What we learned this week

With Just Stop Oil calling it a day in the UK, saying their mission has been achieved, now Last Generation have turned off the lights in Germany. It feels to me like the closing of a chapter of civil disobedience for the climate.

The Climate Coalition are organising another mass lobby of parliament, their biggest yet, on the 9th of July. Register here for Act Now, Change Forever.

Analysis of the current UK heatwave from World Weather Attribution has found that climate change has made these June temperatures 100 times more likely. 32 degrees in June occurred “only once every 2500 years before industrialisation.”

I found myself on a particularly noisy station platform in London recently, which reminded me of this video on noise pollution and urban design. There are techniques for reducing noise in cities if we choose to use them.

Teacher friends, Let’s Go Zero have a week of climate action for schools starting on Monday, with lots of resources and activities to bring into your classrooms.

Power Station trailer

I’ll come back to this in more detail when I’ve seen it, but the documentary Power Station had its premiere yesterday at the Sheffield Documentary Festival and the official trailer has been released. I’ve met the film makers a couple of times and have been following the story as they try and put solar panels on every house in their London street, turning their neighbourhood into their own power station, with their signature brand of homespun radicalism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaoJzRiZ25s

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Celebrating 25 years of the Ashden Awards

The Ashden Awards were held last night, marking 25 years of the awards for climate innovation. To mark the occasion, four previous winners were honoured with outstanding achievement awards, in a ceremony presented by Myra Anubi, with special guests Vanessa Nakate and UK Climate Envoy Rachel Kyte. Two new winners also took home awards, Emergent…

Climbing the energy ladder with BURN

At the Ashden awards last week, BURN won the Award for Outstanding Achievement. It’s a special category in honour of the 25 anniversary of the awards, given to a previous winner who has gone on to do extraordinary things. BURN make affordable cookstoves which save families money, reduce indoor air pollution and help to protect…

Book review: Deficit, by Emma Holten

In 2020 Emma Holten read an article in the Danish press that argued that over the course of their lifetimes, women took more from the public purse than they gave. This made them a net deficit to society. Holten took umbrage at the idea, quite rightly, and borrowed the word as the title of her…

• Celebrating 25 years of the Ashden Awards
• Book review: Deficit, by Emma Holten
• Climbing the energy ladder with BURN

Clothing is climate adaptation

This morning I had a conversation with my daughter about school uniform. It’s been hot this week – for the UK at least – and school has finally said they don’t need to wear their blazers. We await the day that boys are allowed to wear shorts, but it’s a concession to the fact that clothing needs aren’t the same all year round.

Despite how obvious that might sound, formal or informal rules around clothing don’t necessarily recognise this. The British Army has shirt sleeve orders that determine whether you can have long or short sleeves on, and these depend on the time of year and time of day, not the temperature. (In the RAF they let people use their common sense, apparently)

Unwritten they may be, but business has its uniform as well. Take a London train during the summer and you will find plenty of men sweating into their suits, apparently unable or unwilling to wear anything else into the office.

All of this is cultural, and thus all of it can be changed. There are no good reasons to make people uncomfortably hot, and some very good reasons not too: people who are comfortable will do better work and be less irritable. You will save money on cooling. People will be happier. And call me a maverick, but maybe it’s not always necessary to micro-manage what people wear in the first place?

For a nice practical example, consider Japan. In 2005 the Ministry of the Environment hatched an idea to save money on air conditioning in government offices. They reset all air conditioning to a higher temperature and relaxed dress code rules across the civil service. To make sure that everyone got the memo, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi led from the front and starting doing interviews and cabinet meetings in an open-collared shirt and no tie – an important gesture in a conservative dress culture where employees will take their cues from the boss.

The campaign was helped along by branding the idea as ‘cool biz’, and by the next year companies had started to adopt it too. Clothing retailers caught on and started putting out summer wear collections for office workers.

