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.
As part of reaching net zero by 2050, Britain needs to plant 2 billion trees. Where should we put them? RSPB has launched a map showing different soil types, existing woodlands, and how to maximise the benefits for wildlife.
“The climate crisis is racist because it exists in a system that is racist” – this from Minnie Rahman is one of the best things I’ve read on climate and race, and a good summary of what my book is all about.
Speaking of which, an update: this week I delivered the manuscript to Icon Books. At the suggestion of the US distributor, it has lost its question mark and is now called Climate Change is Racist, for the removal of any doubt. With any luck we’ll have a front cover in the next couple of weeks.
Highlights from this week
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’…
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.…
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…
The Earthbound Report 
Is it just me,or does the storymaps.arcgis.com tool lose all the information layers once you zoom in to a useful level (larger than the 20 km marker)? Various organisations are developing tree opportunity mapping tools, for example http://www.oxtrees.uk (oxfordshire) or TerraSulis (all england: https://takeclimateaction.uk/woodland-opportunity-mapping-england) in collaboration with Friends of the Earth. Various councils also have similar tools. These can be really powerful in guiding where to target efforts best. But to me there seems to be a need for better coordination or rationalising effort between all these different tools. How can we get something that pools all resources and best practice to be the best possible?
I haven’t seem Lenin’s Theory of Imperialism in the wild for ages in amongst Rahman’s word salad.
ref DevonChap’s comment: perhaps our perspective would be different if we are one of the kind of people Minnie identifies with. My own reaction is that she has taken something that she feels is a pervasive complex of deep injustices spanning centuries and much of the globe, and has responded with a highly fact-oriented piece, using visual beauty to offset some of the most challenging points, and ending with a set of constructive proposals. Personally I find that pretty moving.
Visually beautiful, sadly very wrong in its history, economics and conclusions. Form over function.
Yes, I was impressed by the whole article, and particularly with the way it has been framed artistically. As a fundamentally uncomfortable idea, some people are going to react against it or find flaws. But the central point – that poorer countries and people of colour “are bearing the brunt of a crisis they did not cause” – is unarguable.
You’re both wrong and rude about it Devonchap.
I thought I was very restrained. I could have called it far ruder things than ‘a word salad’.