Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 55
October 25, 2022
Land, food and the future
At the weekend I gave a talk on sustainable food to a student conference in China. I had a fairly open brief to talk about any aspect of food sustainability that I liked, and so I thought I’d write about land. In George Monbiot’s recent book Regenesis, he talks about how the climate and ecological crisis means that the world needs to produce more food on less land. So that’s what I talked about – not with any attempt to be comprehensive, but to offer some possibilities.
I’ll serialise the ta...
October 24, 2022
How to change everything, by Naomi Klein & Rebecca Steffof
Naomi Klein is well known to activists of my generation, having written one of the iconic texts of consumer capitalist resistance in No Logo in 1999. Her latest book is written with Rebecca Stefoff, an experienced writer for young people, and it’s pitched squarely at a younger generation of activists: How to Change Everything – The young human’s guide to protecting the planet and each other.
In its name and graphics, the book echoes the earlier This Changes Everything, which explained how...
October 22, 2022
What we learned this week
Overhead power cables for trucks are proving successful in Germany and there will be a UK trial on the M180, a 26 mile spur of motorway near Doncaster.
The WWF’s Living Planet report for 2022 is out. There’s one every two years, and this year there’s a youth edition as well.
Britain’s gas imports would be 13% lower if David Cameron hadn’t dropped his husky hugging act and chosen to “cut the green crap” instead, according to Carbon Brief.
October 21, 2022
The world’s first hydrogen airliner
Yesterday I wrote about Easyjet’s plans to reach zero carbon by 2050, a plan that pegs its hopes to hydrogen aircraft to deliver zero emission flight. While I was critical of Easyjet’s PR approach, there is reason to believe that hydrogen aircraft will be in the air by 2050. Exhibit A in the argument for hydrogen airliners is that it’s already been done.
In fact, it was done in the 1980s.
After the 1970s oil crisis, businesses and governments alike started to think about a future beyond ...
October 20, 2022
Why Easyjet wants it to be all about you
After decades of ‘tips’ and ‘small steps’ that you and I can take to ‘do our bit’ for the environment, there’s been something of a backlash against personal action recently. A number of high profile authors and commentators reject the idea of individual action altogether. If action is to be meaningful, it has to be at a bigger scale. Anything else is a distraction. This was certainly a theme in Assaad Razzouk’s book Saving the Planet Without the Bullshit, which I reviewed last week.
I’ve wri...
October 18, 2022
The other population crisis
“The biggest population crisis is not the growth in human numbers, but the growth in livestock numbers.”
George Monbiot
That’s a line that jumped out at me from Monbiot’s recent book Regenesis. I’ve written about the dominance of livestock before, but I hadn’t thought about it in those terms.
The human population, he points out, is currently growing by 1.05% a year and has been slowing for a while. The population of our animals is growing at 2.4% a year and has been rising. There are alr...
October 17, 2022
Book review: Solar Politics, by Oxana Timofeeva
In his book The Switch, Chris Goodall argues that solar technologies will eventually power the world. It’s harder to imagine in Britain than in other places, but if it did, what would the implications be? We know what a fossil fuelled economy looks like, and the politics of fossil fuels. How would solar be different?
These are the kinds of questions that Solar Politics tentatively raises, and it does so through the lens of philosophy, reaching back into ancient ways of thinking about the ...
October 15, 2022
What we learned this week
Today is International Repair Day. Lots of events happening around the world, if you’ve got something that needs fixing. Oh, and yesterday was e-waste day, so here’s SolarAid talking about how they train technicians to repair their solar lights.
Can climate change be understood as collective trauma? Matthew Green at Desmog shares some insights from pyschologists.
Horrendous portmanteau word of the day goes to the Unblocktober campaign, “the world’s first month-long national campaign and ...
October 13, 2022
China is buying half the world’s electric cars
Here’s an interesting chart from the 2022 Earth Index, which I was browsing this week. It shows global sales of electric cars, as measured by the IEA:
There are a couple of things to notice here. The first is the doubling of market share in 2021, when EVs shot up from 4% of new cars sold to over 8%. Yes, the other 9 out of 10 are petrol and diesel, so we’re nowhere near declaring the end of fossil fuel transport. But considering that just five years ago sales were around 1% electric, thin...
October 12, 2022
Land defenders, killings, and steps towards justice
In the UK and I expect in plenty of other places, environmentalism is often seen is the province of white middle class people. That may be true of the green sector and its organisations, but it’s not true of the broader global movement. The wider story of people standing up for nature and land is much more diverse, and often more urgent. For many living at the margins, protecting rivers and forests is a matter of their own survival, and it often puts them in harm’s way.
The environmental jus...
