Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 53

What we learned this week

Basic income news – a letter from 285 signatories, including politicians from all parties, has been presented to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. It requests pilot schemes and a government taskforce to investigate a basic income in the UK.

Domestic and industrial energy users will be able to take part in a Demand Flexibility Service with the National Grid this winter, which will seem them compensated for not using energy at peak time.

France’s senate has voted to mandate solar canopies over th...

Building of the week: Stadium 974

The Qatar World Cup begins this weekend, and the list of objections to it is at this point long and well rehearsed, from corruption to greenwash, to human rights abuses and oppressive anti-LGBTQ laws, to the absurdity of holding sporting events in the desert in the first place. But this I do like: the first temporary stadium in the history of the competition.

is made out of shipping containers. 974 of them, to be precise – which also happens to be the international dialling code ...

What we learned from getting a battery installed

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I’ve been working to improve the efficiency of my house. I had an interim target to reach an A rating for efficiency by 2020, on the way to zero carbon by 2025. The latest step has been to install a domestic storage battery. This will allow us to make more use of our solar power. We would have done it at the same time as the solar panels, but we couldn’t afford it all at once. We’re having to do things step by step.

There are a couple of good reas...

Young people need better climate education

A couple of months ago I wrote about the scandal of climate miseducation, where young people are taught climate science wrong in order to protect vested interests. But there’s a much more common failure in climate education – not giving young people enough information for them to feel part of the solution.

This was highlighted by a global survey conducted last year by Plan International. They surveyed over 1,800 young people between the ages of 15 and 24, in 37 different countries, in order ...

The Age of Resilience, by Jeremy Rifkin

Jeremy Rifkin is a thinker with a reputation for being ahead of his time. The frequently discussed fear that digital technologies will make millions of workers obsolete? Rifkin wrote a book about that in 1995. The possibilities for hydrogen in a clean energy transition? See his 2002 book, two decades before the spate of recent national hydrogen plans. He’s also influential. His ideas around a ‘third industrial revolution‘ have been embedded in China’s five year plans. He did some of the cons...

What we learned this week

I was pleased to see coordinated protests about private aviation in several places around the world this week, including Luton, which is Britain’s busiest airport for private planes.

“I have no problem whatsoever saying that this is about reparation, compensation and liability, and responsibility. The developed world has caused climate change and the developing world is paying the price. If people can’t see the reality of that then there is something wrong.” Scotland’s first minister Nicola ...

Germany’s railways as a public good

We had a bit of a surprise when travelling through Germany on the trains this summer. I had assumed that German railways were excellent. I have German friends who sing their praises, and past experiences have been good. This year, all the legs of our journey through Germany ran slightly late. There were platform alterations, quite a lot of confused people. All the trains were busy and some quite over-crowded.

Since my wife speaks fluent German and loves to talk to strangers, it didn’t take lo...

The Stop the Squeeze campaign

A new campaign launched at the end of October, which I kind of missed at the time. A lot was happening. I doubt I was the only one that missed it.

Stop the Squeeze is a response to the cost of living crisis, backed by a coalition of over 40 charities that includes the New Economics Foundation, Possible, Oxfam, Debt Justice and many others. In language that looks more directly aimed at Britain’s last PM rather than the current one – like I say, a lot happened in October – they “condemn ‘faile...

The world’s biggest carbon problems

It’s COP season again, which means a torrent of climate related reports, books, studies and campaigns. If previous years are anything to go by, I’ll get to some of them by February. Here’s something that I thought might be helpful earlier than that. As negotiators meet to thrash out the next round of climate agreements, here’s a summary of the biggest sources of emissions.

First, the top seven emitters, as graphed by the UNEP’s Emissions Gap report.

As always, it’s impossible to avoid...

The Greatest Polar Expedition of all Time, by Markus Rex

“The Arctic is the epicentre of climate change,” writes Markus Rex. It is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, and what happens in the Arctic does not stay there. Conditions here affect weather elsewhere, driving the air currents that determine the weather across the Northern hemisphere. Yet despite the importance of the region, “there is much we do not understand. The Arctic is where our climate models operate with least certainty.”

One of the reasons that the Arctic is under-...