then I need to replace them.

I learned to use a soldering iron and have tried repairing them in the past, with mixed results. I can repair a loose connection and get a bit more life out of ...

Book review: Breathe, by Sadiq Khan

Sadiq Khan has been mayor of London since 2016, and in this book he outlines his action on climate in the city. It’s a mix of the personal, the political, and the possible – cities can lead on climate change in ways nations can’t, and mayors can be a powerful influence.

Breathe begins with Khan’s own experience of being diagnosed with asthma as an adult. It was a direct result of exposure to air pollution while training for the London marathon, and it alerted him to the reality of envir...

What we learned this week

An interesting development in the story of nuclear fusion – Microsoft have agreed a power purchase agreement with a fusion energy company. A gamble of course, but if it pays off it will make commercial fusion power a reality by 2028.

If fossil fuel companies had to pay reparations for the damage they have done through climate change, how much would they owe? According to this new study, the bill currently stands at $23.2 trillion.

Positive News reports on the world’s first native bee sanct...

Community solar on the Bottle Yard Studios

I haven’t done many ‘building of the week’ posts recently – apologies to those who love a bit of green architecture. Here’s one that might qualify, although it’s also about community solar and sustainable business.

The Bottle Yard is so called because its main site used to be the bottling plant for Harvey’s Bristol Cream sherry, a staple of my Grandad’s drinks cabinet. It’s now a studio facility that’s used in a variety of TV and film productions.

Because it’s owned by Bristol Council, th...

The moral outrage of climate change

in his book The Flag, the Cross and the Station Wagon, Bill McKibben describes an experience in Bangaldesh. There was an outbreak of Dengue fever in the capital, Dhaka. Dengue is a mosquito-borne disease that benefits from the warmer and wetter conditions that climate change is creating in places like Bangladesh, and so cases of Dengue have been rising as the world warms.

McKibben, who caught Dengue himself, observed that Bangladeshis had minuscule carbon footprints and so had done nothing to...

Saving materials with universal batteries

At the weekend I went to assemble a new picnic bench for the garden and found that my drill has bitten the dust. The battery no longer holds a charge, and I borrowed a drill from my neighbour to finish the job. I noticed that his drill is part of the Power for All Alliance, which you may have come across if you have been shopping for power tools recently.

Led by German multinational Bosch, the Power for All Alliance is a design standard shared by several tool makers, who have agreed to use t...

How to Stand up to a Dictator, by Maria Ressa

Sometimes I read a book because I want to learn more about a specific subject. Other times I pick it up with a purposeful curiosity, open to whatever the author wants to tell me. This is one of the latter. I knew that Maria Ressa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. I knew that she is a journalist from the Philippines, where the violent populist president Duterte was in power. What the book was about exactly, well – I’ll find out. People who win the Nobel prize will have something to say, and ...

What we learned this week

In one of the most high profile environmental failures of recent years in Britain, rules on pollution dumping has become so slack that every river in England is polluted. River Action have a petition you can sign.

There is a pile of discarded clothes in the Atacama desert that is so big you can see it from space.

Did you know the RSPB runs a farm? It’s called Hope Farm and it’s been pioneering and demonstrating wildlife-friendly farming techniques for 20 years. It’s in Cambridgeshire and ...