Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 42

What can we learn from a car designed for Madagascar?

Design is political. As Caroline Criado Perez has described in her book Invisible Women, most design work is carried out by men, who use themselves as the basis for what they create. The result is mobile phones optimised for larger hands, for example. Crash test dummies are based on male bodies, leading to cars that are safer for men than women.

This is true for children as well, often a second consideration in a world that uses grown men as a reference point. And it’s true across geography....

Steps towards the end of plastic pollution

Last year the UN Environment Assembly agreed on the need for a global plastics treaty, working towards the long term goal of eliminating plastic pollution. UNEP have now published a report called Turning Off the Tap that describes how this could be done – and it’s got the giant tap from the Nairobi conference on the cover.

The report outlines global approaches to reduce, reuse, recycle – three Rs that will be familiar to many – but also to ‘reorient and diversify’. That’s about shifting the m...

Getting ocean farming to scale

Last week I wrote about a start-up company in the seaweed business, Carbon Kapture, and the challenges of scaling up the promising idea of ocean farming. Carbon Kapture are taking a crowd-funding model to try and get started, and are relying on local partnerships to grow their model.

By way of contrast, there’s another attempt at proving ocean farming at scale that’s going on at the moment. They’ve taken the route of taking one major funder, and it doesn’t come much bigger: Amazon.

North...

The Most Dammed Country in the World, by Dai Qing

I expect you already know which country is being referred to in the title of this book. It’s China, which has 23,841 large dams. That’s comfortably over twice the number of dams in the US in second place. Among them is the largest dam in the world, the Three Gorges Dam, also the world’s largest power station and by any account one of the most impressive feats of engineering in human history.

The dam has saved hundreds of millions of tonnes of coal and its associated emissions, but it was...

What we learned this week

Artists in Appalachia held a funeral for a closing coal power station – not to celebrate its demise but to help the community deal with the change. There are different ways to do this, but it’s important not to disregard the contribution of communities who have served the fossil economy.

“After 39 years of communications campaigning, I can assure you that if a campaign’s goal is starting a ‘conversation,’ its goal is failure.” This speaks more to an American context in my opinion, but interes...

Ocean farming for Carbon Kapture

Ocean farming is something I keep an eye on. It’s potentially a climate solution, a way of feeding the world, and a way of restoring marine ecology, all at once. Unfortunately there’s not been a whole lot to report so far. I’m convinced this will change, and that within two or three decades ocean farming will be a major global enterprise providing us with food, plastics, fertiliser and biofuels.

Here’s one interesting new development in the field water: Carbon Kapture. They’re a start-up bas...

On the ‘hardworking majority’

Last week I was reading up on the government’s new Public Order Bill. That’s a new set of powers for policing and preventing protest, to add to a growing list. The Metropolitan Police waited all of two days before abusing these powers while detaining anti-monarchy demonstrators during the coronation.

One section jumped out at me in the factsheet about the bill:

“Over recent years, guerrilla tactics used by a small minority of protesters have caused a disproportionate impact on the hardwork...

Book review: Pirate Enlightenment, by David Graeber

Pirate Englightenment is the last of David Graeber’s books, published posthumously. It’s about the cross-pollination of pirate communities and Malagasy culture in the early 1700s.

It’s a fitting last word, because the first book Graeber wrote was also about Madagascar. What he discovered during his doctoral research in the country in the early 90s informs a lot of what he wrote in-between. He regularly referenced Madagascar in his other books, and his influential ideas on democracy and f...

What we learned this week

New Economics Foundation has a new report on Universal Basic Services, and how they could be used to address inequality and climate change at the same time. An “indispensable eco-social policy”, they call it.

Whirli is replicating toy-swaps online, with subscriptions for borrowing toys. Good for reducing clutter, keeping toys in circulation longer, and generally creating a more circular economic for toys.

Cory Doctorow explains how social media platforms fail: “first, they are good to thei...

The Catch-22 of climate protest

Earlier this year Extinction Rebellion announced that they would take a break from civil disobedience for a bit in order to focus on building broader coalitions. They called instead for a peaceful and inclusive gathering in London. With no law-breaking involved, anyone who had been hesitant to get involved could no turn up and take part. Called The Big One, it specifically aimed to gather a crowd ‘too big to ignore’.

It was a nice idea, though personally I don’t believe in crowds too big to i...