Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 60

Book review: Volt Rush, by Henry Sanderson

Advocates of the energy transition often talk up the potential of cleaner technologies – the benefits of unpolluted air, the more democratic nature of renewable energy, the quiet of electric cars. Sometimes this can border on the utopian, but it’s important to remember that this is about potential, not promise. There are many ways that the green transition could turn exploitative and unethical – and that’s why it’s so vital to advocate specifically for a just transition.

Henry Sanderson‘s...

What we learned this week

I came back from two weeks of holiday to find my garden looking notably parched and dessicated. While I was doing my best to ignore the news, it turns out that 50% of Europe slipped into drought.

While it won’t raise a huge amount of revenue, Canada’s new tax on expensive cars, boats and private planes sends a clear signal about the social value of such things.

Also on cars, Ford has announced the biggest purchase of renewable energy in US history. It brings forward the company’s aims fo...

How Playmobil is making toys from old fridges

Playmobil was a staple of my childhood. At one point we had a whole village of homes and shops made out of shoeboxes, all populated by colourful plastic families.

As an adult, I discovered that Playmobil owes its origins to an oil crisis. In the 1970s, German toy firm Geobra Brandstatter was best known for ride-on toys, but found itself struggling with higher prices for plastic. As a response, the lead designer created something smaller, with lots of play potential and scaled to the size of ...

Book review: Property will cost us the Earth

Last year Verso published one of the more controversial climate books of the year, Andreas Malm’s How to Blow up a Pipeline – reviewed here recently. While it’s not as incendiary as the title suggests, the Swedish academic does call for an escalation in tactics. He suggests that it is time to move from protest to resistance, and that the climate movement should intervene to sabotage the technologies that are destroying the planet. Groups like Extinction Rebellion have misunderstood non-viole...

What we learned by getting the train to Sweden

I’m back from holidays this week, having taken the family on a bit of an adventure over the last fortnight. We went to Sweden to visit friends, finally taking up a long standing invitation. After a few days on their farm, we spent some time exploring Stockholm and Copenhagen on the way home.

Since we are committed to avoiding flying, we travelled by train. The journey took in five countries and multiple train connections, all of which were made.

There is no question that flying is si...

What is co-housing?

At a time when housing is so expensive and such a big source of carbon emissions, it’s a shame that there is so little innovation around homes in Britain. I suspect this is largely due to the dominance of a handful of big companies in Britain’s housing market, which skews things towards one model – build estates of new homes and sell them as private dwellings.

One avenue to investigate is co-housing. It’s more common in Denmark, though still a minority interest, and since I’m in Denmark this...

Video: Racism and environmental destruction

You checked out the Confronting Injustice report that I recommended last week, right? If so, you probably saw this video already.

But if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s Mya-Rose Craig on racism and environmental destruction. Make yourself a drink and take ten minutes. It’s well worth your while.

More: book review of Mya-Rose Craig’s We Have a Dream .Currently still on the to-read list: Birdgirl .

Where are all the private jets?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the outsized damage that private jets do to the climate. Because private jets carry fewer people and often do short journeys, they have a far higher footprint than other forms of aviation. Since it is only the richest that fly in them, and they are able to protect themselves from the harm of climate change, it is perhaps the single most stark example of climate injustice.

It’s also a problem that is getting worse. Since the pandemic, people have been more ...

What we learned this week

After an absence of thousands of years, wild bison are roaming again in the UK. Just three of them mind you, and just in one woodland park in Kent. But it’s a start. Over the coming months and years, their effect on woodland management will be closely studied to inform future rewilding and restoration projects.

“The gap between severe droughts has narrowed – with three in the last 11 years – as climate change has exacerbated the severity and frequency of shocks and eroded resilience.” Good ar...

Greenpeace on climate, race and colonialism

A striking new report from Greenpeace this week explores the connection between the climate emergency and racism. It also breaks new ground in quantifying environmental racism in the UK.

“Racism and the environmental crisis are two sides of the same coin,” says the report, Confronting Injustice. It describes how people of colour have been disproportionately affected by the climate crisis, but those struggles have been under-represented in the media and often ignored by global power broker...