Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 44

The Tragedy of Madagascar, by Nathaniel Adams

The year I was born, GDP per capita in Madagascar stood at $517, making it one of the worlds poorest countries. Forty years later in 2021, the World Bank records GDP per capita at $501. So little has changed for so many Malagasy people. By some measures progress has gone backwards. And yet, “we have everything here,” says a former senator interviewed in the book. “Food, water, minerals, mountains, beaches. It’s a beautiful country and there is no reason why we should be so poor.”

This the...

What we learned this week

The Drawdown project has developed a new way to browse their eminent collection of climate solutions online. If you haven’t checked in with them for a while, have a look at their new ‘discover’ feature.

It’s been ten years since Bill McKibben’s influential essay for Rolling Stone on the maths of climate change. He’s followed it up with an update on what has changed since, and how we “break the 700,000-years-long human habit of setting stuff on fire.”

What is the lifetime environmental impa...

What we learned this week

It’s the Easter holidays round here, so fewer posts last week and none at all next week. I’m going to take a break for a few days. In the meantime, some miscellaneous links, some highlights from the blog in case you missed them, and a couple of cultural recommendations below.

Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam is phasing out private planes and night flights as it seeks to be ‘quieter, cleaner and better’. These are the kind of ‘people first’ decisions UK airports, including my local Luton one, co...

The countries saying no to new oil and gas

Over the last couple of years the campaign group Just Stop Oil have risen to notoriety. Their tactics are controversial and sometimes absurd, but their single demand is hard to argue with: stop all new oil and gas.

If you accept even the basics of climate change, then the most obvious thing to do is stop making it worse. Just Stop Oil don’t demand the closing down of the industry. They’re not calling for all oil and gas industry workers to be sacked and all petrol driven cars crushed. They e...

On the safety of nuclear power

Last week I wrote about the possibility of a new generation of small modular reactors, something a number of governments and businesses are betting on as a reponse to climate change and high energy prices. As is often the case, one of the things that came up in discussion was the safety of nuclear power. Is it safe? Can it ever be safe?

While the short answer to those questions is a pretty obvious no, the question ‘is it safe?’ doesn’t get us very far. We are surrounded by unsafe things ever...

Book review: Carbon Colonialism, by Laurie Parsons

“What comes into your mind when you think of environmental breakdown?” asks Laurie Parsons in the opening to his book Carbon Colonialism. For a lot of people it’s still melting ice and polar bears. If people feature, it’s likely to be forest fires or famines far away. With some notable exceptions, “what your example is unlikely to include is your own town, your own neighbourhood, your own street.” For readers in the west, the climate crisis is a step removed.

That is not the case everywh...

What we learned this week

Anyone watching climate proceedings in the UK will have had a lot to process on Thursday as the government published dozens of new policies related to energy and climate – some good, some resolutely moving in the wrong direction. I haven’t had a chance to wade through them all yet, but I’ll be drawing on Carbon Brief’s summary to do so.

As global plastic use continues its inexorable rise, an overview of the health effects of plastics has revealed that they cause harm at every stage in their ...

Is it time for pay as you go road pricing?

As electric car sales rise in the UK, a problem looms for the government. The treasury takes in a substantial amount of money from fuel duty – the tax on petrol and diesel that drivers pay at the pump. Even with recent crowd-pleasing cuts and freezes to fuel duty, it still hauls in £28 billion a year in tax.

However, since they don’t burn petrol or diesel in their cars, electric vehicle drivers don’t contribute anything to this total. The more electric cars there are, the more that source of...

What makes a healthy street?

I was browsing Luton council’s new draft walking and cycling plan (consultation now open) recently. As part of their plan to move more of the town’s journeys to active transport, they use a set of indicators from the organisation Healthy Streets. They list ten things that determine a pedestrian’s experience of a street, and these indicators can be applied to any street in the world.

A sustainable transport system depends on a lot more people choosing to walk or cycle. One of the things t...

The age of small modular nuclear?

There was something of a non-sequitur from Britain’s Chancellor Jeremy Hunt recently. “We don’t want to see high bills like this again,” he said of the country’s current energy costs. “It’s time for a clean energy reset. That is why we are fully committing to nuclear power in the UK, backing a new generation of small modular reactors.”

If I was hoping to bring down energy bills, then nuclear isn’t the first place I’d look. The cost of Hinkley Point C, Britain’s first new nuclear power plant i...