Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 6

Book review: Mountain Tales, by Sauma Roy

Sauma Roy is a journalist and microfinance entrepreneur in Mumbai. She discovered that many of those seeking loans were living on the Deonar landfill site, eking out a living from the city’s waste. Over the course of a decade she visited, got to know people, and tells their stories in the remarkable book Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings.

It’s called Mountain Tales because Deonar is a trash mountain: the city has been dumping its rubbish there since...

The evolution of EV charging networks

Last week I charged the electric car in four different countries. All of the chargers worked, and I used the same Electroverse card on all of them. It’s the first time we’ve taken the car outside the UK and it was entirely painless.

It was not always like this. Though most charging happens at home, early adopters of electric vehicles had to put up with a few frustrations on longer journeys. Charging infrastructure was patchy across England and there were dozens of different suppliers. Most o...

Transparency in recycling from Polytag

One of the big obstacles to creating a circular economy is that there’s a big disconnect between producers and waste. Companies create and sell products, and usually have no involvement with waste disposal. That’s done by an entirely separate industry or by local government. Even if a company wants to take responsibility for the waste they produce, there is rarely a clear route back from the customer. We end up with expensive schemes to post things back or find a drop-off point. You have to be p...

What we learned this week

Earlier this week I wrote about solar power in Pakistan (link below), though this is the big solar story of the week: as of this summer, solar generation is set to overtake nuclear power. It won’t stay there, as it will fall back below nuclear as the northern hemisphere moves into winter, but it’s sign of its coming dominance.

Your Wotsits are now low carbon, as Pepsico have upgraded to electric ovens at their factory in Leicester. Also Frazzles, Cheetos and Monster Munch if that’s your bag....

The world’s fastest solar revolution

Around a decade ago, astute observers of the renewable energy market began to imagine a solar powered world. It wasn’t obvious at the time, given the dominance of fossil fuels. But the logic was simple enough: the price of solar was falling so fast that it would soon be the cheapest form of electricity generation. Sunlight is free, so once your panels are installed, solar power will always be cheaper than the alternatives. Slowly but surely, solar power will displace coal and then gas from elect...

Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

The UK is the world’s sixth largest economy, and has never had more wealth at its disposal – but it doesn’t feel like it. There’s somehow never enough to go round. People still live in poverty and every town has a food bank. Libraries close. Hospital waiting rooms don’t have enough seats. Councils cut down street trees because they haven’t got enough money to maintain them. As citizens live with the feeling of decline and insufficiency, they find scapegoats for their disatisfaction and vote ...

Climate adaptation with Shade the UK

Having grown up in tropical countries, I know the value of shade, the cool and the relief from an oppressively hot sun. On moving back to Britain, I couldn’t help noticing that I was often alone in this. People will sit all day in the sun at the beach or the park, giving themselves sunstroke and blaming it on the cider. Since we don’t tend to seek it out, shade often isn’t provided in ways that it would be elsewhere. Perhaps it’s inevitable in a country known for grey skies, but as a nation, we’...

A Climate of Truth, by Mike Berners-Lee

Mike Berners-Lee has spent his career as a researcher and consultant on climate change, as well as authoring the very useful books How Bad Are Bananas? and There is No Planet B. But over the years something has become obvious: knowing what to do is not enough. We have understood climate change for decades. All the solutions are available. What is it that stops us from acting?

A Climate of Truth aims to peel back the layers of what Berners-Lee calls “the polycrisis” to get to “the poisoned...

Where the world’s food goes

Enough food is grown every year to feed everyone on the planet. The reason that hundreds of millions of people continue to go hungry isn’t to do with total production. It’s more to do with distribution, poverty or conflict. This study of global food flows illustrates how much is grown and where it goes. It features in Mike Berners-Lee’s new book and I thought I’d share it.

On the left we see the calories that go into the global food system, as crops grown or pasture. Some is then lost at...

What we learned this week

Last year I wrote about Nice Rice, who have centred their rice brand on sustainable rice intensification. Wildfarmed are doing something similar with wheat, making it possible for consumers to choose bread and other foods produced through regenerative agriculture.

Speaking of agriculture, there’s an urban farming boom going on in Indonesia, where 500 new farms were started in 2024 alone. Not something I’d heard about until I read about it in this article on The Xylom.

I was at an event wi...