Twenty years on, summer office attire is standard in Japan. It’s an established part of the fashion industry calendar, with new styles out for the summer. It saves over two million tonnes of CO2 a year in air conditioning costs, and everyone feels better for not being in a suit and tie – until October, when the dark suits return.

Cool biz has since been adopted in South Korea, where cultural norms around summer wear in the office have similarly shifted.

As Carbon Brief described in a recent newsletter, there’s plenty that we can learn from Japan’s initiative, and no reason why it shouldn’t work in more places. After all, climate change is both increasing temperatures and prolonging spells of hot weather. That means more discomfort and greater exposure to health risks from overheating. What we choose to wear is perhaps the most straightforward form of climate adaptation there is.

#adaptation #japan

Climbing the energy ladder with BURN

At the Ashden awards last week, BURN won the Award for Outstanding Achievement. It’s a special category in honour of the 25 anniversary of the awards, given to a previous winner who has gone on to do extraordinary things.

BURN make affordable cookstoves which save families money, reduce indoor air pollution and help to protect forests. They won an Ashden award in 2015 for their first cookstove design, and at the time they had sold 62,000 of them. Ten years later they sell five million stoves every year in 14 African countries, employing 3,500 people across their factories Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and Tanzania. This year they plan to open three new factories, including one in Madagascar.

Their impact so far is enormous, saving an estimated 14.7 million tonnes of wood and cutting global emissions by 26.2 million tonnes. (To put that number in perspective, 26 million tonnes is the annual footprint of the entire country of Denmark.) With a third of the world’s population still cooking on open or basic fires, there is plenty more to do.

Efficient cookstoves are the ultimate example of an intermediate technology, or as E F Schumacher called them, appropriate technologies. They are locally available and affordable, the kind of thing that is accessible to the people who need them most. A lot of solutions proposed for global development are inappropriate – see Bill Gates’ hydrogen toilet. Or the ill-fated One Laptop Per Child project, which attempted to design and give a laptop to every child in the world, including the ones who really just needed a pencil.

The downside of appropriate technologies is that they can appear to be second best. Despite all the benefits to a clean cookstove, someone cooking on an open fire might aspire to cook on an electric range. A better wood fire is thus best seen as a step along an energy ladder, not the end goal.

BURN have understood this and offer a range of products in response. There are LPG, charcoal and biomass stoves, and also an electric induction hob. It’s sold in a bundle with the pans you need, and it can be paid for with a ‘pay as you cook’ finance model so that those on very low incomes can still get one. So BURN don’t just shift people off the bottom levels of the energy pyramid, they help them move a step at a time towards the top. These are stoves that bring benefits to health and to finances as well as carbon reductions. They’re also stoves that people want, and that make them feel proud.

Here’s a video introduction to their work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPXVgtv-Wqg

#appropriateTechnology #kenya

Celebrating 25 years of the Ashden Awards

The Ashden Awards were held last night, marking 25 years of the awards for climate innovation. To mark the occasion, four previous winners were honoured with outstanding achievement awards, in a ceremony presented by Myra Anubi, with special guests Vanessa Nakate and UK Climate Envoy Rachel Kyte. Two new winners also took home awards, Emergent Energy in the UK and Sosai Renewable Energies from Nigeria.

The awards were set up by Sarah Butler-Sloss, who told the story of their genesis at the ceremony. She had been researching the connections between sustainability and poverty in Africa, recognising that clean energy could be a powerful tool for improving people’s lives – an idea that was ahead of its time in the 1990s. A particular moment of inspiration came when visiting schools in Kenya, and noticing the difference between kitchens that cooked on traditional three-stone fires, and those that had more efficient cookstoves. The traditional fires burned more wood and were thus more expensive to run, and the smoke filled the kitchen, blackening the walls and harming the health of the cooks. Clean-burning cookstoves were healthier, cheaper and quicker. The technology was available, and so the challenge was to popularise them and help the manufacturers to scale up and meet demand.

