Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 86

Enso – circular economy tyres for electric cars

A couple of months ago I wrote about the roadside pollution from electric cars – the particles from tyres and brakes. In the UK, non-tailpipe emissions are around 8% of air pollution, so it’s not a huge contributor to the problem. But due to the weight of their batteries, electric vehicles may produce more tyre particles than fossil fuel vehicles, and so it may be a more significant source of pollution in future. If we want electric cars to live up to the ‘zero emissions’ labels that many of the...

Book review: The Blue Wonder, by Frauke Bagusche

This is a book that’s taken me considerably longer to finish than most, mainly because on every other page I had to put the book down and do a Google image search for something. Giant isopods, which are like deep-sea woodlice the size of puppies? Yes, I’ll be needing to see what those look like. Ditto the carnivorous Ping Pong Tree Sponge, and the Pufferfish sand sculptures.

As the name suggests, this is a book that brings the weird and the wonderful to centre stage, from whales to the p...

What we learned this week

Striking headline from Oxfam: “COVID vaccines create 9 new billionaires with combined wealth greater than cost of vaccinating world’s poorest countries.”

What the Conservative government say about climate change and what they actually do remain in separate orbits, as I described yesterday. More evidence of that discconect as they prepare to green light the 150 million barrel Cambo oil project in the North Sea.

Development aid is not dependent on GDP growth, say the OECD. Several countries ...

The UK’s climate report card

This week the UK government’s official climate advisors delivered their annual progress report to Parliament. For those following climate developments, it’s always worth reading. Since the next international climate talks, COP26, will take place in Glasgow later this year, it’s all the more important that the government match its climate action and its rhetoric.

Activists such as myself are sometimes accused of never being satisfied with anything, while politicians are quick to claim global ...

How responsible for climate change is the global north?

One of the arguments in my book, Climate Change is Racist, is that the climate crisis has been disproportionately caused by the global north*. Since the citizens of the global north are majority white, there is a racial dynamic to climate change that we don’t talk about very often.

But are we sure that the north is actually more responsible? To what extent? What about India and China’s enormous emissions?

Here’s the graph from the book, showing total cumulative emissions by continent:

...

It’s World Female Ranger Day

Today is the inaugural World Female Ranger Day, an idea hatched by the environmental charity How Many Elephants. Obviously it’s World Something Day every day, some of them worthy, some less so. Monday was Indigenous People’s Day, yesterday World Rainforests Day. Even today has competition, as the UN has a focus on widows today. Widows are sidelined in some cultures, with no husband and no prospect of remarrying, so a date on the calendar creates attention on some of the world’s most invisible pe...

In defence of electric vehicles: carbon emissions

I’ve written a couple of articles recently about electric cars and some of the common criticisms of them. In particular, I’m interested in the ‘friendly fire’ criticism from environmentalists who overstate the problems in order to champion public transport or cycling. But in so doing, they play into the hands of the fossil fuel industry and the car companies, who’d like change to progress as slowly as possible.

Previous posts have looked at waste batteries and roadside emissions. Today I wan...

Book review: Seven Ethics Against Capitalism, by Oli Mould

If you’ve read the title of this book and felt your blood rising at the idea of anything or anyone being ‘against capitalism’, this book’s not for you. Go and read Doughnut Economics, which interrogates capitalism is some imaginative ways. You can come back and read this one later. Oli Mould’s book is for those who already know that capitalism is failing in multiple ways, driving up inequality and destroying its own environmental foundations. The question is what to do about it. If the autho...

What we learned this week

“We are attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change” writes Mackenzie Scott, formerly married to Jeff Bezos, and who gave away $5.9 billion last year. “In this effort, we are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands.”

I’m a big fan of ‘parklets’ – mini public spaces reclaimed from parking spaces. Possible are highlighting them at the moment with a ‘design your own parkl...

Race and the urban heat island effect

My new book, Climate Change is Racist, is mainly about the global injustices of climate change. But it includes more local perspectives, highlighting how people of colour are disproportionately vulnerable to both the damage of climate change, and the damage of the fossil fuel industry itself. These sorts of concerns are well known to the environmental justice movement in the US, though less prominent in the UK.

Another example of this environmental injustice is exposure to the heat island ef...