Excellent conference - 100% recommend!

New Energy Institute Blog Post: Spreading the Cap-and-Trade Wealth - @severinborenstein.bsky.social energyathaas.wordpress.com/2025/11/10/spreading-the-cap-and-trade-wealth/ #climatechange #electricity #energyefficiency #naturalgas #solar

The evidence keeps accumulating that Brexit was an astonishing self-inflicted economic policy disaster. The fact that it is a slow-moving one bodes ill for those who think that populist economic mismanagement will translate into voters punishing populists. www.nber.org/system/files...

Look at the distribution of z-values from medical research!

Wonderfully pedantic letter in today’s @financialtimes.com

"The combined upfront cost of the five-year Global Talent Visa ... and the Immigration Health Surcharge ... amounts to £5,941. ... This compares with average upfront fees of £275 across 14 other countries for similar visa schemes." UK visa fees are absurdly high and utterly self-defeating.

Great article on what sounds like a farcical construction project. I will be sure to avoid the sidewalk on this particular block whenever I'm next in NYC.

These policy costs should be removed from electricity bills and funded via general taxation. Immediate ~15-20% price cut right there.

Putting aside the wisdom of newly elected Reform UK councils trying to block clean energy investment in their area, as predicted they actually have limited local powers to deliver on that promise when large projects (like this 700MW solar development) are signed off at the national level.

Grid scale batteries are changing our electricity system. Excellent new visual story on batteries in FT today shows just how far this technology has evolved. Fasten your seatbelts, this is just the beginning. ig.ft.com/mega-batteri...

Exciting opportunities to work with LSE's @gsos-lse.bsky.social Global School of Sustainability * Comms & Events Coordinator * Student Experience Officer * Assistant Prof in Biodiversity Economics, Dept of Geog & Env * Assistant Prof of Philosophy, Dept of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method

We're hiring! Environmental econ AP position with a focus on biodiversity and related topics. Come join our great community here at LSE, with lots of people working in the enviro econ space across campus. Deadline in just under 3 weeks (Oct 26th) and details here: jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Monopoly_IRL

Worldwide solar and wind power generation has outpaced electricity demand this year, and for the first time on record, renewable energies combined generated more power than coal, according to a new analysis. share.google/FrLUSBkG5xrX... 🔌💡 #Upshift

Nice piece out today in the @nytimes.com that includes some coverage of our recent @pnas.org paper on air pollution and pets.

We're hiring! Environmental econ AP position with a focus on biodiversity and related topics. Come join our great community here at LSE, with lots of people working in the enviro econ space across campus. Deadline in just under 3 weeks (Oct 26th) and details here: jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

The growth of Chinese EV and battery exports in the past few years is really something! 🔌💡

Call for papers and posters is open for #envecon2026. It is the UK's only premier applied environmental economics conference gathering research providers and users from academia, public and private sector. www.uknee.org.uk/envecon/enve...

New paper out in @pnas.org! We study the effect of air pollution on pets, finding increased vet admissions when air quality is worse. Tackling air pollution doesn't just matter for human health - it's important for animals too, including people's much loved cats and dogs www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New paper out in @pnas.org! We study the effect of air pollution on pets, finding increased vet admissions when air quality is worse. Tackling air pollution doesn't just matter for human health - it's important for animals too, including people's much loved cats and dogs www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Nice blog on data centers and electricity prices. Also that is a wild stat that one-third of worldwide hyperscale data centers are in Virginia! 🔌💡

Killed by the Net Zero Dad www.economist.com/britain/2025...

Why did Apple take a perfectly functional app for managing a music library (iTunes), that could also transfer directly to an iPhone, and break it up into a bunch of inferior apps that are buggy as hell and have less functionality?! Enshitification in action.

France’s 2022 nuclear outages showed how vital interconnectors are for grid stability 🇫🇷⚡ This year, as heatwaves strained 🇫🇷’s nuclear fleet, interconnectors helped France replace the missing capacity through imports. https://loom.ly/G1lrGlM

Just heard this paper being covered in @economist.com. A 50+% increase in incidence by midcentury is big. Was notable seeing growing concerns about the spread of mosquito-borne diseases when in France over the summer.

