Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 92

What we learned this week

With the Biden administration looking to set its climate targets, Vox asks what a ‘fair’ target might be – with some suggesting it would be over 100%.

“In America, we’re taught from a young age that the coolest thing in the world is to be a big man with a big car who eats big meat” – Emily Atkin’s astute and amusing article against ‘meatposting’.

The city of Bogota has a target to increase the number of women cycling, and the initiative can teach us all sorts of interesting things about ma...

Every child on their own trampoline

When the country went into lockdown last year and the schools closed, I made a parenting decision. I overturned my previous objections and ordered the kids a trampoline. It has been the source of more joy than possibly anything else I have done as a parent. In the sunny days that followed, the children were on it for hours. Work was done uninterrupted as they disappeared into the garden and amused themselves.

However, there are reasons why I didn’t buy them a trampoline the first time they as...

Where emissions are rising and falling

Last year I attempted to find some examples of developing countries where CO2 emissions are falling – not altogether successfully, I might add. It was something of an experiment. Here’s a graph that would have saved me a lot of trouble, from the data-mongers at Our World in Data.

It shows absolute change in emissions. Blue colours mean emissions are falling, with darker blue indicating bigger declines. Red is the inverse.

This is useful because we know that emissions have been falling in...

Book review: Beyond Capitalist Realism, by Samuel Alexander

The word ‘essay’ is the French for ‘try’ or ‘attempt’, and it’s what the 16th century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne called his writings. Each one was an foray into an idea, and the whole point of calling them ‘attempts’ implies that some of them will miss the mark. An essay might end with a successful articulation of what he was trying to get at, or it might prove inadequate and abortive, something to come back to later. His life and writing is beautifully captured in Sarah Bakewell...

What we learned this week

Why is $1.90 a day still the standard for ‘extreme poverty’, even though everyone knows the bar is set far too low? And if it’s a legitimate standard, why don’t we use it in the West? Good questions from Jason Hickel.

Are hasty post-Brexit trade deals with the UK undermining regional trade in Africa? Observers of the freshly inked deal with Kenya are watching carefully, says the FT.

In case you missed it yesterday, please sign this petition to parliament to encourage a shift to a Wellbeing...

Sign the petition for a Wellbeing Economy

If the global pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that there are more important things than economic growth. We’ve had to make choices that prioritise human health at the expense of business as usual. We’ve had to step in to protect jobs and livelihoods, or keep people in their homes. Some of these interventions have not been kind to GDP or to profits, but they were necessary. The pandemic has shown us what really matters. Can we take that lesson forwards into our post-Covid politics?

There...

Banking on climate chaos

Today is a day of action against the banking industry for its role in continuing to fund fossil fuels. The challenge of the global climate crisis is well understood, but the allure of fossil fuels remains strong. The projects are just so big and so profitable. Banks and investors continue to pump money into new coal, oil and gas, with the 60 biggest banks pouring $3.8 trillion into the sector in the last five years.

That’s since the Paris Agreement of course, and directly in opposition to it...

What are green jobs anyway?

‘Green jobs’ is a phrase that’s hard to escape. It’s at the heart of many countries’ plans for a ‘green recovery’, or the green new deal, or green growth. And rightly so – one of the key elements of the transition to a sustainable economy is the switch from jobs that destroy the natural world to those that restore it.

Keeping an eye on jobs one way of making sure that the transition to a sustainable economy is about people, not just about technology, or nature. Creating employment opportunit...

Book review: Post Growth, by Tim Jackson

Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth is one of the most influential books on the postgrowth bookshelf, written in the wake of the financial crisis and clearly articulating the limits of economic growth as a measure of success. This book also comes in the wake of crisis, a time when “alongside an uncomfortable reminder of what matters most in life, we were being given a history lesson in what economics looks like when growth disappears completely.”

That’s the thing with postgrowth econo...

What we learned this week

Until recently I was only aware of one off-the-shelf domestic biogas system on the market, despite their popularity in China and elsewhere. A reader told me about another one in Ireland: the MyGug, which looks like a giant egg in the garden.

Dharna Noor explains how and why America’s Black neighbourhoods often face greater flood risk in this article for Earther.

If you could scrap your car in return for £3,000 in credit for public transport? The BBC reports on a pilot scheme in Coventry. ...