Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 87
June 17, 2021
Why doesn’t every town have a community wood store?
I’m working today from my attic office, which I built a couple of years ago when my children moved into separate bedrooms and I had to surrender my study. It has a desk made of offcut panels that were being given away by the DIY store. There’s an alcove bookshelf next to me which is clad with my neighbour’s old wood flooring. It’s held together with stripwood that was once part of an easel.
I should add that this is all cobbled together in a fashion that would not pass muster anywhere else i...
June 16, 2021
The difference between negative and positive peace
It’s around 5pm and I’m cooking dinner in the kitchen, when I am interrupted by shrieking from the living room. The kids are at either end of the sofa, kicking at each other and hollering accusations. Someone has had five minutes more Minecraft than they are entitled to. It’s not their turn any more, but they won’t surrender the controller. Or something.
I intervene. Parental Authority is deployed and the kicking stops. There is a begrudgingly muttered exchange of “sorry”. I return to the ki...
June 15, 2021
Electrifying the fleets
Electric vehicles are increasing their market share, slowly. In the UK at least, ordinary drivers are still cautious. They are unsure about range, the ease of charging, or the expense. The really rapid progress is in businesses and the public sector, where it’s someone’s job to crunch the numbers and see what will be most cost effective. When you do that, EVs often win hands-down.
Every week I have a couple more emails in my inbox with press announcements about new EV fleet purchases. The bi...
June 14, 2021
Book review: Why Rebel? by Jay Griffiths
“I wish that everyone who said they believed in angels would actually believe in insects” is the first line of Jay Griffiths’ book Why Rebel? It’s a good indicator of what is to come. What we believe or aspire to can lead us away from the natural world, and overlooking the small things – insects, soil – can lead to ruin.
Griffiths has been very involved in Extinction Rebellion, and so the title of the book suggests an argument for the movement. And it is indeed a call to arms, though not ...
June 12, 2021
What we learned this week
As the Euro 2021 football tournament gets underway, the BBC asks what the carbon cost of the event will be. A few years ago this was only of interest to environmental publications. Now it’s the BBC. Give it a couple more years and EUFA and FIFA will be asking too.
Followers of fusion power will be interested to hear about the new record set in China, where their research reactor generated temperatures of 120 million degrees Celsius – eight times hotter than the core of the sun – for two minu...
June 11, 2021
The history in the hedgerows
When I moved to Britain as a teenager, hedgerows were something I resented. Where I had grown up in Madagascar and Kenya, once you were out of the town you could roam freely across the landscape. In England, a walk in the countryside consists of navigating endless zig-zags from one parcel of land to another, because everything is chopped up into discreet fields with hedgerows.
To be honest, I found this restrictive and unwelcoming at first, a constant reminder that every inch of the landscap...
June 10, 2021
Available now: Climate Change is Racist
It’s publication day for Climate Change is Racist: Race, Privilege and the Struggle for Climate Justice.
The book is published by Icon Books and it’s available from today in the UK (and in a couple of months in the US and elsewhere), and if it isn’t in your local bookshop, ask them why not.
I only signed the contract for the book in January, so Icon have done a remarkable job in turning this around and getting it out there in less than six months. We wanted the book to be accessible ...
June 9, 2021
Forcing change among the oil majors
“Energy is reinventing itself,” says the PR blurb, and “Total is becoming TotalEnergies“. Yes, that’s the French oil giant Total rebranding itself last week as “a broad energy company committed to producing and providing energies that are ever more affordable, reliable and clean.”
Fossil fuels remain part of that portfolio and they’re not pretending otherwise, so it’s not necessarily the greenwash some are going to accuse it of. It’s an acknowledgement that after the age of fossil fuels, we’r...
June 8, 2021
The importance of diversifying the green movement
The climate emergency is a multiplier of disadvantage. If you’re marginalised in society for any reason, there’s a strong change that you face a greater risk from climate change. That includes people with disabilities and the elderly. Women face a variety of specific vulnerabilities, depending on where you are in the world. Class and caste differences will matter, and nomadic people groups face specific risks.
Perhaps the biggest difference in outcomes is the racial one, and the fact that th...
June 7, 2021
Book review: Angry Weather, by Friederike Otto
As every good weather reporter knows, it’s not wise to blame any single event on climate change. Climate is not weather. It’s often repeated, and it matters. If campaigners can point at every storm or flood as evidence of a changing climate, sceptics can point at every snowfall and cold snap to claim the opposite.
Nevertheless, we know that rising emissions are affecting the weather, and we need to get better at knowing what we can and can’t say. And so a whole branch of climate science ...
