You may have noticed the rash of anti-electric car scare stories in the newspapers in the UK recently. It might be organised, it might just be the papers angling for a viral hit. Either way, it’s undermining the transition to cleaner transport and puts the 2035 end-date for new petrol and diesel cars at risk. The Fully Charged Show and Fair Charge are crowdfunding a fact-checking campaign to counter negative stories if you’d like to contribute.
One of those scare stories is about how the increased weight of electric cars will ruin roads and collapse car-parks – a story that ignores the fact that SUVs are also heavy. France may have a solution to this already: Paris, Grenoble and Lyon are all introducing higher parking costs for bigger cars, incentivising residents to drive smaller and lighter vehicles.
Lancaster Council have been forbidden from mandating that new homes be built to energy efficient standards. Slightly complicated story that I won’t go into, but if you’ve got a few minutes, there’s an open consultation you can contribute to that could really help councils to move faster than the government on low carbon homes.
The Little Rebels Award is an annual award for ‘radical children’s fiction’, with books for the under 12s that address social issues. Good shortlist, with Needle by Patrice Lawrence this year’s winner.
It’s been a slow couple of weeks on the blog while I’ve been working on a manuscript. I now have a full draft, just in time for the holidays. Off camping for a few days now, so no new posts at all over the next few days.
Highlights from this week
The energy transition in the toybox
Play is a vital part of development in us humans, as it is for many animals. It’s fun, and it’s also how we rehearse what life is all about. Children develop interests through play. It uses their imagination and also shapes their imagination, engaging their creativity, teaching them cooperation and helping them to make sense…
The layered risk of climate change
When I first started looking into climate change some twenty years ago, there were a few things I didn’t understand. I didn’t see how an average temperature increase of 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius was so dangerous. Sea level rise was also puzzling. How could rising sea levels of mere centimetres pose any kind of…
The Production of Everyday Life in Eco-Conscious Households, by Kirstin Munro
Green lifestyles are under-studied, suggests Kirstin Munro. We know the stereotypes. When it comes to really understanding what households actually do, how it works, what they think and how they negotiate their compromises – that’s more of a mystery. It’s important to study this, because environmental problems are so often blamed on consumer behaviour. If…
- The layered risk of climate change
- The energy transition in the toybox
- The Production of Everyday Life in Eco-Conscious Households, by Kirstin Munro
Recommendations
This week I played the first couple of hours of an unusual video game called Common’hood. It begins with the protagonist being evicted, and finding themselves in a small community of squatters in an abandoned factory. Then you get to work scavenging materials, building shelters and growing food, and developing increasingly elaborate plans and technologies.
If you know anything about computer games, you’ll have noticed that cooperation, resilience and community organising are under-represented themes amongst all the running around and shooting things. Kudos to the developers for doing something very different. Common’hood plays like a cross between a survival game and a base builder, and you might want to take a look if you fancy a more positive game for a change. I played it on Xbox, where I found the menus and construction mechanics a bit fiddly, so you might want to try it on PC for the best experience.
Also worth noting the unusual developers. Plethora Project are a design agency specialising in architectural literacy, so the game is designed to educate gamers on materials, design and architecture along the way.
The Earthbound Report 