The purpose of the awards is to showcase these sorts of ideas, bringing attention and funding to organisations with outstanding solutions, and helping them to accelerate their impact. As Butler-Sloss noted, the concept was proved in year one, when one of the winners returned home and was greeted at the airport by the president and a crowd of journalists. The award helps to draw in both investors and policy-makers, with Ashden providing support to help them grow and take advantage of the attention.

Over the years the awards have evolved, adding a second stream for UK innovators in 2003, alongside winners from the global South. The focus has remained on inclusive solutions, ones that bring the benefits of clean technologies to those at the margins, including awards for those working specifically in refugee contexts. There was also a series of awards for sustainable travel, clean air, and awards for schools.

Ashden itself has evolved in response to the awards, developing an alumni network for the growing number of winners, and launching various supporting projects. For example, when the National Trust won an award in 2006 for its sustainability initiatives, they were inundated with queries from people who wanted to learn from them. That led to the forming of Fit for the Future, a sustainability learning network for the heritage sector. Other projects within Ashden focus on forests, affordable cooling technologies, or renewable energy.

In total, there have now been 271 winners from across Asia, Africa and the UK. Many of them have successfully grown into much larger organisations, reaching millions of people. Some have gone on to further recognition, such as S4S in India or D.Light in Kenya, both of whom have won the Earthshot Prize. The winners and their projects are what the awards are all about, so while I wanted to write about the awards themselves today, I’ll feature a series of winners in the weeks to come.

• More about the awards here

#ashden

Book review: Deficit, by Emma Holten

In 2020 Emma Holten read an article in the Danish press that argued that over the course of their lifetimes, women took more from the public purse than they gave. This made them a net deficit to society. Holten took umbrage at the idea, quite rightly, and borrowed the word as the title of her book.

It’s not exactly news that women don’t contribute the same amount to the treasury as men, but to imply that women are a drain on resources is to undervalue what it is women are doing while they’re not in paid work. Women take career breaks to have children, and are more likely to work part time in order to provide care. This is of course a vital contribution to society, and only the peculiarly one-eyed world of economics would see this as a deficit.

Raising children, caring for elderly relatives or running a household are not paid tasks. They generate no financial wealth or taxes. In our economic system, things without a price on them have no value. Care work is thus invisible to maintream economics. Since women do more care, their contribution is systematically overlooked.

There have been a couple of responses to this from early feminists, and from economists keen to resolve the disparity. One is to argue that housework and care should be paid. This values those tasks and brings them into the formal economy, although who pays for that is an open question and as far as I know no country has ever attempted it (this is one of the arguments for a basic income). Another response is to call for a rebalancing of care and housework, getting men to do more unpaid work on the one hand, and freeing women to stay in work on the other. This is the approach taken by countries that offer generous paternity leave and free childcare provision.

While laudable, neither of these gets to the real heart of the issue, Holten suggests. The problem is not with women, and neither is it with care. The problem is with economics and the way that it understands value. Across a series of chapters, the book describes the rise of our current system of pricing and markets, and how early economists accounted for care. The answer is that they generally didn’t (as Katrina Marçal also explores in her splendidly named book Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?) Early economists – all of whom were men – managed to write complex theories of society that neglected to mention childbirth or childcare, as if new workers sprung up in the woods like mushrooms. Ideas such as care, home, family and love are basically invisible in enlightenment philosophy.

Holten also challenges the branch of feminism that sees liberation through employment. This is the feminism of the privileged, she argues. As black feminists have pointed out, for one woman to go back to work, someone else might step in as a nanny or au pair. Usually that will be someone lower down the economic ladder, often an ethnic minority or immigrant. For that person, the shoe might well be on the other foot: they would much rather work less and have more time for their own family. They work because they have to, but liberation for them would be the freedom to work less and spend more time with their children.

This is also true of men, Holten notes. Plenty of men sacrifice family time in pursuit of paid work and the status it brings. That’s a bad deal, in my opinion as a dedicated part-timer, and many would benefit from working less.

