Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 90

Why cutting the aid budget is a racist policy

For someone with an interest in global poverty and development, overseas aid was one of the high points of the coalition government under David Cameron. After years of unmet promises, the UK finally reached the target of 0.7% of national income spent in overseas aid, and then wrote it into law in 2014. It was the first G7 country to reach that target, despite pledges to do so dating all the way back to the 1970s.

That didn’t last long into Boris Johnson’s new ‘global Britain’ regime. The Dep...

Guest post: What’s the opposite of neoliberalism?

I reviewed Martin Whitlock‘s book Human Politics, Human Value a few years ago, which I thought approached some familiar political problems in an imaginative way. When Martin got in touch about revisiting the idea of a more human politics, I suggested a guest post. Here it is.

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. This ancient Greek proverb, famously applied by Isiah Berlin to writers and thinkers, is an equally apt description of the state of current economic di...

Lithuania’s renewable heat revolution

In the government’s latest public attitudes tracker, they asked about district heat networks. Local heat networks are proposed as part of shifting UK housing onto sustainable forms of heat – instead of having your own boiler in your home, you would tap into a network that provides heat and hot water to your neighbourhood. Fewer than 3 out of 10 Britons have heard of heat networks.

That’s not surprising. Just under 2% of homes in the UK are connected to district heating systems. That figure i...

Book review: Rewilding, by Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe

Rewilding was not a familiar term ten years ago. Though it was first coined in 1992, it remained a rather niche idea in conservation circles. It has risen up the agenda in the UK, propelled by debates around the re-introduction of beavers, and books such as George Monbiot’s Feral or Isabella Tree’s Wilding.

Those two books are an activist polemic and a personal story respectively. Both excellent in their own ways, but neither offering an introduction to the science behind rewilding, the ...

What we learned this week

There’s a first time for everything, and here’s a link from the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, who are asking this month if economic growth can continue forever. My friend Katherine Trebeck is among the contributing essayists as they look at arguments on both sides.

The US food website Epicurious announced this week that they would no longer feature beef in recipes or features. It’s a climate inspired decision that I’d love to see replicated more widely. It’s not telling anyone wh...

Building of the week: Maggie’s, Leeds

In previous posts I’ve written about biophilic architecture, a movement that creates buildings with a connection to nature. Through their forms, materials, views, the way they use light and shadow, they are places that we feel at home in. I’ve also written about how buildings like that can have therapeutic effects, demonstrated most spectacularly by this hospital in Singapore that is designed to lower blood pressure and help patients relax and heal.

This is another example, this time from Le...

When is it time to abandon a place?

Have you been watching Climate Change: Ade on the front lines? It’s a three part BBC series in which Ade Adepitan travels to visit communities already facing the devastating impacts of climate change. It’s on the BBC’s iPlayer catch-up service if that’s available to you, or see these educational resources otherwise.

In the series, Adepitan visits Bangladeshi villages that are shored up by vast stacks of sandbags, or homes on stilts in the Solomon Islands, where the sea keeps encroaching. How...

In defence of electric vehicles: roadside air pollution

Electric vehicles are a strangely contested technology. In some circles they are celebrated, many are supportive but hesistant, and some downright hate them. What I find interesting about the hatred is that it comes from completely opposing directions. Men who like their cars to go ‘vroom vroom’ hate them, with Jeremy Clarkson the iconic leader of that miserable band. But lots of environmentalists hate them too.

I constantly hear objections to electric cars from committed greens. In some cir...

What White People can do next, by Emma Dabiri

I haven’t reviewed all the books on race that I’ve read over the last few years, but I thought I’d make an exception for this one, Emma Dabiri’s What White People can do next.

The title suggests a kind of to-do list for white people who want to make themselves useful in the struggle against racism. There are elements of that, but it doesn’t necessarily go the way readers might expect. Like that embroidered cover image, this is a book that’s doing its own thing.

For a start, Dabiri ha...

What we learned this week

The Science Museum has a new exhibition on climate change, sponsored by… Shell. Again. It’s as if nothing was learned from the last time Shell sponsored a climate change exhibition.

Last year I wrote about how Gravitricity are developing ways to store energy in falling weights dropping down old mine shafts. Their demonstrator project is now live, giving us a sense of what that looks like.

The weather forecast is a very ordinary thing, something you might check in the morning over a cup of...