Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 82

What we learned this week

Norway is the latest country to announce a national wellbeing strategy, reports the Wellbeing Economy Alliance.

Speaking of national strategies, the UK government has announced one for hydrogen. This is something I wanted to know more about, so I’ve been doing some reading on it with a view to writing a series on it. Hydrogen stories and links appreciated please, whether for or against or in-between.

“What if the most American symbol of unsustainable consumption isn’t the automobile, but t...

Building of the week: Schoonschip

The Netherlands has a unique relationship with the sea. As a low lying country, a third of which is below sea level, it knows more about managing sea levels than most. Climate change presents a particular threat to the Netherlands, and it has some sophisticated techniques for managing rising flood risk. One of them is floating buildings, and a pioneering project in that department is Schoonship.

Launched in 2010 and completed in 2021, Schoonschip is an experimental floating village from the s...

Insect farming in a circular economy

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation posted a series of videos this summer, all exploring how to create circular economy food systems in Africa. You can view the whole series on Youtube, but I found this one particularly interesting. It includes several things I keep an eye on, such as insect foods, alternative toilets, and the circular economy. And it’s reporting from Kenya, with real projects that are already making a difference.

Insect farming still tends to make us squeamish here in the UK, bu...

Extinction Rebellion and the prophetic imagination

Yesterday Extinction Rebellion (XR) began their latest week of action in the centre of London. I was there with the kids, joining the crowd in Trafalgar Square for the launch and giving out stickers. We marched from there up Charing Cross Road, although it turned out that the march was really something of a decoy to keep the police looking the other way. While that was happening, activists blocked a junction in Covent Garden and erected an enormous pink table. When it was ready and the junction ...

How to Think About the Climate Crisis, by Graham Parkes

Reading How to Think About the Climate Crisis, I got the distinct impression that it was a difficult book to write. The author spent ten years on it, and at one point mentions “the torment of writing this book.” Given that there is a website with an appendix for every chapter, some of which run longer than the chapters themselves, perhaps part of the problem is what to leave out. Where do you stop? And when everything is constantly evolving, where do you draw the line and commit to print?

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What we learned this week

The transition to electric cars is happening first in Norway, where the half year new car sales figures are in. All petrol and diesel cars together account for just 10% of sales. Then it’s 32% hybrids and 58% electric.

I’m not sure a low carbon Olympics is actually possible, but we can at least compare Tokyo to previous events.

Light pollution is growing twice as fast as population, and 80% of people globally live in light-polluted skies. Good article on BBC Future on why this matters.

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Can the Ministry of Justice deliver green prisons?

This week the Ministry of Justice announced a significant investment in solar power on its prisons. Three prisons are getting solar installations this year, and a further 16 next year. In total it will involve 16,000 panels at a cost of £12 million – which will pay for itself in energy savings of an estimated £800,000 a year.

These installations are expected to cover around 20% of the electricity needs of the prisons. It’s a step in the right direction as the Ministry considers its role in t...

We have more to learn about fire

Wildfires are one of the most dramatic consequences of the climate crisis, and are back in the news again at the moment. It’s individual places that make the headlines, rather than overall trends, but of course climate change affects wildfires in a variety of ways. Fire seasons are starting earlier and going on longer. There are more fires, and drier conditions make them more serious.

Some places are used to a fire season. It’s part of the annual cycle and people know what to do. In those pl...

The wilful ignorance of Tony Blair

Recently I listened to Michael Liebreich and Tony Blair in conversation about climate change. The topic of degrowth came up, with Liebreich saying that there were roughly two schools of thought on sustainability. There was degrowth, which he characterised as “stop the economy, I want to get off.” And then there’s the view that he takes, which is that “the only way we’ll do this is through innovation.”

Putting aside the spectacular oversimplification of that choice, what interested me was wha...

Book review: How to f*#king save the planet, by Jennifer Crouch

There are a lot of serious books about the climate change. There are far fewer that take themselves less seriously. As the name suggests, this is in the latter camp, It’s from the folks behind IFL Science, written by author and artist Jennifer Crouch, and it bills itself as ‘the brighter side of the fight against climate change.’

The book is fairly introductory, beginning by explaining the basics of climate science and how the climate has changed in the past. It moves on to look at human ...