Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 69

An e-bike upgrade for India

Earlier this week I wrote about how my wife converted her bike into an e-bike, using a kit from the good people at Swytch. I was going to add this is a link, but it deserves a post of its own. Here’s a similar idea from India, aimed at the 58% of workers in India who commute by bike. Most of them ride the classic black bike that will be familiar to many in Africa as well. If you’ve ridden one, you’ll know it’s basic, sturdy, and easy to maintain – but not exactly swift.

Engineer Gursaurabh Si...

The inevitable decline of climate scepticism

Climate change is a distressing enough prospect without the hysterical tone of the debate around it. Because extremes generate engagement, online algorithms tend to push everything to one of two sides. Newspapers pick a side to stand on and sneer across the divide. TV and radio reports, until fairly recently, would invite guests from both and get to them to argue.

All of this feeds the media machine, but of course there never were two sides. There are rarely two sides to anything, but a spec...

Interview: how to electrify a bike with Swytch

A couple of weeks ago my wife and our ten-year-old son took over the kitchen for an afternoon and turned her bike into an e-bike. They used a conversion kit from Swytch, who will send you a new front wheel with a hub motor. Swap over the wheel, install the battery and wire it up, and you’re ready to go. I thought I’d let Louise tell you about it herself:

Where did you find out about Swytch?
The first time I heard about Swytch was on an ad on Youtube. If was quite funny and cute, and I watc...

Book review: Race for Tomorrow, by Simon Mundy

Climate change “will remain the biggest and most important story that I, or any journalist of my generation, will get the chance to cover” says Simon Mundy, environment and sustainability reporter for the Financial Times.

As a journalist married to a journalist, this is a familiar conversation, and Mundy has invested more in the story than most. His book covers the climate crisis from multiple angles, taking in 26 different countries across six continents. It’s the result of a two year ...

What we learned this week

Much has been written about how Russia’s attack on Ukraine will affect oil and gas prices. And then food prices. It will also affect the production of electric cars, since Russia is a big exporter of nickel.

With the government contemplating more oil, fracking and turning to our reliable friends in Saudi Arabia for help getting off Russian gas, wouldn’t renewable energy and efficiency be better options? 350.org are asking people to write to their MPs about a Green New Deal.

It’s always wor...

Can you build a house to last a thousand years?

There are various ways to make something sustainable. As this post about toasters demonstrated, you could take one of at least three different approaches. You can make something easy to repair. You can make it 100% recyclable. Or you can make it indestructible.

These approaches can be seen in architecture too. Waste is a serious problem in construction, and in many places houses are built as cheap boxes to live in. They might last a generation or two, and then they will need to be demolished...

Sustainable fashion with The Little Loop

Fashion is one of the less obvious contributors to climate change. It doesn’t always get mentioned alongside the cars, gas boilers or coal power stations that dominate discussion of how to reduce emissions. But when you stop and add it up, the impact of the fashion industry is significant and not particularly easy to tackle.

There’s the fact that many clothes are plastic and are therefore fossil fuels in disguise. There are global logistics chains, and the waste of discarded clothing. Then th...

Take climate action with The Jump

I’ll be honest, I was a little sceptical about The Jump. For a start, does the world need another attempt at creating a movement around small actions for the climate? Isn’t there one that you could join already? And secondly, there are quite a lot of things called The Jump, including an ill-advised ski-jumping TV show, and a somewhat confused campaign about climate refugees and sky-diving called Jump for the Planet.

So what is this The Jump, and what makes it different from previous projects ...

Book review: Imagine If… by Ken Robinson & Kate Robinson

Ken Robinson was a noted expert on creativity and its role in education. He died in 2020, leaving this synthesis of his work, which he was working on with his daughter Kate, half finished. She has seen it over the line, and it serves as a kind of memorial, as well as a summary of his ideas and their ongoing relevance.

The central idea of the book is that it is imagination that distinguishes humanity from the rest of life on earth. We create the worlds we inhabit, and can recreate them. ...

What we learned this week

Just building all the renewable energy that already has planning permission would offset any loss from Russia’s oil and gas, according to analysis by Carbon Brief. So no need for fracking then.

Greenpeace have a petition to the government on a related note, asking for insulation and energy efficiency measures to reduce our use of Russian gas.

“You don’t get to be willfully ignorant and then plausibly surprised” – Mary Annaïse Heglar on the racist observations out of Ukraine, and how the r...