I’ve been saying it for years, so it’s interesting to see the New York Times run an article asking if degrowth would be good for Japan. Not sure how the communism comes into it, but I’m looking forward to the English translation of Kohei Saito’s book Slow Down, out next year.
On a related note, Australia is taking steps towards measuring wellbeing, an important precursor to reducing dependence on the fundamentally flawed concept of GDP as a marker of progress.
A new kind of sail is getting its first voyage after being retro-fitted to the Pyxis Ocean cargo vessel. The ‘sail’ is made from the same material as wind turbines and could reduce cargo ship emissions by 30%. We have seen this kind of thing before, but sooner or later someone’s going to deliver the design that goes mainstream.
New train services on the Barcelona to Madrid corridor have been very succesful, with the number of people flying between the cities falling by 24%. More of this everywhere please.
Didn’t get much writing done on the blog over the last couple of weeks, as I had a children’s book manuscript to finish and summer holidays to attend to. One more week of holidays still to come, and then I might be able to post a bit more regularly.
Highlights from this week
Book review: The Seaweed Revolution, by Vincent Doumeizel
I was on holiday on the South Coast this summer, and when I’m by the sea I like to read about it. This time I chose Vincent Doumeizel’s The Seaweed Revolution, which is a book I have been anticipating for some time. I expect ocean farming to be one of the big stories of this…
The jump in G20 fossil fuel subsidies
Of all the crazy things to be doing in an age of climate breakdown, subsidising fossil fuels is among the craziest. It prolongs the problem, undermines the development of clean energy alternatives, and rewards the wrong things. And so at COP26, the G20 countries made a (qualified) pledge to phase them out. We’re not off…
Neocolonialism and carbon credits
A few weeks ago I wrote about problem of casually promised offsets in a world with limited land. Corporations and governments rely on carbon offsetting in order to meet climate targets, and if we add up all the pledged offsets so far, it’s very obvious that it is impossible to deliver them all. Where will…
The Earthbound Report 
Hi Jeremy,
My current email address will be defunct on the 1st of September. Could you please change my address to jsheldon@joannasheldon.com?
Or point me to where I might make the change myself. The subscriptions management link takes me to WordPress where I already have an account for the @joannasheldon.com address.
Many thanks Joanna
Hi Joanna, that’s something I don’t have any control over, I’ve afraid. If you scroll down the sidebar to where it says ‘subscribe to blog via email’, you can put your new email address in there. I can then unsubscribe your old email address at the bottom of any of the emails. That should do it!