Feminist economics, as Holten sees it, isn’t just about getting more women into the workplace or putting a price on care. It is about making care visible in economics and giving us the language to improve things that can’t be counted. It would open up new political space, and breathe new life into the public sector. It may prove critical in solving the crisis in care, where the dominance of GDP and market thinking is blunting our response. “As long as the goal is a society with more money in it, there will always be a pull away from those things that are hardest to put a price on, and the people deemed expensive, valueless or immeasurable will face constant degradations.”

Governments can now only speak confidently about things they can cost. The over-arching policy goal is to pump up GDP, in the hope that more money will give us all the things we need. “There is no talk of giving us the right to more of what we can’t put a number on – vacation days, care for our minds and bodies, maybe a society in which no children are poor.”

I think this is an important argument. There are few things more important than care, in all its forms, and a decision-making system that sees it as worthless isn’t fit for purpose. We need to fix the blindspots in economics if we want to make progress on the things that matter most, and Holten’s book is an excellent introduction to a more holistic economics.

• You can buy Deficit from Earthbound Books
• See also Tim Jackson’s latest book The Care Economy, and Katherine Trebeck‘s work, including the book we co-authored, The Economics of Arrival.

#feminism

Earth in 100 seconds

A few years ago there was a thought-provoking video that showed Britain’s land use, Britain in 100 seconds. The man behind the film, Dan Raven-Ellison, has now produced a global version. Each second of the film shows 1% of the Earth’s land, beginning with 10 seconds walking through ice, and then into deserts and so on.

It’s a neat visual reminder of how human activity has appropriated an ever greater slice of the Earth’s surface, what we use it for, and what remains for wildlife. Have a look, and see if it’s something you can use in a classroom or community group as a discussion starter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MshXmxjEQnc

If you like it, you might like to contribute to the crowdfunding campaign to make it available in more languages.

#land

What we learned this week

I’m a fan of agrovoltaics – combining solar panels with farming – and it has a new high profile project. The Vatican’s agrovoltaic project was commissioned by Pope Francis to meet the Vatican’s energy needs. It is now complete, adding the city state to the short list of countries entirely powered by renewable energy.

Meanwhile, the UK government has announced that the long awaited Future Homes Standards will be arriving in the autumn, and are expected to include rules that all new houses will have solar panels. Good news – though I also remember Ed Miliband announcing in 2006 that all new homes would be zero carbon from 2016, and then the Conservatives scrapping that target at the request of the housing lobbyists. So there is a sense of lost time and history repeating itself here.

As climate change destabilises water supplies, nationalists could be handed new tools for ecological warfare. Among the longer term consequences of India and Pakistan’s recent flare in tensions is the suspension of water treaties governing rivers in the region, and Modi’s insistence that “India’s water will flow for India’s benefit.”

The alternative approach is to cooperate over water supplies, as the EU is doing. Their new water resilience strategy is due imminently, and may be called into action sooner rather than later if 2025 rainfall patterns continue.

I very much enjoyed – and also envied, frankly – Indonesia’s micro-libraries that are featured in this photo collection on the Guardian. They include passive design and sustainable materials, as well as being very imaginative and child friendly buildings.

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The evolution of EV charging networks

Last week I charged the electric car in four different countries. All of the chargers worked, and I used the same Electroverse card on all of them. It’s the first time we’ve taken the car outside the UK and it was entirely painless. It was not always like this. Though most charging happens at home,…

Book review: Mountain Tales, by Sauma Roy

Sauma Roy is a journalist and microfinance entrepreneur in Mumbai. She discovered that many of those seeking loans were living on the Deonar landfill site, eking out a living from the city’s waste. Over the course of a decade she visited, got to know people, and tells their stories in the remarkable book Mountain Tales:…

• Book review: Mountain Tales, by Sauma Roy
• The evolution of EV charging networks

Book review: Mountain Tales, by Sauma Roy

Sauma Roy is a journalist and microfinance entrepreneur in Mumbai. She discovered that many of those seeking loans were living on the Deonar landfill site, eking out a living from the city’s waste. Over the course of a decade she visited, got to know people, and tells their stories in the remarkable book Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings.

