Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 93
March 26, 2021
The National Trust Climate Hazards map
The National Trust is Britain’s leading heritage organisation, responsible for caring for some of the country’s most iconic landscapes and buildings. One of the things that threatens that heritage is climate change, through the erosion of coastlines, heat damage or storms. In fact, the trust says that “climate change is the single biggest threat to the precious landscapes and historic houses we care for.”
To help to assess the risks, the trust has created an interactive map. It shows the chan...
March 25, 2021
Nigeria’s leading solar firm will recycle batteries
One of the world’s emerging environmental problems is what to do with the waste from the energy transition. While there’s no question that renewable energy is less destructive than fossil fuels, it is not environmentally benign. There are end-of-life wind turbines and solar panels to recycle, and the batteries from electric cars and other goods.
It’s important not to exaggerate these issues – I often see them used to dismiss cleaner technologies, and that only prolongs the extractivist statu...
March 24, 2021
Book announcement: Climate Change is Racist
I know some of you have been waiting for this for a while, so I’m pleased to announce that Climate Change is Racist is now available for pre-order. Thanks for your patience, and I can’t wait for you to read it.
The book will be published by Icon Books on June 3rd, and here’s some blurb:
A short sharp look at the history of climate change and race, with a foreword by Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, bestselling author of This is Why I Resist .
Both in its cause and in its effect, climate cha...
March 23, 2021
The uninhabitable (parts of the) earth
The Uninhabitable Earth was a bestselling book on climate change by David Wallace Wells, which caused a stir a couple of years ago. It doesn’t actually predict that the earth will be uninhabitable, though it does present a stark and unflinching view of a worst case scenario.
The climate crisis won’t render the entire planet uninhabitable, parts of it will be. What will happen to the people who live in those places? Which places are we talking about? And what do we mean by habitable anyway?
...March 22, 2021
In Search of Mycotopia, by Doug Bierend
Last year I read Merlin Sheldrake’s extraordinary book Entangled Life, which I have been recommending to all and sundry. It’s about the underappreciated world of fungi and the role that they play in ecology. There’s room in my life for a couple more books about fungi, and so here’s Doug Bierend’s In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen science, fungi fanatics, and the untapped potential of mushrooms.
You wouldn’t necessarily know about it unless you stumble across it, but there is a thriving sub...
March 20, 2021
What we learned this week
Some of the most popular articles on this site are those about creating a flood-proof home – hardly an area of expertise for me, but a topic people are clearly interested in. Hazard + Hope is a web series by people who actually are experts in this field, and they cover a variety of approaches for making homes flood resilient.
Protest “is not and should never be viewed as a gift from the State” – Liberty with a good summary of the many problems with the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bil...
March 18, 2021
10 climate podcasts to try
Not so long ago podcasts about climate change were pretty rare. My wife and I used to endlessly debate whether or not we should attempt one ourselves, since nobody else seemed to be doing one. That has certainly changed.
In fact, there are so many good ones that it’s hard to keep track of them, especially since podcasts tend to come and go. Last week a reader sent me a link to Outrage + Optimism, and I was surprised that I hadn’t come across it before. It made me wonder what else was I was m...
March 17, 2021
Who’s winning the green Premier league?
At the weekend two London rivals, Arsenal and Tottenham, went head to head in football’s Premier League. Arsenal won, which is as it should be. But in the overall standings, Arsenal are second to Tottenham at the top of the league.
I’m not talking about the actual league here, but the more important one: the Premier League Sustainability Rankings, which the BBC have compiled for the second time this year. Tottenham leads with a maximum 21 points, with Arsenal, Brighton & Hove and Manchester ...
March 16, 2021
Book review: Another End of the World is Possible
Last year I read How Everything can Collapse, a book by two French ‘collapsologists’ who wanted to have a grown up conversation about the possibility of social collapse. Hollywood cliches and visions of apocalypse have made the idea into something either terrifying or implausible, and it doesn’t get enough attention. As far as they are concerned, a slow decline of industrial civilisation is practically inevitable. It could be accelerated by things like – you know, a global pandemic.
Reco...
March 15, 2021
And the award for the greenest recovery goes to…
Last year it became obvious that the pandemic was going to put a serious dent in the global economy. Countries starting thinking about stimulus plans and economic recovery. Campaigners rallied around the idea of building back better. Don’t let a good crisis go to waste, as they say. How can we create a green recovery that doubles up on the benefits – protecting jobs and businesses while also creating a more sustainable future?
This is indisputably obvious, which is why so many politicians tal...
