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.

Didn't realise this nonsensical government advice about deleting emails was now all over the news as top advice. Madness. www.thetimes.com/uk/environme... www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08... www.independent.co.uk/news/delete-... metro.co.uk/2025/08/12/d...

I’ve been wondering about the UK’s approach to heat pump deployment. Everything is focused on air-to-water heat pumps. The intent is to replace existing gas boilers by providing hot water and plugging into existing central heating systems (ie hot water radiators). But does this make sense? 🔌💡

A debate is brewing about electricity prices in the UK, with concerns about how expensive they are and the fairness of the way tariffs are structured. This latest proposal from @ofgem.gov.uk strikes me as having the potential to be the least worst option for resolving some of these issues. (1/14)

Nice! Would be good to not entirely replace the gas tax - petrol/diesel cars should still pay something extra to account for emissions/pollution impacts. But overall a shift towards mileage taxes is long overdue.

This. Taxing social bads (gambling) to fund social goods (tackling child poverty) should be a no brainer.

Very exciting to see Google step up on load flexibility of data centers. Hope we'll see other hyperscalers do the same. Critical for developing AI while maintaining reliable grids and reasonable electricity prices. (my blog: energyathaas.wordpress.com/2025/04/14/c...) 🔌💡 blog.google/inside-googl...

Motherfucking wind farms…

Tax. The. Gambling. Industry. More.

This! I have a strong preference for classrooms on campus that are newer and have one of these CO2 detectors on the wall. Being stuck doing back-to-back teaching in an old room with minimal ventilation in winter is the worst.

#climateflation graphic of the day, via @financialtimes.com

Personally I find this kind of "review" quite unhelpful and misleading. Economics teaching of environmental issues (climate, biodiversity, pollution etc) has expanded a lot in recent decades. There's huge interest from students and on the research side the environment field keeps growing rapidly. 📈📉

Sometimes quietly wish my research occasionally involved superconducting magnets producing 10x luminosity. Science is cool.

After a lengthy review the UK government recently decided not to pursue locational pricing reforms to the electricity wholesale markets. I figured I’d offer a retelling of this saga and a few thoughts of my own. Energy nerds were out in force for this debate too so other takes are welcome. (1/n)

Fun Star Wars fact is that the Aldhani heist in Andor season one was shot at the Cruachan Dam pumped hydro power station in Scotland. I'm curious what the economic verdict is on the merits of UK film production subsidies, but it is at least kind of cool seeing familiar locations show up on screen.

I try to be open minded when people engage with climate issues, but this kind of argument about AC is really very silly. You only need replace “cooling” with “heating” to see that using appliances/energy to protect against temperature extremes should not be viewed as some kind of moral sin.

This figure from the article illustrates that the low adoption of air conditioning in European cities results in much higher heat-related mortality during extreme heatwaves compared to American cities, where air conditioning is more widespread.

Very much agree with this. The PM has expressed regret about the tone of the announcement earlier this year on immigration. They should listen to @britishacademy.bsky.social here on the substance too.

Today in @financialtimes.com: OpEd on how it is tempting to let gas outcompete coal, but why the long-term consequence is less renewables and more emissions + policy implications for Europe based on: The Gas Trap, with @kholtsmark.bsky.social, forthcoming in JPE. www.ft.com/content/e969...

Call for Papers: #LSEEnvironmentWeek (22-25 Sept 2025) Fourth conference co-hosted by @STICERD_LSE's EEE Programme @The_IGC We welcome papers from all economists working on environmental questions. 📅 Deadline 14/07/25 Submit your paper 👉 ow.ly/Wtob50Wcsw0

This is a nice summary of the Spanish grid operator's reports on the May Iberian blackout. As with any big event like this, there were many interdependent causes, but the TL;DR is that 3 nuclear and 7 gas plants failed to provide the voltage control that the grid operator contracted them to provide.

We can all think of airports we hate, but what is one you actually really like? ✈️ My vote goes to San Francisco (SFO).

Riding Amtrak over the Sierras from Reno to the Bay Area for a conference in Berkeley. It’s a pretty journey, but at 7+hrs it’s real slow (twice as long as driving) and always delayed. Wish the US had even mildly more convenient train service, especially out west - it really is a nicer way to travel

Really striking chart. Hope to see more integrated TfL-style transport networks outside London. Manchester under @andyburnham.bsky.social already heading in the right direction - more cities need the local powers to do the same.

Initial report on the Iberian grid outage has been released. @elpais.com has a nice piece on it. Notably the report points to key failures by the grid operator and conventional plants to manage overvoltages. Will do a seperate thread when I've had time to digest the full findings in the report. 🔌💡

If you're going to be accused of waging a war on motorists whatever you do, you might as well make some overdue reforms and raise some revenue. I'd support ending recent fuel duty cuts and introducing a new pence per mile road tax (via MOTs) that phases in as EVs replace the petrol/diesel fleet.

Interesting piece from @insideclimatenews.org on excess utility rates of return and rising electricity prices. Nice to see our research on this topic get a mention too. 🔌💡