It’s called Mountain Tales because Deonar is a trash mountain: the city has been dumping its rubbish there since 1899 and it now covers 300 acres, heaped as high as an 18 storey building. A thousand trucks a day arrive and add to it, and pickers scramble over the delivery for anything that can be salvaged and sold – plastic bottles, metal, scraps of fabric. They look out for the trucks coming in from the richer parts of the city, where there’s a better chance of finding edible food and items that can be sold. This is “the world that our castaway possessions made”, and an entire community lives and works in Deonar, now into its third and fourth generations of pickers.

The book tells the story of the dump and the endless wrangling over how to deal with it. We hear about the various factions among the pickers – the fabric gatherers, the ‘magnet people’ who specialise in metals and patrol with a magnet on a stick. The high risk, high reward route is in medical waste, not least because you will have to deal with the gangland bosses that run that bit of the dump. We also jump from the landfill site to the courtroom from time to time, as politicians try and fail to get to grips with the mountainous headache. Compost it? Incinerate it? Re-locate it? Who should take responsibility for it, and what place does the community have in the change?

While there’s a century long story of change here, the spotlight is very much on the people. Roy introduces us to a cast of characters and their families, sharing their lives in detailed descriptions that read like a “non fiction novel”, as she has called it.

It’s a difficult life, as you can imagine. There is the constant danger of cuts and scrapes from broken glass and other hazards. There are fires, moving vehicles in the smoke. There are guards, as the pickers are at various points declared persona non grata. The gas emissions from the waste cause respiratory problems. The carbon monoxide can cause dizzyness and confusion which is understood as mountain spirits which need to be exorcised. Life expectancy is just 39.

And yet, Roy doesn’t set us up to pity the pickers. People make a full and meaningful life for themselves in Deonar. They raise children and have their hopes for them. They start businesses and build homes. They fall in love. They organise and protest. The book is an extraordinary portrait of a community at the margins, allowing us into their experiences, their suffering and their little victories. As a reader, I came to care about them and want the best for them – especially a teenage girl called Farzana, whose harrowing story of survival becomes the focus of the narrative.

What Roy has done in Mountain Tales is shine a light on the darker side of consumerism in India, though every society has an ‘elsewhere’ to deal with their waste. In simply presenting their stories, it’s also a bold declaration that every human life matters. Biographies are not generally written about trash pickers, and there’s something radical and sacred in the book’s quiet insistence that these lives are worth reading about. By inviting us into their experiences, we get to walk with Roy alongside people who are at best overlooked, at worst considered as disposable as the waste they trade in. The result is a book that I found quite beautiful, despite its desolate setting.

• You can buy Mountain Tales from Earthbound Books

#india

The evolution of EV charging networks

Last week I charged the electric car in four different countries. All of the chargers worked, and I used the same Electroverse card on all of them. It’s the first time we’ve taken the car outside the UK and it was entirely painless.

It was not always like this. Though most charging happens at home, early adopters of electric vehicles had to put up with a few frustrations on longer journeys. Charging infrastructure was patchy across England and there were dozens of different suppliers. Most of them needed a membership card or a RFID tag or an app. This wasn’t the case in Scotland, where the government built a national network of chargers, and my north-dwelling brother grumbled bitterly when he had to cross the border and find somewhere to plug in.

That began to change a few years ago. A handful of larger companies rose to the top of a crowded market, and their networks expanded. We found out which companies were more reliable and which ones to avoid. I look out for Instavolt, MFG or Gridserve chargers. If it’s PodPoint or BP Pulse, there’s a 50/50 chance it won’t be working when you get there. Some networks have prioritised growth over maintenance, and leave chargers broken for months. (Special shout-out to BP Pulse here, as I visited a school yesterday that had their chargers installed in the car park in 2020 and they have never worked.)