📢 Come and work with us! We're looking to recruit an Assistant Professor in Biodiversity Economics Application Deadline: 26 October 2025 More details here: jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/12… Please share

It's weird - but now in Oslo, there's so many EVs that you notice the noise and the smell from individual ICE cars, and you realise how much we've been normalising it for ever. You can smell them half a street away. And inside parking lots are just *quiet*.

why economy bad? why not economy good for little while, where good economy go

LSE Environment Week 2025 is taking place from 22-25 September 🌎 🌱Working with partners across LSE and the world, this week will encourage economists from all fields to work on environmental issues and connect to policy change Register online now ➡️ www.lse-environment-week.com/environment-...

Striking stats in @suttontrust.bsky.social report cited by this piece. Dominance of private school / Oxbridge in media, government and law is really quite damning. Big drop for current cabinet vs previous one though, and hilarious that Oxbridge is apparently not an asset in the Scottish parliament

🌳Join us on September 22nd to launch the LSE Green Skills Lab that will produce academic research on the labour market dynamics of the green and digital twin transition and the development and evaluation of industrial policy to achieve a Just Transition.

Archive footage of Bankside power station, now the Tate Modern. 🔌💡 Clip comes with obligatory upbeat music and a chipper voiceover noting "how it all works only the experts know, but obviously it's in good hands". Wild to think back to an era with large coal and oil power plants in central London.

Cycling in to work with a stiff headwind and clear blue skies thinking "I wonder what the grid is looking like today?" Surprise, surprise: 70% renewables, gas down close to 10%, prices in the single digits (and negative overnight). 🔌💡 grid.iamkate.com

Word of the Day is ‘snerdle’ (19th century): to stay warm and still beneath the covers for as long as humanly possible.

These projects simultaneously seem technically doable (it's just a bigger, longer cable) and kind of wild (transcontinental electricity trade). Still some real challenges though, including financing, sabotage risk, N-1 reliability, international cooperation etc. Not insurmountable, but not easy. 🔌💡

Fascinating segment in today’s @economist.com podcast on this study. ‘96% ranked it as one of the top five most spiritually significant moments of their lives and 42% declared it the single most profound experience they had ever had.’ “[I’ve] never thought of the Holy Spirit the same again”

This chart is wild. Near vertical direction on solar capacity globally, led by China. And as Ember notes in a new report today, that trend is accelerating with nearly 400GW new capacity in first 6 months of 2025.

Follow-up point: in a country where almost half the population still lacks access to electricity, using a bunch of the power from a large new hydroelectric dam for crypto mining (30% according to this Bloomberg piece) is clearly an exceedingly bad idea. 🔌💡

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) came online this week, making it the largest hydropower dam in Africa. With a capacity of 5.1GW it will provide a significant amount of power for Ethiopia's more than 130 million people, as well as exporting to neighbouring countries like Kenya. (1/8) 💡🔌

We should just have GDP figures published every hour with 24/7 coverage - confidence intervals be damned. P.S. I enjoyed the xkcd comic reference. Very apt. xkcd.com/904/

Cool piece of analysis. Really does make the 2007/8 financial crisis seem like a watershed moment, be it in terms of vibes, economics, or the media business.

It's always noticeable how much worse road traffic is on strike days. Had to get a bus yesterday and it took forever. Back to my regular cycle today and aside from busier roads it was a breeze. Bikes truly are the way to get around.

This is pretty funny from Miliband. "I'll give you the energy and climate brief when you pry it from my cold, dead hands".

Nice chart this week which reminded me of this shocking map that we ran five years ago. Clean energy production can't come to Poland soon enough www.economist.com/europe/2025/...

Just spent the afternoon hanging out reading in the park. Local cricket match being played. All kinds of people sat out enjoying the nice weather. A string quartet even did an outdoor music recital. Total hellscape London these days.

Been noticing a lot of AI hype does seem to involve startups claiming "our chatbot/agent will streamline your life by booking travel, replying to emails, finding recipes, answering queries etc". Can often feel like a reheated version of the prior wave of delivery service apps or smart home devices.

Great chart from the FT showing the French nuclear fleet is now routinely flexing down, to accommodate rising solar generation (People often talk about how some reactors CAN flex; but it's often assumed that they WON'T, due to economic incentives)

Some handy AI energy use stats here

Real reforms to property taxation in the UK are long overdue. Would be great to see changes to council tax and stamp duty that can raise money while actually making things fairer and more efficient. We will see what ends up making it into the budget later this year, but this sounds encouraging...

If you could be PM or President for the day but could only make small petty reforms, what would you do? For one, I think I’d ban airports from forcing you to walk through the duty free gauntlet. Truly an awful idea that seems endemic at UK airports.