Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 58

Putting the fossil fuel industry into reverse

To much of the climate movement, the fossil fuel industry is the enemy. It is the carbon emissions from coal, oil and gas that are driving the breakdown of the climate. The companies that continue to extract and sell these resources are therefore a key focus point for activism. But what to do with the fossil fuel industry? Dismantle it? Drive it out of business? Or use it for good?

After all, the fossil fuel companies have unrivalled experience at delivering enormous projects. The engineering...

The scandal of climate miseducation

I remember a particular lesson from high school, in seventh grade life sciences. We were learning about species and different ideas about where they came from and how they are connected. Some people think they evolved, the teacher told us. Some people think there was a big bang. And of course, we know that the truth is that everything was created by God.

This was an American Christian high school, and young earth creationism was taught as standard. The bit of the lesson that particularly sta...

Book review: Empireland, by Sathnam Sanghera

Empireland is already a bestseller and doesn’t really need my review, but it’s an interesting time to be reading about empire. The complex legacies of the British empire is a matter of vigorous debate already, with a whole shelf of books on the topic in the last few years, many of them written by authors of colour. I suspect that conversation will enter a new phase with the end of Queen Elizabeth’s long reign. Give it a couple of months, and it might be possible to talk about the last centur...

What we learned this week

400 parts per million is the concentration of caffeine in coffee, NASA tweeted this week – and of course the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. I will be stashing this comparison for future climate science training events.

“Aid funding for climate disasters isn’t charity,” argues Alec Luhn in Vice, in a powerful article on Somalia’s drought and climate justice.

Cornwall is trialling e-bikes for police and cargo e-bikes for paramedics, both with very positive results so far.

We fo...

Which appliances cost the most to run?

As price rises drive people to look for ways to save energy, there is suddenly a wealth of well presented information about energy use in the home. One of my favourites that I’ve seen recently is this chart from Bloomberg, which details the price of a variety of household appliances. It shows how much it costs to use them, ranked according to how long you will use it for.

As I regularly tell people in workshops on home energy, heating is the killer. They’ve assumed six hours of heating he...

Who will deliver us from this growth obsession?

Britain has another Prime Minister this week, Liz Truss, selected on behalf of the nation by the Conservative Party’s 172,447 paying members. In her acceptance speech she promised that “we will deliver, we will deliver, we will deliver”, as if her new job was with Uber Eats. Confusing as this was, it rather reminded me of Boris Johnson. He recently promised “a relentless focus on delivery“, and at the last election he famously joined a milk round to prove his dedication to the delivery cause.

...

Renew Hub: Manchester’s centre for reuse

Britain’s biggest reuse and repair centre has just celebrated its first birthday. In its first year of operations, Manchester’s Renew Hub has renovated and sold on 50,000 items – including 953 bikes, almost two thousand electrical items and six thousand items of furniture. In total, this has diverted over 500 tonnes from landfill, playing an important role in creating a local circular economy.

Items for potential reuse are identified at the council’s waste sites and re-directed to the Renew H...

What we learned this week

After the Arctic and Antarctica, which country has the most glaciers? Take a guess, and then read this news article to see if you were right.

Meanwhile in Europe, almost half the continent is on a drought warning, according to the latest report from the Global Drought Observatory. That’s the worst drought in 500 years in Europe, and terrible timing given other threats to world food production this year.

Carbon Brief and the Oxford Climate Journalism Network have started a Global South Cli...

France says non to fossil fuel advertising

When I was a child you could still advertise tobacco products, and I remember magazines and billboards with Joe Camel or the Marlborough man. Opportunities to tout cigarettes and other causes of early death were slowly restricted, and it’s now been 20 years since any tobacco billboard has appeared in the UK.

The same will happen with fossil fuels. Not under this Conversative government, mind you, but eventually. In time, we will stop actively promoting the primary cause of planetary destruct...

Two actions to take on loss and damage

Climate conversations in the UK tend to revolve around technologies, targets and tips. Little changes we can make to our lifestyles. Bigger changes that somebody else (the government? businesses?) will make to our energy and transport systems.

In other parts of the world it’s all a lot more visceral. Climate change is a matter of life and death, of survival. It is experienced as loss and damage – destroyed harvests, flooded homes, land turned to desert.

This summer has reminded many of u...