As a frustrated would-be user of the government’s Green Homes Grant, I am saddened but entirely unsurprised by the confusion around the scheme at the moment. Might still be salvaged, but at the moment it looks like yet another wasted opportunity on refurbishment and energy efficiency.
I mentioned recently that Ikea had opened its first secondhand shop. It will soon be launching a buy-back scheme for unwanted furniture, taking responsibility for its goods at the end of their useful lives.
The Campaign Against the Arms Trade have re-designed their website, which makes it a good time to recommend their work generally. Among recent stories, the fact that Britain has given Yemen £1 billion in aid, while selling £6 billion in arms sales to its aggressors.
I’ll be on half term next week. Not sure if we’ll get away as a family or not, given the uncertainties of Covid, but if all goes to plan we’ll be in a cottage in the Midlands. There are some posts scheduled, but I hope to be offline and won’t be replying to comments.
Something a little bit different – Woodkid is a French musician and film-maker who I rather like. I’ve been listening to his new album this week and thought I’d share the music video to the track ‘Goliath’. It’s shot at an open cast coal mine, and it’s cinematic, industrial and striking. “This song refers to our individual and collective responsibility in creating a monster and in finding ways to defeat it”, he says.
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Kyle Devine is a professor of environmental studies with a particular interest in the music industry. He investigated the ecological impact of the music industry in a previous book, Decomposed. It didn’t cover the solutions, and that has become a follow-up. As the opening sentence spells out, “this book is about people in music who…
What we learned this week
Reuters’ investigation into global heatwaves has led them to conclude that we need a new term for them. They’re calling them heatstorms, and their report is an interesting crossover of journalism and science. On the subject of heatwaves, studies in Nature Health have calculated that there were 50,000 heat-related deaths in Europe this summer, the…
Let’s paint some roofs white
I’m doing a lot of work on overheating at the moment, and have been visiting schools to help them understand why their buildings get too hot in the summer and what they can do about it. One of the solutions that keeps coming up is painting roofs white. It’s well documented that white roofs reflect…
The science of hope
The Living Planet Report is produced every two years by WWF and the Zoological Society of London, serving as a regular health-check on wild nature. It’s not been positive news, and over the years its headline finding has become increasingly well known: that since 1970, average wildlife populations have declined by 73%. (This is frequently…
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You might like the new album from iliktrains the Leeds based indie group called Kompromat . It’s about a post truth world and it’s impact on our fragile unsustainable world 🌎