Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 54

What we learned this week

While the UK’s national government doesn’t know what it’s doing from one week to the next, good climate policies continue to thrive in the regions. The Scottish government has announced a public energy agency, Heat & Energy Efficiency Scotland, to be a trusted central hub for advice and expertise.

Over in Wales, the Welsh government has announced a state-owned renewable energy developer as a response to high energy prices. Energy profits generated in Wales will go back to people in Wales.

...

Film review: The Oil Machine

The Oil Machine is a new documentary about the UK oil industry, how it has shaped our economy, and the hold it has on politics. I presume it’s being released in the week of COP27, but perhaps its more immediate relevance is to the debate around Just Stop Oil. While protestors take ever more extreme actions and the government blithely ignores its own climate advisors to issue more drilling licences, it’s well worth reviewing the story of how we got here. The Oil Machine tells that story, of why w...

Carbon taxes and climate inequality

The climate crisis is a matter of justice on many different levels. Among them is the fact that the damage is mainly caused by the richest, though it is the poorest that are most exposed to the harm. This is true internationally and within countries too.

Here in Britain, the richest have vastly larger climate footprints. In a recent report by the think tank Autonomy, they looked at 20 years of carbon emissions by income group. The top 1% have a much greater impact:

It would take 26 ye...

Earth and Wheat’s food waste solution

This week I’ve sent my end of the month Zero Carbon Luton newsletter, full of local climate actions of one sort or another, as Luton heads for net zero by 2040. Subscribe if you like. Here’s a story from the October edition. It’s the kind of thing I’d post here too, because it’s both local to me and a world first:

You’ve probably heard of ‘wonky’ fruit and veg schemes that sell on mis-shapen fresh food that’s been rejected by the supermarkets. What if you could do the same thing with baked g...

Five kinds of climate denial

In the book I reviewed on Monday, Sam Moore and Alex Roberts’ book on ecofascism, there is a brief section on denial. They suggest that “denial has many forms”, and they name five. It’s a passing mention in the book, but I thought it was a useful way of thinking about some common obstructions to climate action.

Trend denial: This is the original sin of climate denial – just insisting that it isn’t happening in the first place. The world isn’t warming. Everything is fine. The scientists lie....

The Rise of Ecofascism, by Sam Moore and Alex Roberts

Earlier this year I ran a brace of posts by Harriet Bergman on eco-fascism (here and here). It’s a topic I want to keep half an eye on, and so I picked up a copy of Sam Moore and Alex Roberts’ book The Rise of EcoFascism: Climate Change and the Far Right.

One of the first things the authors do is question the term ‘eco-fascism’. It was coined by the environmentalist Murray Bookchin in response to a radical green fringe whose views had taken a particularly ugly turn. They were suggesting ...

What we learned this week

The UK has a different government than this time last week. This one plans to keep the ban on fracking that last week’s government put in the bin. But they’ve also re-banned onshore wind, which last week’s government had finally set free.

No word yet on whether the proposed ban on solar arrays on agricultural land will remain, but this week’s government might want to keep this in mind: one of the biggest investors in solar farms in the last few years has in fact been… the government. As well...

Erne Campus – the world’s largest PassivHaus Premium building

PassivHaus has been around for a while as a building standard, but its principles are organised around energy conservation and comfort rather than carbon emissions. PassivHaus Premium has emerged as a more rigorous standard for those aiming for genuine net zero buildings. And the world’s largest PassivHaus Premium building was recently announced as the ‘project of the year’ at the annual RICS awards – Erne Campus, South West College in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland.

Their previous building w...

The search for new growing spaces

In part three of this series on land, food and the future, I want to look at some of the possibilities for expanding food production without destroying the environment.

Earlier we ruled out a bunch of land types that aren’t currently used for agriculture:

Only half of usable land is used for farming, because the rest has forests on it. We’ve already agreed that we’re not going to cut the trees down – but can we produce food within the forest?

That’s what agroforestry is all about, ...

More food from the same land

Yesterday I wrote about pressures on limited global farmland, and how we basically had two choices. We could look for new growing spaces, or try to get more food from what we have. Tomorrow I’ll look at the first of those, and today I’ll look at the second – is there any way to get more food from the same amount of land?

Food waste

One really good place to start is with food waste. Globally, a third of all food is wasted. 1.3 billion tonnes of food is thrown away every year. That’s food th...