miscellaneous

What we learned this week

In case you missed it, an article from me on the promise and the perils of hydrogen energy, for Mint Magazine.

I was under the impression that Scotland was the only country to put any money behind loss and damage at COP26. But not so: the Belgian region of Wallonia put up a million alongside them. First I’ve heard of this regional climate leadership.

I wrote recently about innovative approaches to plastic in Africa. Practical Action have something similar here on new approaches to waste.

Not everyone has got on board with the post-industrial aesthetic of the winter Olympics, but Dezeen celebrates the re-purposing of old industrial plants as high profile recycling.

I’ve been getting press releases about potato milk. Apparently it’s going to be a big thing. I don’t know.

I’ve been on half term this week and doing other things, so a slow week. Nevertheless, some highlights:

Book review: We need to tax billionaires, by Gabriel Zucman

This was the year that we saw the world’s first trillionaire, a state of imbalance so absurd that it really ought to rewrite how we talk about inequality. I don’t see any sign of that yet, but this book might have one practical and popular answer: tax billionaires. An important thing to note here: first,…

What we learned this week

A study of four decades of news articles in America found that climate change accounts for 0.55% of news coverage, and has risen “from silence to a whisper” in the at time. Belgium is the first country to appoint a Chief Planetary Officer, a role “designed to bring Planetary Boundaries science directly into national decision-making,…

How Frontier Markets empowers women traders

Among the most important questions to ask of a new technology are these: who controls it? And who does it serve? With many leading AI applications, the answer to both is simple – the richest. But that’s not inevitable, and so I enjoyed hearing about Ashden Award winner Frontier Markets. Frontier Markets is a social…

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