The overall network has improved. There are more chargers, more high capacity chargers, and they are easier to use. It took a long time for operators to note that people would prefer to pay with their bank cards than to join a club or fiddle about with an app, but that’s pretty much normal now.

Following the growing number of installed chargers, and then the winnowing out of under-performing operators, a third step in convenience is now underway. That’s the consolidation of charge networks into user-friendly universal services. We’ve had the Zap-Map app for a while, which made it easy to find chargers, with live updates on whether they were in use or not. The big step forward is master networks such as Octopus’s Electroverse, which has got over a thousand different operators and almost a million chargers all available on one charge card.

That’s what we used on our travels last week, charging the car in England, France, Belgium and the Netherlands on one service. We get a discount as Octopus customers, and it adds the cost to our household energy bill. There are alternatives. Ovo Charge is one, set up for their home energy customers but open to anyone. Some car companies run their own, such as Kia Charge or Volkswagen’s WeCharge.

There’s more to do. It was almost laughably easy to re-charge in the Netherlands, blessed as it is with more charge points per capita than anywhere else on earth. There’s more to do in the UK, which still has black spots and charging deserts. It’s still possible to find motorway service stations with no working charge points, which is bizarre. But if it’s the charge network that’s been holding you back from getting an electric car, it might be worth looking again.

#EVs

Transparency in recycling from Polytag

One of the big obstacles to creating a circular economy is that there’s a big disconnect between producers and waste. Companies create and sell products, and usually have no involvement with waste disposal. That’s done by an entirely separate industry or by local government. Even if a company wants to take responsibility for the waste they produce, there is rarely a clear route back from the customer. We end up with expensive schemes to post things back or find a drop-off point. You have to be pretty committed to use these, and if you have to drive across town to drop off your handsoap dispensers or used felt tip pens, is there any environmental gain?

This disconnect also means that companies don’t know what happens to their waste. They can switch to recyclable packaging, but they can’t know for sure if people are disposing of it properly, or how much of it is getting recycled.

Polytag is a company that has spotted a gap in the market for better data in the recycling process. They’ve developed a method for adding invisible tags to packaging, similar to QR codes and easily added at the labelling stage. These can be read under UV light, and scanners to detect them can be added to the conveyors at waste processing plants. Because most waste in the UK goes through large centralised processing plants, they’ve calculated that they can scan 90% of the country’s recycling by installing around 40 scanners at waste sites.

There are lots of applications for this technology. One is to help with sorting mixed recycling, which refines the waste stream and delivers higher quality bales of waste materials.

The data produced by these scanners would be useful to the companies, so they can understand what happens to their packaging. If recycling rates of a particular item are low, companies would know that they need to explain themselves better on the packaging. Polytag don’t make a big deal of it, but if you’ve got data on exactly what is being recycled, you could also charge the appropriate companies for it. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to charge the likes of Coca Cola s small recycling fee for every bottle of theirs that goes through a council waste depot? Polytag’s technology could power extended producer responsibilty.

Polytag’s codes can help with bottle deposit schemes too, making it easy and using existing recycling habits. Consumers would be able to scan codes on packaging and get paid as they recycle, without the need to drop off bottles at a reverse vending-machine or bottle bank. This isn’t theoretical – a trial with Ocado recently saw 20,000 people claim a reward for recycling. Since the tags are unique, companies don’t need to wait for the government to sort out incentives for recycling. They can just do it themselves. (As a reminder, the government’s bottle return scheme was announced in 2018 and is expected to begin in October 2027)

Recycling is not the big solution to plastic waste in a circular economy. But better data would open up new possibilities, and a growing list of companies are on board. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more on Polytag as retailers and producers adopt the system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed9YkMmHWgo

#plastic