Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 88

What we learned this week

Sophie Yeo asked every council in England about rewilding, and found that a quarter of them have plans to do some rewilding in one form or another.

“It’s time for the climate movement to talk about meat honestly and grapple with the implications” writes Jan Dutkiewicz in an article in The New Republic called John Kerry doesn’t understand how cows work.

‘Collecting real utopias‘ is a blog series that showcases remarkable ideas on the CUSP website, because “we must believe other worlds are p...

The social guarantee campaign

I’ve covered the idea of Universal Basic Services a couple of times on the blog, with this explainer, and then with a review of the book The Case For Universal Basic Services. That book has now become a campaign, and they set out their stall at The Social Guarantee.

The idea of Universal Basic Services is that there are a handful of basic services that everyone needs, and it is often cheaper and more efficient to provide those collectively. That’s a broadly recognised principle in certain fi...

Book review: Architecture, by Barnabas Calder

“Form follows function” is a maxim of modern design, though Barnabas Calder proposes something different: “form follows fuel.” From the earliest known archeological remains to the trends of the 21st century, the availability of energy has shaped architecture.

That’s a perspective that deserves exploring, especially since the energy constraints imposed by climate change now present “the toughest challenge the world of architecture has ever faced.” In order to design buildings fit for a ze...

What we learned this week

China is building an undersea data centre in order to reduce cooling costs. I learned this from Carbon Brief’s weekly email briefing on energy and climate, which you really ought to sign up for.

Indonesia announced this week that it will not approve any new coal power plants, and that it intends to introduce a carbon tax. This is really important, as the country’s coal boom had put it on a rapid ascent towards the top ten global emitters.

My rather unlikely hopes of replacing my hybrid wi...

In defence of electric vehicles: waste batteries

The discussion around EVs is politicised, and there are at least four camps. On the positive side you have the government, which has a blind faith in electric cars as a motorist-friendly approach to sustainable transport. Also on this side is Silicon Valley and the techno-optimists, the folks who made EV start-up Arrival the most valuable tech company in the UK without them yet launching a commercial product.

The negative side also has two camps. One of them is the petrol car encumbancy, with...

The top ten producers of single-use plastics

Global plastic production continues to soar, roaring towards a cumulative total of some 8 billion tonnes.

You’ll sometimes read that, since it’s not biodegradeable, all plastic ever created still exists. That’s not strictly true. There isn’t 8 billion tonnes of plastic in the world, since about a quarter of waste plastic is burned to dispose of it. But even that remains in the form of toxins and greenhouse gases.

Nevertheless, plastic is accumulating in the environment, a horrendous ...

Climate change threatens a third of global harvests

Last week another horrendous scientific study made a brief appearance in the news: climate change threatens a third of the world’s food production.

The study is from Finland, where scientists have developed a concept called ‘safe climactic space’. This is a measure of how dry a place is, its projected rainfall and temperature increase. Most global agriculture and livestock farming happens inside this safe space, as you’d expect. As global temperatures rise, this space begins to shrink.

U...

Book review: GDP, by Ehsan Masood

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why it Must Now Change is an account of how Gross Domestic Product came to be, how it rose to dominate international politics, and how it fails us. It is told through the stories of the people who invented it, tweaked it or challenged it over the decades, bringing a human dimension to what could otherwise be a somewhat bloodless history of an idea.

However, let’s cut to the chase: there are many books that critique GDP (including mine), and seve...

Design icon, energy disaster

In my building of the week posts, I usually profile a building that demonstrates some aspect of sustainability or social architecture, something we can celebrate and learn from. This one’s a bit different. It’s a beautiful bad example, a building that is iconic in design circles, but looks terrible from an energy perspective: the Bauhaus school of architecture and design.

The Bauhaus school was founded in 1919 in Germany. It was influential enough to be able to command a purpose-built campus...

Yes, wind turbines can be recycled

“Not so green energy” reads the Daily Mail headline. “Hundreds of non-recyclable wind turbine blades are pictured piling up in landfill”.

It’s a fairly typical news story about one of the downsides of wind energy. There have been plenty of articles on end of life turbines, some of them useful, and some of them gleeful takedowns of technologies some people oppose. Either way, it’s best not take these articles as the final word. There is a difference between something being ‘non-recyclable’ and...