Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 48

Film review: Finite – the climate of change

It’s 2023. The world has warmed by 1.2 degrees already, and global emissions are still rising. And yet even in countries that claim leadership on climate change, mad decisions continue to be made. The UK approved a new coal mine at the end of last year. Germany has failed to fix its coal dependency. The drive for profit prevails.

What do you do in response to this kind of madness? How far will you go to stand up to it?

These are the sorts of questions raised in the new documentary Finite...

Book review: Five Times Faster, by Simon Sharpe

Every week there are steps forward on climate change to report. There is movement. Things are happening. “The problem,” writes Simon Sharpe, “is the pace of change.” It’s all moving too slowly, bogged down in glacial decision-making processes, held back by institutional inertia and the power of vested interests. The carbon intensity of the global economy is decreasing at 1.5% a year, and the science tells us it needs to be 8% a year. “In other words, we need to rip fossil-burning out of the ...

What we learned this week

“Developments in space travel and technology need to benefit everyone,” not just billionaires in absurd hats, writes Gareth Worthington in The Big Issue.The organisation Campaign for Better Transport celebrated its 50th birthday this week. Shell’s profits for 2022 were nearly $40 billion, which is “more than double the conservative figure of $16 billion for clear-up costs of last year’s devastating floods in Pakistan.” Filipino activist Yeb Sano explains why he is taking direct action a...

The companies offsetting their entire existence

The drive to ‘net zero’ has brought a new energy to climate action, but has also brought new levels of greenwash. Everyone has a net zero target to meet, but how that’s defined is a bit of a free-for-all. Interchangeable terms and vague commitments abound. But a small handful of companies are attempting to go bigger and better on their emissions.

When they start thinking about the impact on the climate, most companies are prepared to take on their direct operational emissions. Others are bol...

The return of the climate department?

There was some surprise news in UK politics yesterday. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been reshuffling his ministers and re-ordering some departments. In the process, the idea of a climate department has been brought back from the dead. Grant Shapps will now head up a newly formed Department of Energy Security and Net Zero.

If you remember, the UK was an early pioneer in creating a climate change ministry. The Department of Energy and Climate Change was formed in 2008 under the Labour govern...

A fashion for degrowth

In my book, it doesn’t make much sense to be pro or anti growth. That’s like being for or against activity, or motion. These are broad and abstract things, and we need more information before we can form an opinion. Growth of what exactly? For whom? And at what cost?

I’m not the only one to think so. “We may reasonably ask not just growth for what, but growth of what,” as Robert and Edward Skidelsky write in their book How Much is Enough? “We want leisure to grow and pollution to decline.” T...

Climate, catastrophe and faith, by Philip Jenkins

Scholars have written the history of religion, and other scholars have written the history of the climate. The two haven’t necessarily been put together, and Philip Jenkins remedies that with his engaging book Climate, Catastrophe and Faith: How changes in climate drive religious upheaval. It shows how times of crisis in the weather have dramatically shaped religious movements across the world.

Reading back over the past thousand years, there have been periods of misery that have gone do...

What we learned this week

If you’re wondering where all the posts for this week went, they went out the window in my unscheduled visit to hospital. I’m fine, thanks for asking, and I never wanted an appendix anyway. If next week is a little quiet too, it’s because I’m catching up on work I didn’t finish. Or possibly because I’m reading the books people have dropped round while I’m supposed to be taking it easy.

So no post highlights for this week, but some links:

Did you catch that the cost of living crisis has gi...

Book review: Stopping Oil

Just Stop Oil has been a high profile campaign in the UK in the last year or so. It has one simple demand – to stop all new development of oil and gas. And as the debate that they started rumbles on, it’s helpful to take a moment to look at a success story. Stopping Oil tells the story of the opposition that emerged in response to New Zealand’s move into fossil fuel extraction, and how it was ultimately curtailed.

Starting around 2008, New Zealand’s government began a concerted effort to...

What we learned this week

A climate justice angle we don’t hear very much about – the Phoenix newsletter looks at climate and the caste system in South Asia,

Britain’s big housebuilders continue to erect whole estates of new homes all fitted with gas boilers. So it’s worth noting that one of them, Redrow, announced this week that they are going to fit heat pumps and underfloor heating as standard from now on.

That’s important in normalising heat pumps, which in some circles are still considered new, unproven, and o...