miscellaneous

What we learned this week

  • The Guardian continues to evolve its response to the climate emergency, and this week published a climate change dashboard.
  • At their annual conference, Britain’s Liberal Democrat party voted to back a Universal Basic Income. The Lib Dems are not the force they were, but it marks another step towards the mainstream for Basic Income. (The Green Party also supports BI)
  • Governments resist them, campaigners often demand them without necessarily thinking it through, so it’s useful to The Economist’s perspective on how ‘outright bans can sometimes be a good way to fight climate change‘.
  • As an experiment, I’m dropping the latest posts from this week in at the bottom, for those catching up. Let me know if this is a helpful feature or not, and I might add it every week.

Can Germany phase out fossil fuels by 2045?

In writing about sustainability for two decades, I’ve read a few national climate declarations. Remember Sweden’s bid to be the first fossil-fuel free country by 2020? Neither do the Swedes, and 2020 came and went with the target long abandoned. Same with New Zealand’s ambition to be carbon neutral by 2025, which was announced in…

Possible’s new story about climate

“There’s a story being told about you, about what you need, about what you care about, about what’s possible,” begins the new video from Possible, one of my favourite climate charities. There is a prevailing narrative about climate change that it doesn’t matter to people, that it’s too expensive to do anything about, that it…

Book review: End Times Fascism, by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

End Times Fascism deserves some kind of award for the most depressing book title of the year. I’ll admit that my first reaction was ‘pass’, but I read a truly eye-watering book earlier this year called Promise me You’ll Shoot Yourself. Written by historian Florian Huber, it is compiled almost entirely from diary entries by…

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