If you want full control of where your pension goes can choose your own sustainable investments through a self-invested DIY pension — Go Invest Green contributor Justin Reynolds discusses his experience.
Perhaps I’ve read too much science fiction, but I have long been fascinated by the future, and impatient for its arrival. I want to see the advanced, ecologically sustainable world that technological innovation indicates we could have: cars, trains, ships and airplanes powered by batteries and hydrogen fuel cells; gleaming solar and wind farms; artificial proteins cultivated without animal slaughter; garden cities; the automation of humdrum work and more free time.
We’re getting there, but it could be happening faster. I’ve participated in some of the usual political channels for trying to make it happen, but it took me years…
A new book by Financial Times journalist Alice Ross offers a valuable introduction to the rapidly growing opportunities for green investors.
As readers of the Climate Venture Collective blog will know, the Go Invest Green team is developing an app to help users channel their pension towards funding the emerging green economy.
But pensions are just one kind of investment that can speed the energy transition. Investing to Save the Planet, a new book by Financial Times journalist Alice Ross, offers a valuable introduction to the wider world of green finance. …
From the stabilisation of Antarctica’s sliding glaciers, the mass adoption of regenerative agriculture, to a new age of solar-powered sail and the return of the airship, Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest climate fiction previews the technologies we may — before too much longer — be using in the real world.
Science fiction seems to tend to dystopia. Post-apocalyptic wastelands, rain-soaked megacities, and slave colonies on distant moons offer compelling aesthetics and opportunities for good stories. But the genre has a utopian counter-tradition, less interested in the technological sublime than in how science can be used to make a better world.
Kim Stanley Robinson is science fiction’s most eminent contemporary utopian, returning with each novel to the question of how technology can serve the collective good. …
A new book argues that the case for moving to a sustainable economic model should use the language of desire rather than sacrifice, emphasising what we might gain, not just what we might lose.
Early every morning the commuters descend to the underground, crushing onto the choking tube train. Or they queue at the bus stop, shielding their phones from the enveloping drizzle. Or sit, waiting, in their cars as the traffic lights slowly change.
They enter nondescript offices, from which they emerge only fleetingly for the next eight — or more — hours, to grab an expensive coffee and sandwich from the crowded fast-food outlet. During the afternoon the working day stretches endlessly, as the weary eye seeks to refocus on the blinking cursor. …
What comes first, thought or language? Some notes on the philosophy of language with reference to Le Guin’s great science fiction novel The Dispossessed.
Can we think without language? The question has entangled itself in my mind since I re-read Ursula K Le Guin’s classic science fiction novel The Dispossessed a little earlier this year.
The book seeks to loosen our fixed ideas about how society might be organised by immersing us in the contrasting political and economic systems of Anarres and Urras, worlds locked into a twin planet system orbiting the star Tau Ceti.
Urras is somewhat like our Earth, rich in natural resources, a swirl of competitive nation states, broadly capitalist, generally socially conservative.
Anarres is something quite different: a spartan desert…
Dieter Helm’s latest energy transition manifesto puts a carbon tax at the centre of a programme for navigating the path to a carbon-neutral economy
Reading too many climate crisis books, as your reviewer is prone to do, isn’t good for your mental health. A grim opening chapter presenting the scale of the challenge before us is usually followed by a detailed blueprint for action, which one reads with a sinking feeling as its political unviability becomes apparent.
Dieter Helm, an economics professor at Oxford University, is as well qualified as anyone to try squaring the circle of offering a programme both commensurate to the task at hand and attuned to political reality.
Helm’s prolific publications over the past decade have covered every aspect of…
A ferocious polemic by Andreas Malm, written as the worldwide lockdown took hold, summons the imagery of Soviet war communism to impress the urgency of our predicament
What is the connection between the coronavirus and the climate crisis?Andreas Malm’s brilliant polemic Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, written within a matter of weeks as the worldwide lockdown took hold, argues that their common root and cure are in plain view, if we are willing to see, and act.
Covid-19 is not an act of God that came out of a clear blue sky, but, like climate change, the consequence of rapacious extraction of the Earth’s resources. As we pry ever deeper into the primordial wildernesses where viruses lurk for materials and animals to…
A new book by Ashley Dawson argues that only public control can stop the drift and steer the world towards sustainability
The philosophers Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén in their essay Energy and Experience observe that the visions of limitless abundance unleashed by the rise of the modern oil industry in the late 19th century coincided with the death of God. The gleaming new industrial civilisation to be powered by fossil fuels seemed to open a path to a different kind of transcendence.
People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons by Ashley Dawson is a book haunted by the dream of infinite energy and the boundless new forms of life it promises. …
A review of a new book providing a helpful reference guide to the complex economics of the hydrocarbons sector
The byzantine economics of oil and gas can baffle even industry professionals. Just how do companies calculate the risk of committing substantial resources to testing a possible petroleum find amid so many uncertainties?
And how, given those unknowns, can exploration licences be designed respecting the interests of all parties? How can the security oil and gas travelling through pipelines and shipping channels that cross volatile borders be assured? Why have so many countries found the presence of significant oil and gas resources to be a curse as much as a blessing? What on earth are hydrocracking, alkylation, isomerisation, delayed coking…
A review of Sarah Stewart Johnson’s lyrical reflection on the hopes and fears generations of observers have projected onto the red planet
The insistent call of the red planet, our neighbour, yet utterly alien, is well expressed by the title of Sarah Stewart Johnson’s lyrical book The Sirens of Mars.
Johnson, a planetary scientist at Georgetown University who has contributed to several of NASA’s recent Mars missions, including the ongoing Curiosity Rover programme, considers the hopes and fears Mars has inspired since ancient astronomers wondered at an enigmatic red star shimmering on the horizon.
It’s a deeply personal work, at times reading like spiritual autobiography, a history of Martian exploration interwoven with episodes from the life of a writer whose vocation has…
Justin Reynolds
A London-based business writer and essayist. Find me at translucence.io and @_translucid.
