Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 66

Book review: Expansion Rebellion, by Celeste Hicks

Heathrow Airport’s third runway is the ultimate ‘zombie’ project – repeatedly shot down as a terrible idea, only to raise its ugly head again. I’ve written it before as a case study in lobbying power, and here the journalist Celeste Hicks details the Heathrow expansion from a legal point of view. Expansion Rebellion: Using the law to fight a runway and save the planet tells the story of the judicial review into the plans, when the High Court ruled that the third runway had not taken climate ...

What we learned this week

Having written about how Insulate Britain lost support in public polling, I was interested to see that Just Stop Oil appears to be encouraging climate action, even if people hesitate to endorse the protestors themselves.

Also on the theme of useful polling, working class Conservative voters are more supportive of renewable energy and net zero policies than more affluent voters. No more lazy statements on what working class people care about or don’t care about please.

Amnesty Internation...

Art review: Our Time on Earth, the Barbican

Our Time on Earth is a new exhibition opening today at The Barbican Centre in London, and presenting a creative response to the climate emergency. 18 different artists have contributed, from 12 different countries, each offering a different perspective on living well in the anthropocene.

Visitors enter The Curve gallery in darkness, and are invited to take a breath. It’s a reflective way into an exhibition that is full of questions and tensions. Then, rounding the corner, we get a magnifi...

So, methane-catching face masks for cows?

Farmed animals are a big contributor to global emissions, accounting for around 14.5% of greenhouse gases. Cattle farming for beef and dairy is the biggest problem, and with over a billion cows on the planet, it’s a major obstacle to a sustainable future. Some of the environmental impact of cattle farming is from producing the feed, but the trickiest bit is the animals themselves. There’s really no easy solution to the methane from cows. It’s just part of their digestion. They burp and fart a lo...

After oil we flourish

For some parts of the world, the idea of life without fossil fuels brings a lump to the throat. How will we keep our homes warm? Please tell me I can keep driving a car. There is uncertainty about how we will cope without oil and gas, in some cases leading to outright rejection of climate action.

For other parts of the world, it’s been the other way round. It is fossil fuels that have held them back, and the end of their energy dominance brings liberation and new possibility.

Here’s Nnim...

Book review: The Saviour Fish, by Mark Weston

When his wife took a job training teachers for a British government aid programme, Mark Weston had expected somewhere less remote. Somewhere more accessible, more connected. Instead, they got a placement on Ukerewe, a remote island on Tanzania’s Lake Victoria. While his wife teaches, Mark observes and writes, and the result of their two year stay is the rather special The Saviour Fish.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the book, and the opening chapter or two seemed to be fairly familiar...

What we learned this week

With an aging population, Italy has a growing number of shrinking towns – and thousands that have been more or less abandoned. Here’s a story about how one town used community energy to revive their situation.

I wrote an article on climate and race for the ethics department at Tubingen University in Germany: “This is the racial injustice of climate change: not that the climate crisis discriminates against people on the basis of race, but that people of colour live in the places most affected,...

How to upcycle a skyscraper

This is the Amp Building at 50 Bridge Street in Sydney. It was built in the mid-seventies, with 45 storeys of office space. Looking rather tired, it was slated for refurbishment a few years ago, and just re-opened in a completely different form.

The Danish architects 3XN removed the old glass and concrete facade, and designed a new tower from the existing core. New floors were added on top, making it into a 54 storey building. The old floors were retained but extended on a series of angl...

What I learned from hosting a Little Free Library

When my family moved to Madagascar when I was little, we sent our belongings in a shipping container. It arrived a few months after we did, with lots of boxes of books. Since books weren’t readily available in the country, let alone in English, this was basically what we had to go on for the next decade. In time, I read most of our stock – all the children’s books, and then I started on my parents’ books. Dad’s military history and theology. Mum’s classic novels. The fact that I was reading Solz...

How climate change is devastating Madagascar

Madagascar has always had a cyclone season, but this one is particularly bad. The country has been hit by a succession of five tropical storms and cyclones, with a sixth brewing in the Mozambique Channel right now. This, according to World Weather Attribution, is a climate change disaster.

To be specific, climate change increases the rainfall intensity of cyclones and tropical storms. More rain falls at once, increasing the likelihood of flooding. It is floods that have done the most damage,...