Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 65

What we learned this week

Another one for the growing portfolio of solar-powered cars: the Squad Mobility City Car is a tiny vehicle for cities that can draw 20km of range each day from its own solar panels.

Also on the topic of solar, Octopus have thrown their weight behind a scheme to build solar farms in Morocco and cable it under the sea to Britain. Using solar power from the Sahara has been kicking around as an idea for decades, so it’s interesting to see someone pick it up and put some serious finance behind it...

The luxury of a temperate climate

I don’t know what the weather is like where you are today. I have just cycled back across town in the rain, and it looks like the sun is about to come again. It’s a cool 13 degrees C or so in Luton.

Taken from the live picture at World Weather Online, here’s the state of temperatures elsewhere in the world today:

It is over forty degrees across much of the Sahel region of Africa, the Middle East and into South Asia. Among the hottest places I can see on the map is Northern India, wher...

Can we trust aviation industry promises?

It went away for a while during the turmoil of Covid lockdown, but Luton’s airport expansion plans are back and going strong. When I ask about the environmental impact, I know exactly what answer I’ll get: details of all the things they’re doing to make ground operations low carbon. The planes? Not their problem.

It’s a local expression of a global problem – nobody wants to take responsibility for the planes themselves. The emissions often occur over international territory, so they don’t ge...

Changing climate opinion in UK newspapers

Last year I wrote about the shift in climate rhetoric from British newspapers, with the Mirror, the Sun and the Daily Express all launching new green campaigns. The latter was the biggest surprise, having spent years regularly trashing climate science and renewable energy.

The change is more than anecdotal though. Researchers at Carbon Brief keep an eye on how climate change is reported. They pay particular attention to editorials, as these can be seen as the most straightforward expression ...

Guest post: Debt and the climate crisis – a perfect storm

A guest post from the Jubilee Debt Campaign to mark their rebrand to Debt Justice this week.

We all know the climate crisis is here, it is devastating people’s lives now and urgent action must be taken. But we won’t get very far unless we also address harmful debt in lower income countries.

Debt might feel far removed from the issue of climate, but in reality, we cannot address one without the other.

Take Zambia for example, a southern African country of 18 million people on the fr...

Book review: The Climate Change Cook Book

I figured it would be a matter of time before somebody wrote a climate change cook book. Despite the title, I’m not quite convinced this is it. It’s a collection of fairly generic recipes with an introduction about climate change, and then they more or less forget about the theme afterwards. It makes me wonder if the plan for the book got lost in translation somewhere in the publishing process.

Before I go any further, some things that I like about it: first of all, kudos to Peter Taylor ...

What we learned this week

We kept four tortoises in Madagascar, along with many other pets of various kinds, so I have a soft spot for them. Here’s an unusual story about conserving them in the Mojave Desert, using 3-D printed booby-trapped decoy tortoises.

Can’t make it myself, but I like the title of the Ad-Free Cities conference happening today in London: Beyond Consumerism – reducing the brain pollution from advertising.

Is it better to be vegan or give up flying? I mean it’s not an either/or, but it’s a good ...

Living bridges and botanical architecture

I expect most of us have at some point crossed a river or a ditch using a tree – either a fallen one, or a tree in just the right place. But at the Our Time on Earth exhibition last week at the Barbican, I was rather impressed with an exhibit that learns from the indigenous architecture of the Khasi tribe in Meghalaya, north-east India.

I say architecture, though this stretches the usual definitions considerably. This is architecture without architects, and also without buildings. What the K...

Why climate action starts with the richest

When I talk about climate justice, I often compare carbon footprints across countries. My go-to comparison is per capita emissions in Madagascar (0.16 tonnes) and Australia (16 tonnes), two countries that I have a connection to. The annual climate impact of an average Australian is a hundred times larger than a Malagasy citizen. Or to put it another way, each average Australian does as much damage to the climate as a hundred Malagasy people do.

Globally, it is rich countries that need to act...

People want to cycle more

44% of people in the UK would like to cycle more than they do, according to a survey from Ipsos Mori. It’s a positive endorsement of policies for active travel, which is an important part of reducing transport emissions.

A few years ago transport overtook power generation as the main source of Britain’s carbon emissions. While electricity generation has rapidly decarbonised, transport emissions have barely dipped in thirty years. People want to drive cars, and they want to drive big cars....