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.

Should we put solar panels on railway lines?

A few years ago there was a flurry of internet hype about solar roadways – imagine a world where roads generated power for the streetlights! Or where solar-powered LEDs along the road replaced the white painted lines for no good reason! A lot of money was spent on this across various projects, the biggest being…

Book review: Don’t Build, Rebuild, by Aaron Betsky

“We should not construct new buildings from scratch,” says the first line of Aaron Betsky’s Don’t Build, Rebuild. He’s an experienced architecture critic from the Netherlands who has spent his career travelling the world and studying buildings. The ones he is drawn to today represent an architecture that “does not impose itself on the land…

What we learned this week

Chris Hatch at Covering Climate Now writes about something I’d noticed: Mark Carney was very forward thinking on climate change while at the Bank of England, and seems to have forgotten all about it as Prime Minister of Canada. More evidence that if you’re losing farmland to solar farms, you’re doing it wrong. The biggest…

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.