miscellaneous

What we learned this week

Portugal had a goal of ending coal power by 2030, but this month it closed its last coal power station, nine years ahead of schedule. It’s the fourth European country to stop using coal, joining Sweden, Austria and Belgium.

Can you raise Christmas turkeys through regenerative farming practices? This company in California is claiming that by using native grasses rather than farmed feeds, their turkey farms are a net gain for nature.

Credit Suisse have been fined £147 million for fraudulent loans to Mozambique, which have cost the country billions. But since it was the London branch of Credit Suisse, the fine will be collected by the FSA and given to the UK Treasury to spend as they like. Sign the petition from the Jubilee Debt Campaign to send the money to Mozambique where it belongs.

“We need to be alert to context and not ask ‘what will work, generically?’ but ‘what will work and be right for this place and contribute to the bigger picture?’ – because population size, landscape, climate, skills, identity and culture all hold opportunities and barriers for change.” Josie Warden at the RSA asks questions about making global change in specific places, something I often consider here in Luton.

An upcoming talk for this week – in conversation about climate and race with Greta Arena, for the Festival for Change, on Youtube at 9:50am on Wednesday 1st of December.

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 Electrotech Revolution

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about why the age of solar power is here. As the technology has matured and become more widely available, solar will slowly rise to dominate global energy. If this doesn’t seem entirely likely, perhaps you live in the global north, where we get less sun and have the…

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