Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 51

The toxic myth of the climate lockdown

This month Oxford council had to call in the police to deal with abuse and death threats against their staff, after online stories about a ‘climate lockdown’ in the city. I won’t link to the original stories because I don’t want to give them oxygen, but the gist of the conspiracy is summed up in this introductory sentence from one well known climate denial website:

“Imagine if your power mad politicians liked Covid Lockdowns so much, they wanted to continue them indefinitely. This is going t...

Paint Your Town Red, by Matthew Brown and Rhian Jones

I’m pretty sure I’ve ended dozens of posts here on the blog with the words ‘I’d love to see something like this in Luton’. That’s not something I need to say about the ‘Preston Model’. I heard about it first from friends in the council a few years ago. Luton has made good progress on the idea, and Preston gets a mention in The Economics of Arrival. But I hadn’t read a whole book about Preston and its experiment, and Paint Your Town Red looked like a useful introduction.

Preston is a larg...

What we learned this week

One in five cars bought in the UK in November was battery electric, the highest proportion so far. Add plug-in hybrids and you’re looking at 27.7% of the market.

As the World Cup comes to a close, a couple of related links. Here’s the Scientific American on FIFA’s carbon neutral claims: “FIFA’s slippery stance symbolizes the all-too-common misleading practices that many organizations, companies and governments use to hoodwink people into thinking they are addressing climate change while inst...

Welsh wind power for Wales

The largest wind farm in Wales has 76 turbines and provides enough energy for a sixth of all Welsh households. It’s run by the company Vattenfall, and that’s an interesting firm. The name is the Swedish word for waterfall, as the roots of the company lie in the Royal Waterfalls Board, a state-owned agency that built hydroelectric power. The company was expanded in the 1970s to build nuclear power in Sweden, and it has since moved into renewable energy across Europe.

Vattenfall has invested h...

Rwanda’s circular economy plan

Rwanda is a true sustainability leader – see the Kigali accord that regulated greenhouse gases from refrigerants, and the plastic treaty proposed with Peru earlier this year. Last week Rwanda hosted the World Circular Economy Forum, and at the event they launched their first national action plan for a circular economy.

If you’ll excuse a little policy wonkery, it’s worth looking at the plan and what it contains. What is Rwanda planning? How are they adapting circular economy principles t...

Book review: Practical Anarchism, by Scott Branson

Anarchism is arguably a useless word. Because it has been so commonly defined as chaos, it’s almost impossible to have a conversation about anarchism without being misunderstood. Scott Branson acknowledges that using the term might be a losing battle, but use it they do, proudly reclaiming and reimagining anarchism as a down to earth way of life.

“Anarchism has to be a continual practice, not a static ideology,” says Branson. It has no end goal. It’s not out to stir up a revolution or de...

What simple actions can people do to reduce their carbon footprints?

This is one of the questions I get asked most often. What simple actions can ordinary people do to reduce their carbon footprints? I expect you’ve heard it before.

Let me reply with a question of my own: which simple household objects can I use to battle a T-Rex?

None, right?

If I need to fight a T-Rex for some reason, I’m not going in with a toilet brush and a pair of scissors. I’m going to gear up, and I’m going to bring friends.

I mean, I’m open to discussing the running away o...

Are plastic roads a waste solution?

What to do with all the world’s plastic waste? More and more things, from construction materials to clothes, are made from plastic – with no obvious way to recycle them. Of what can be recycled, far more is being created than can be economically collected and processed. Other than burn it or dump it in landfill, what else can we do?

How about melting it and layering it into our roads?

That’s a plastic waste ‘solution’ that was first developed in India in 2001, and it was trialled over the...

Behind the screens

Smartphones have become a ubiquitous part of moden life. There are already more mobiles on the planet than there are people, and yet vast advertising spend is directed at encouraging consumers to upgrade. Phones are kept for 2-3 years and replaced, often thrown away long before they are broken.

If you’ve been watching the football in the UK recently, you may have seen an advert that encapsulates this drive for novelty. A woman sees a friend with a folding phone, and obsesses about it until s...

Escape from Model Land, by Erica Thompson

Mathematical models don’t often get a lot of attention from the general public. When they do, it’s rarely positive. Perhaps they have failed to predict a recession, or foretold pandemic doom scenarios that don’t materialise. All of a sudden it gets political, and everyone is talking about a science that they may or may not understand.

For those who do want to understand what models are and what they can do, Erica Thompson has written a very useful book: Escape from Model Land – How mathe...