Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 57

Manchester’s vibrant new electric buses

Electric vehicles tend to get more attention, but at the top of the sustainable transport hierarchy sits the humble bus. If the active transport options of walking and cycling aren’t available, then the bus is the greenest form of transport there is. And so today I wanted to draw your attention to a place that is going big on buses: Manchester.

This time next year greater Manchester will see the launch of the Bee Network, named for the city’s chosen worker bee mascot. The network will be serv...

The Year of Living Danishly, by Helen Russell

On our family holidays this year we took the train to Sweden, and spent some time in Copenhagen on the way. The city immediately lodged itself in my list of favourite places. Nowhere is perfect, but Copenhagen seemed to be getting more things right than most, with great public spaces, an obvious sense of public trust, and bikes everywhere. While we were exploring, I came across the Happiness Museum, an intriguing little visitor attraction dedicated to how happiness has been defined through t...

How river plastics feed ocean plastics

It’s been a while since I checked in on The Ocean Cleanup, the ambitious not-for-profit that is working on solutions to remove plastic from the oceans. They’ve made some very big strides, and the world’s biggest cleanup has begun in earnest. Their prototype machines are at work on the seas, but they’re also moving towards solving the upstream problem of how plastic gets there in the first place.

In this short documentary, founder Boyan Slat travels the route of the Rio Motagua in Guatemala, ...

What we learned this week

Heatwaves over land get noticed because people live through them. Heatwaves at sea, not so much. The European Space Agency has been tracking the marine heatwave that affected the Mediterranean recently, and its consequences.

You saw that Yvon Chouinard has given away his company Patagonia? “As of now, Earth is our only shareholder,” he writes in a letter explaining how the Patagonia Purpose Trust will channel all profits to environmental action.

The EU has published new standards for repai...

Film review: The Ants and the Grasshopper

I wrote about The Ants and the Grasshopper last year as a film to look out for. It’s out today, a heartfelt exploration of the power of stories to make change. As the tagline puts it, “how do you change someone’s mind about the most important thing in the world?”

The film begins in the village of Bwabwa in Malawi, where we meet Anita Chitaya. She’s a farmer and a mother, a neighbour and an activist. We follow her in the fields as she explains her organic growing techniques. We also see he...

What we owe the future, by William MacAskill

William MacAskill is a pioneering thinker, and one of the movers and shakers behind the Effective Altruism movement. His book Doing Good Better is a brilliant introduction, and I’ve written a fair number of posts about the movement here on the blog in the past. I’ve learned a lot from Effective Altruism, been inspired by the questions it asks, and I’ve used some of its ideas in my life, my work and my giving.

I also have some reservations about the movement, and one of the biggest is it...

Why does chocolate have a high carbon footprint?

The list of the top five most carbon intensive foods reads like this:

BeefLambCheeseChocolateCoffee

I’ve written a fair bit about the relative carbon footprints of foods, and I have mainly focused on meat and dairy. I’ve written specifically about beef and about cheese in the past, so it’s probably time I thought about the next one on the list: chocolate.  

What’s chocolate doing there? Why does it have such a high carbon footprint?

There is an obvious answer: mi...

Can Polestar deliver a zero carbon car?

There are a number of examples of companies working to reduce the emissions from the cars that they produce. This summer Ford announced that their Michigan plant, the mother of all car factories, would be carbon neutral by 2025. Bentley claim to have Britain’s greenest car plant, but they make the least efficient petrol cars in the country and there’s a distinct tang of greenwash on that one.

Perhaps the most ambitious so far is BMW, which used the i3 as a pilot for sustainability. The electr...

What we learned this week

A reader pointed me to the Climate Train this week, when scientists travelled to the UN climate talks in Kyoto by train in 1997. Their website is still online as a testament to late 90s website ‘design’ as well as the journey itself.

Australia is to add wellbeing measures to its budget for the first time, assessing spending decisions according to their effect on citizens’ wellbeing. This will be absolutely standard practice worldwide at some point.

There is growing interest in controlling...

Local food and the sources of emissions

‘Food miles’ became a popular term a few years ago in environmental circles, with locally produced food proposed as a solution. Some campaigns still advocate the LOAF principles (Local, Organic, Animal-friendly and Fairtrade) as a summary of ethical eating. But focusing too much on where food is produced can miss much bigger sources of carbon emissions.

I’ve written about this before, and it bears repeating: where food comes from matters, but what we eat matters a whole lot more.

Hannah R...