Author: Michael Shearwood
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The Built Environment – Materials That Last.
Material choices shape how buildings age, endure and adapt. In a changing climate, durability, maintenance and lifecycle performance matter just as much as embodied energy.
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The Built Environment – Form, Orientation, Massing and Function.
Form, orientation, massing and function are decided early — and once set, they shape comfort, energy use and resilience for decades. This post looks at why these quiet design choices matter more than any system added later.
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Designing for a Climate That Is Already Changing
Buildings last for generations. The climate they will face is already changing. This series looks at how design decisions made today shape energy use, resilience and habitability for the next hundred years.
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A Fossil-Smart Future – The Long Game: What Won’t Change Quickly
Some sectors will take much longer to move away from fossil fuels. Aviation, shipping, defence and critical chemicals rely on fuels with properties alternatives cannot yet replace at scale. A credible transition acknowledges these limits and plans for them, rather than ignoring them.
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A Fossil-Smart Future: Harder but Solvable
Reducing fossil-fuel use in heavy industry is harder, slower and more expensive than replacing electricity or cars. But with planning, investment and time, these sectors can still change.
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A Fossil-Smart Future: What Do We Reduce First?
A managed reduction of fossil-fuel use begins with prioritisation. Electricity, urban transport and building energy already have viable alternatives — and that’s where progress can move fastest.
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Towards a Fossil-Smart Future
“Complex problems aren’t solved by political slogans — they’re solved by deciding the order in which the problem should be tackled.” Much of the public debate about climate change still revolves around distant targets and abstract outcomes — net zero by 2050, temperature limits, or emissions curves that feel disconnected from everyday decisions. Yet the…
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COP30: My Expectations Were Low – Just Not This Low
COP30 didn’t collapse — it just stood still. With no roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels and the world’s biggest emitters absent, the summit exposed a process running out of influence. If diplomacy won’t lead, we must ask who will.”
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The Futures We Shape: Manabe, Climate Physics, and the Cost of Delay.
“Models don’t predict the future. They show the consequences of our choices.” 1. A Beginning in a Brick Building Before most people had seen colour television, in a plain brick building at Princeton’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, a young scientist named Syukuro “Suki” Manabe was doing something almost no one had attempted: he was teaching…
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The Target That Vanished: Politics, Net Zero, and the Long View We Forgot
A misty morning over Black Hill becomes a reflection on what’s still worth protecting — and what happens when short-term politics forgets the long-term physics. The first in a two-part series on net-zero, systems thinking, and the need to remember what “normal” once meant.
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