Jeremy Williams's Blog, page 96
February 15, 2021
Book review: The Case for a Four Day Week
Another book in ‘the case for‘ series from Polity Books, this slim volume considers the arguments for a four day week. Written by three researchers from the New Economics Foundation, it’s a clear and concise introduction to the question of working hours.
“In this book we set out arguments for a four day week because we think the world would be a better place – and our lives would be much improved – if we spent less time working for money and had more time at our own disposal.”
There a...
February 13, 2021
What we learned this week
The airline industry’s UN-negotiated deal on climate change came into effect in January, with little fanfare. Called CORSIA, it is based around offsets and will probably achieve nothing at all.
Last week I asked if the government’s Green Homes Scheme had failed and was on the brink of collapse. Yes, is the answer we learn this week, as the government is planning to can £1.5 billion of its planned £2 billion budget.
Bitcoin is now consuming more electricity than the whole of Argentina.
...February 12, 2021
The campaign for a four day week
A redistribution of working time is one of those ideas that circles endlessly around, much talked about and only rarely applied. There’s a real history to the idea of reduced working hours as a form of progress, something that’s been fought for in the past, and then more or less abandoned with the advent of the 9-5 with a two day weekend.
As Katherine Trebeck and I argue in our book The Economics of Arrival, reduced working hours are exactly the kind of progress that advanced economies shoul...
February 11, 2021
Big fossil fuel projects are no longer acceptable
In Saturday’s links round-up I made passing mention of two of Britain’s biggest climate hypocrisies – the new coal mine in Cumbria, and Drax’s huge new gas power plant. They’re both projects that have no business going ahead in 2021, and yet they had been given the green light.
As campaigners pointed out, these projects punctured the illusion that Britain was a leader on climate change, and it undermined preparations for COP26. New coal mines send all the wrong signals when the country is co...
Big fossil fuel projects are longer acceptable
In Saturday’s links round-up I made passing mention of two of Britain’s biggest climate hypocrisies – the new coal mine in Cumbria, and Drax’s huge new gas power plant. They’re both projects that have no business going ahead in 2021, and yet they had been given the green light.
As campaigners pointed out, these projects punctured the illusion that Britain was a leader on climate change, and it undermined preparations for COP26. New coal mines send all the wrong signals when the country is co...
February 10, 2021
Is the church failing young people on climate change?
There’s a new report out today that I did some work on. It’s from Tearfund and Youthscape, and it investigates young Christians’ attitudes to climate change. Here’s the headline finding:
9 out of 10 Christian young people are concerned about climate change.
Just 1 out of 10 think their church is doing enough about it.
The report investigates young people’s views on the climate and what they’d like the church to be doing. With the help of some focus groups, it digs into how they understan...
February 9, 2021
The Daily Express and its green nationalism
Strange sights on the news-stands this week as the Daily Express turned its masthead green and invited its readers to ‘join our green Britain revolution’.
For those unfamiliar with it, the Daily Express has been an outspoken voice of climate denial in the past. Previous front page headlines have included ‘The great climate change fraud’ and ‘100 reasons why global warming is natural’, alongside the usual Brexit tub-thumping and anti-immigrant scare-mongering.
However, there’s been a c...
February 8, 2021
Book review: Radical Empathy, by Terri Givens
A few weeks ago I reviewed Roman Krznaric’s book Empathy. I read the book as part of my research for my new book, and I was particularly interested in how empathy could be used to overcome racial divisions. That specific question only gets a passing mention in Krznaric’s book, so I was delighted to discover that Policy Press were publishing a whole book on that exact topic – Radical Empathy: Finding a path to bridging racial divides.
It’s by Terri Givens, an American social scientist and...
February 6, 2021
What we learned this week
Oil giant Exxon has posted a loss of $22 billion as the pandemic has cut into demand. Shell has lost $21 billion. There will be more such headlines to come for fossil fuel companies that aren’t diversifying.
There has been lots of self-congratulation in Britain recently over its headstart in vaccinating for Covid-19. But as Cai Nebe warns at DW.com, “the West has treated vaccination as a right for itself and a privilege for the rest.” In so doing, they have ceded leadership on public health t...
February 5, 2021
Ireland’s greenest community – Cloughjordan Ecovillage
A couple of months ago I wrote about The Wintles, an unusual housing project from the Living Villages Trust. There, a series of homes were built and sold, planning from the outset to create a brand new village and community around a set of shared public spaces and resources.
A reader in Ireland got in touch to tell me about a similar project, the Cloughjordan Ecovillage. This too has been designed to foster community in a new village, but with a crucial difference. Here, you buy a plot of la...
