- 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.
Learning to live as a hot country: Madagascar
Earlier this year the Climate Change Committee, the UK’s climate advisory body, published a report on adaptation. Britain’s progress on reducing emissions has not been matched on the adaptation side. “There has been little progress on preparing ourselves for the changing climate,” they warn. As one of the guests at the launch event put it,…
What we learned this week
Much rejoicing from geography nerds around the world as the UN voted to formally retire the Mercator map of the earth in favour of the Equal Earth projection. If you haven’t seen this version, it shows the continents in their right sizes without the odd stretching of the similarly corrective Peters projection. Togo led the…
What are the alternatives to air conditioning?
Air conditioning was drawn into the culture wars this summer in the UK, joining a long list of things to be angry about, alongside flags, pronouns and National Trust scones. Now we have the tangled irony of people continuing to deny that climate change is real, while falsely claiming that they are being denied measures…
The Earthbound Report 