Jeremy Williams's Blog

The Wellbeing Research Center has released its figures for 2025, reporting on life satisfaction around the world. Respondents are asked to rank their lives on a scale of one to ten, and the country with the highest life satisfaction is Finland at an average of 7.74. The lowest is Afghanistan at 1.36. Madagascar, which I always look up first in global rankings of anything, is 4.16.

Time Magazine on how Ukraine plans to claim climate damages from Russia. We may be a way off that yet, but it’s ...

There was a ground-breaking event in London this week, a first of its kind update on climate change called the National Emergency Briefing. Members of Parliament were invited to attend and many did, as a series of experts set out the state of the climate and the way that Britain will be affected.

The briefing was held right opposite the Houses of Parliament and chaired by Mike Berners-Lee, who warned that attendees would hear “difficult news and we’re going to face it together”. Presenters t...

Over the last couple of months I’ve read a number of books about the future, both positive and negative. It wasn’t particularly intentional as a programme of reading, but it’s been an interesting exercise in comparing and contrasting. Everything Must Go fits well into the theme, as an examination of apocalypse in popular culture.

People have always thought they were living in the last days for one reason or another. Journalist Dorian Lynskey traces the various fears and preoccupations t...

Annual climate talks are a time for big announcements – new targets, new investments and partnerships. Politicians will often declare a new goal in the run-up to the conference, to show leadership or reassure others that they’re doing their part in the giant ‘I will if you will’ of global environmental diplomacy. What happens to those targets afterwards is less public. Sometimes that’s because they weren’t genuine in the first place. Sometimes it’s because they fizzle out or are overtaken by eve...

Britain’s Labour government is tying itself in desperate knots to avoid raising taxes, but some of them would be very popular – such as taxing private planes. Possible have a nice little video highlighting the absurdity of untaxed private planes. Have a look, then email your MP about it.

Another fun little campaign that you might like to take part in is the International Pyjama Party for Night Trains, taking place on December 12th. The idea is to get people to turn up to international station...

In 2018 I came across a striking fact: 99% of the world’s electric buses were in China. It was there that they were commercialised and produced at scale, and every month Chinese cities were adding more buses to their fleets than the rest of the world put together. The benefits of electric buses did not go unnoticed, running quieter and cleaner on city streets, and everyone else wanted them too. So what would the percentage be now?

Outside of London, which has always loved buses, I saw my firs...

We had a heat pump installed in the house earlier this year. With frost on the ground yesterday, it’s been tested in lower temperatures for the first time and is doing just fine. The house is warm and maintaining a steady temperature, and we’re spending less on energy than we did with the gas boiler.

With the heat pump in and running on electricity, the remaining gas infrastructure in the house is obsolete. Not that there’s much of it left. There are some pipes in the walls and under the flo...

Five years ago a whole succession of countries declared net zero targets, to the point that it became something of a standard. Half a decade on, how many of those countries are on track to meet that target?

Fifteen, according to a new study from Allianz. Those 15 countries have already reduced their emissions by a third, which means they would be on track for 2050 if they keep up that pace. A further 20 countries have made good progress, reducing emissions by at least a fifth. They would be a...

COP 30 has prompted the usual rush of project launches and report publications. This one jumped out though, and not just for the late 90s textspeak vibes of its name: Adapt2Win is a campaign for climate adaptation fronted by a host of global sports persons, including Arsenal’s Beth Mead. Having grumbled just this week that adaptation is still a sideshow in climate conversations, it’s good to see a higher profile campaign around it.

Norway has opened its first national plastic recycling centre...

Kristina Lunz runs the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy in Germany, and is the author of The Future of Foreign Policy is Feminist. That was a really useful book, and so this follow-up immediately had my attention. In this shorter book, Lunz takes one of the foundational principles of her work – empathy – and explores its role in politics.

Empathy is the ability to see things from different points of view, which seems to me to be an obviously useful thing in our polarised times. Underst...