Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 75

The most climate privileged country on earth

Climate privilege is the luxury of being unconcerned about climate change. It doesn’t appear to affect you, it’s largely an academic question, and it doesn’t impose itself on your day to day reality. For some people, the climate crisis is life and death. It’s about survival. For others, it’s an environmental concern, or a problem for future generations.

Climate privilege overlaps with other forms of privilege, just as vulnerability to climate change overlaps with other forms of marginalisati...

Trainhugger’s tree planting ambitions

I get a lot of press releases about tree planting. Many of them are for ‘revolutionary’ or ‘game changing’ platforms or apps that promise to plant trees when you do unrelated things online. Sometimes blockchain is mentioned as a way of getting extra attention. They have names likes Treedom, Treely or Treedle. I am sceptical of their claims.

Where are these trees? Since I don’t literally plant them with my mouse clicks, who does plant them? And was that person fairly paid? Who owns the land o...

What we learned this week

Fairphone have worked with the Open Source community to provide a seventh year of software support for their Fairphone 2. That’s a new record for an Android device, and while that sounds niche and geeky, this is exactly the kind of thing that needs to become standard if we’re going to have gadgets that don’t die after two years.

If you’re still moping a little bit after COP26, here is 350 Europe’s round-up of seven climate wins from 2021.

New Harvest is an organisation to follow if you wan...

Reduce traffic, not just combustion engines

Electric cars are an important part of the government’s plans for a low carbon transport system. It’s in Boris Johnson’s ‘ten point plan’, though we await the specific policies that will accelerate the take-up of EVs. There’s no doubt that they will play a significant role, but electric vehicles are not enough on their own, for a whole host of reasons.

In a new briefing, the Green Alliance outline two reasons why we should also look at reducing distance driven in cars – any kind of car – and...

Investigating failure demand

Imagine you run a website. You look up the most popular pages and you discover that the ‘help’ page gets more traffic than any other. Do you congratulate yourself on writing such a magnificent help page? Or do you ask what’s wrong with your website that so many people need help?

That’s a classic example of ‘failure demand’, which is demand created by failure rather than success. It’s a theme in my book The Economics of Arrival, co-authored with Katherine Trebeck, and it’s investigated in a re...

Book review: Regeneration, by Paul Hawken

Drawdown is one of my favourite climate books, an extensive study into the top fifty ways to reverse climate change, edited into an accessible and inspiring book by Paul Hawken.

Regeneration is similar. It’s presented in the same attractive but slightly unwieldy format, halfway between a paperback and a coffee table book. There’s a similarly large team of people behind it and a huge amount of expertise, and again all brought together by Hawken. But there is a different dynamic to this bo...

What we learned this week

The demand for leather for the fashion industry is a driver of deforestation in the Amazon, and this new report from Slow Factory has mapped the connections to some familiar brands. Have a look, and if there are any favourites of yours in the list, get in touch with them.

A Quaker friend pointed me to this campaign to include military emissions in the Paris Agreement – despite the enormous footprints of armed forces, governments have given themselves a pass and don’t include them in their cli...

Building of the week: Etsy’s HQ

I haven’t done a building of the week for a while, but an interesting example came up in the book I’m reading at the moment, Paul Hawken’s Regeneration. He mentions the corporate headquarters of Etsy, and I thought I’d share it.

Etsy, as you may know, is an online marketplace for crafts and handmade items. When they needed a new and larger headquarters, they wanted a building that reflected their values of community, craft and sustainability. They opted for a retrofit of a 1920s building tha...

Is it helpful to talk about climate and race?

A few months on from publication, and after a whole string of events with different audiences, I’m getting a feel for the sorts of questions that people have about my book Climate Change is Racist. For the most part I’ve been surprised by how receptive people are to its arguments. Very few take against the book once they’ve read it or heard me speak, but there is one question that comes up from time to time that I thought I’d address: is it helpful?

Here’s the question as it was framed to...

How Green 2.0 is increasing diversity

As a general rule if you value something, you keep track of it. When it comes to social progress, you need to measure things if you want to be able to tell if they are improving. That includes diversity, and Green 2.0 is an organisation dedicated to reporting on ethnic diversity among the staff of American environmental NGOs.

Why such a specific project? Because environmental problems often affect people of colour more – as we’ve seen with air pollution, water quality, or risk from natural di...