By Jeremy Williams On the off-chance that you’re in Helsinki some time soon, you’ll be able to drop in on what sounds like a very good exhibition. FIX: Care and Repair is being held jointly across the Museum of Finnish Architecture and the Design Museum, and it celebrates the idea of repair as part of Finnish culture. “The skills to […]
Photo credit: Keith Hunter / University of Edinburgh. By Jeremy Williams Did you know that Britain has a national supercomputer? It’s hosted at the Advanced Computing Facility at the University of Edinburgh and it’s used on our crunchiest problems, such as climate modelling or processing health data. It’s in the news this week because of a trial of a new […]
By Jeremy Williams There’s a scene in Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s book The Wind in the Willows where the wise Mr Badger rebukes the wayward Mr Toad. Badger takes him into the smoking room for a lecture, and then brings the repentant Toad out to tell his friends that he has seen the error of his ways: “Toad, I want […]
climate change By Anders Lorenzen 2023 was the warmest year ever recorded, COP28 showed us how far away we still are from where we need to be as to what climate science demands to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. So it is no wonder if one is heading into 2024 feeling a bit downbeat. With that in mind […]
Parts of the clean energy sector have had a difficult year, but things could improve in 2024. By Anders Lorenzen 2023 is the warmest year ever recorded since records began, the year has throughout the planet set one climate-induced extreme weather event after the other, the latest scientific research on climate change gets bleaker and bleaker, and world leaders only […]
By Jeremy WilliamsThere’s a giant cognitive dissonance at the heart of global climate politics. Almost every country now agrees that it has work to do to prevent climate disaster. The age of scepticism is over and every major economy has set carbon targets. At the same time, those governments all want to maximise fossil fuel production. According to the recent […]
climate change By Jeremy Williams There’s a lot of confusion over which climate actions make the biggest difference – or even whether personal actions make any difference at all. They do – about a quarter of climate emissions can be dealt with through personal actions. The rest is beyond our control as individuals, though of course we can campaign and […]
Solar panels on the roof of a building in Gaza. By Anders Lorenzen This article is not going into nor is it taking sides in the rapidly and tragic escalating conflict in Israel and Palestine. Both Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestine territories, are incredibly energy-poor and have no energy production and thus rely 100% on energy imports. What […]
By Jeremy Williams “At the risk of seeming unreasonable, may curses rain down on the fair-weather vegan,” began a recent article on meat eating from a certain national newspaper. It went on to lambast ‘fake’ vegans, or ‘fegans’. Sales of meat alternatives are falling, and “we should have known the vegan-newbies would turn out to be a bunch of flakes.” […]
By Jeremy Williams I’m aware of four different ways to charge electric vehicles without stopping to plug in. All of them have been trialled and some are being adopted more widely. I’ve written about all four at some point: Overhead cables – somewhat obvious, given that trams and trolleybuses operate on this system already. Not something that cars will use, […]