Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 91

No Johnson, climate change is about survival

Yesterday President Biden hosted a virtual climate summit, at which the United States was finally able to announce a climate target. It also saw Prime Minister Boris Johnson give a speech encouraging countries to get on board with the climate agenda.

I remember the deep cringe of last year, where Johnson insisted that he wasn’t talking about climate change because he was one of the “hair-shirt wearing, tree-hugging, mung-bean munching eco-freaks”. As if people thought he was. It was a thorou...

Britain’s new climate target

It’s been a busy week in the news. It would be easy to miss the story of Britain’s sixth carbon budget, which was announced yesterday and promptly lost in the shouting about football. To summarise, the British government has declared a new intermediate climate target. The ultimate aim is net zero by 2050. Intermediate targets help to keep that on track, and the government has declared a 78% cut by 2035.

This is significant for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it’s the target they were adv...

Let’s clear a path for local energy

Community energy is one of the most transformative opportunities of the energy transition. It involves renewable energy and also a change of ownership. It democratises energy at the same time as decarbonising it. It breaks the power of the big fossil fuel companies, and creates an inclusive energy market where everyone can have a stake in the the energy that they depend on.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that some people hate it so much, and Britain’s blossoming community energy sector was very...

Book review: How Green is Your Smartphone?

Given how ubiquitous these everyday devices are, the title of this book is a fair question and one that should be asked more often: How Green is Your Smartphone?

News stories crop up regularly about e-waste, the carbon footprints of cloud computing, or the human and environmental cost of mining. But how much do we actually know about the phones that we use dozens of times every day?

The answer has two parts. There is the cost of making a smartphone, and then of using it. “It starts it...

What we learned this week

France will ban domestic flights that could be done by train in under 2.5 hours. This is a slightly weaker version of a policy that came out of their citizen’s assembly on the climate, and the opposite of the Conservative government of Britain, which wants to waive taxes to encourage more domestic aviation.

Nevada is considering banning ornamental lawns in order to protect water supplies. I can imagine the tabloid headlines should such a thing be proposed in Britain, but ultimately this is w...

Europe’s airlines are global polluters

A couple of weeks ago the campaign group Transport & Environment released some figures on the climate impact of Europe’s airlines. It’s the first time these figures have been compiled, which gives you a sense of how easy it is to gloss over the aviation industry’s contribution to climate change.

Here’s a top five:

Lufthansa: 19.11 million tonnes of CO2British Airways: 18.38Air France: 14.39Ryanair: 12.28KLM: 10.03

These are big and fairly meaningless numbers, so let me put them in cont...

10 different uses for seaweed

One of the sustainability trends that I keep an eye on is ocean farming. It’s one of the most promising avenues for feeding the world, though progress is pretty slow so far. Seaweed has vast untapped potential, as demonstrated by these ten different uses for it:

1. Food – many cultures eat seaweed, mostly in Asia, where 99% of seaweed farming takes place. Other cultures used to eat more of it, including more locally in Wales and Cornwall, but it has become more specialist and niche with the p...

Where did all the SUVs come from?

One of the banal hazards of my life is the traffic of the school run. The school is on a side street that was probably perfectly adequate for generations, but is now regularly choked with queueing cars. One of the reasons it gets blocked is that cars are so huge. It’s almost surreal, seeing these dinky humans tumbling out of these enormous vehicles.

As I’ve reported before, Britain’s carbon emissions have fallen dramatically in the power sector, and hardly moved in a decade in the transp...

Vegan honey and our relationship with nature

This week I came across an intriguing company called MeliBio that has developed a vegan honey. They have broken down the process that bees use to make honey and then replicated it using fermentation. It’s not a synthetic alternative to honey. It is biologically identical, even though no bees were involved. It is ‘animal free’.

Why? Because people have an unsustainable appetite for honey. Commercial bee-keeping threatens to overwhelm other bee species, reducing overall biodiversity and riskin...

Book review: Building for Hope, by Marwa al-Sabouni

Marwa al-Sabouni is an architect from Homs in Syria. She lost her practice in the fighting, but chose to stay in the city with her family and play a role in its rebuilding. Little known outside the region, she became internationally recognised after the publication of her book The Battle for Home, which told her story and reflected on the role of architecture and city planning in the conflict. (See her TED talk for the latter.)

Building for Hope: Towards an Architecture of Belonging is a ...