Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 45

Book review: Caring Cash, by Tom Neumark

Cash transfers are one of the big ideas in aid and development, and there was a lot of discussion about it a few years ago. Books such as Portfolios of the Poor or Just Give Money to the Poor made the case that people living in poverty were the experts in their own lives, knew what they needed, and were very skilled at handling their limited budgets. Why not just give them the money they needed, rather than setting up elaborate charity and welfare services?

Brazil and several other count...

What we learned this week

Instead of paying for offsets, would you do more good if you gave the same money to a well chosen charity? Good use of effective altruism thinking in this academic paper from Orri Stefansson.

I wrote this week about how early hype around insect based foods (link below) failed to translate into a viable industry. See also algae biofuels, as the last big funders pull their investments on an idea that seemed quite promising a few years ago.

The science of peak oil kind of got crowded out by ...

Film review: I am the Earth

Chile has been globally recognised for its climate action, and is currently ranked third in the world on the Climate Change Performance Index (after Denmark and Sweden). And so the country has commissioned a medium-length documentary about what it’s up to. The film has been doing the rounds of festivals and conferences, and today lands on Amazon, if that’s something you have access to.

Drawing on some Oscar-winning national talent, I am the Earth: Stories from The Southern Edge of the Wo...

What happened to the edible insect trend?

A few years ago I ran a rather popular series on the blog where I set out to try as many insect-based foods as I could find. If the start-ups were to be believed, there was rising interest in insect foods and it was going to be a big thing. Sustainable, nutritious, tasty, and surely coming to a supermarket near you any day now.

Having sampled the wares for myself, I found that optimism hard to justify. For a start, some of the companies were marketing themselves on their novelty value, which ...

Britain’s looming net zero gap

Governments are often more keen on announcing things than delivering them, and climate change stands out as an area of policy that has a particularly large gap between rhetoric and reality. I see it locally here in Luton, where the council has a stated target of reaching net zero carbon by 2040, but remains committed to growing the airport. At the larger end of the scale, President Biden undermines his climate plans by opening up new oil fields on federal lands. And somewhere in between those sc...

Why every nation’s carbon footprint matters

Why should Britain reduce its carbon emissions when they’re only 1% of the global total? It’s not our problem – tell China, India and the US to sort themselves out. That’s a common enough view among those sceptical of climate policy.

There are a variety of responses to that, including historic emissions and the fact that some of our emissions are outsourced through trade. Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data also points out that if every country with low emissions took that view, climate chan...

Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood, by Charlotte Wrigley

Permafrost has a particular place in climate change discussion. It doesn’t come up often, and when it does it’s frequently in the apocalyptic tone of tipping points and catastrophe. Fundamentally, it seems under-studied, or at least insufficiently explained for non-academic audiences. So I was interested to see a new book on the subject.

Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood is an examination of permafrost and its role in climate change, but it’s more than that. It’s a kind of anthropological study of...

What we learned this week

The Guardian has published a map of air pollution in America, showing a clear and consistent pattern of environmental systemic racism: “A major finding is that residents of the neighborhoods facing the most air pollution in America are twice as likely to be people of color as those in less polluted neighborhoods.”

“The drought has underscored the problems of international aid: its unaccountability, its focus on short-term intervention, and its perpetuation of a social and political system bui...

Electric cars can be stupid too

A couple of weeks ago I was observing a workshop on climate solutions, and the room was discussing the merits of various transport options. A well meaning and environmentally-minded fellow started laying into electric cars. They were no kind of climate solution, he insisted, because they still cause pollution and the batteries cannot be recycled. So no, we shouldn’t invest in charging networks or waste time encouraging people to switch to EVs.

I found myself defending electric cars again. Ye...

Low Traffic Neighbourhoods work

Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) have been in the news a fair bit recently, often for the wrong reasons. They have become something of a bete noire for motorists with a right wing bent, and there’s a lot of angry shouting about them. That all gets in the way of what should be a grown-up conversation about traffic, because it’s a problem.

The number of cars in the UK has grown consistently for decades, and traffic with it. Recessions tend to put a dent in traffic figures, and the pandemic in...