This really is quite something. In the 15 years @carbonbrief.org have tracked UK media, 2025 was first ever year where more newspaper editorials opposed #climate action than supported it. Meanwhile, the *actual* climate crisis deepens by the month. Go figure.

"Smartphones are an accelerator of deeper forces already at work" x.com/JesusFerna70...

Johann Wadephul says Europe must learn from Ukraine on energy security. That was not praise. It was a warning. Europe is not immune to attacks on critical infrastructure. Ukraine’s lesson: decentralised power, fast repairs, microgrids, storage, redundancy.

Im Zuammenhang mit dem jüngsten Gutachten, das die Rechtmäßigkeit des geplanten Gebäudemodernisierungsgesetzes infrage stellt, finde ich ja diesen Absatz aus dem Anschreiben des BMWE zur Kabinettsentscheidung in der verganganen Woche interessant:

Er wirft der Palästinensischen Autonomiebehörde vor, einen Haftbefehl gegen ihn erwirkt zu haben. Bezalel Smotrich will ein Dorf im Westjordanland räumen lassen.

Denn wenn jeder Mitgliedstaat nur seine eigene Wirtschaft subventioniert, erkauft sich Europa Wettbewerbsfähigkeit nach außen mit unfairem Wettbewerb nach innen. Das zerstört den Binnenmarkt. Friedrich Merz hat beim Karlspreis die Chance gehabt, das zu adressieren – und sie vertan.

Ausgezeichnet, ignoriert! Mario Draghi hat aufgeschrieben, was zu tun ist, damit Europa sich wieder zwischen China und Trump behaupten kann – und bekam dafür den Karlspreis. Zurecht. Doch ausgerechnet sein Laudator Merz nimmt die Analyse nicht ernst. Wer lobt ohne zu handeln, schwächt Europa.

Übrigens auch tragisch: Deutschland wird die kommenden Jahre sehr sehr sehr viel Geld für die Rüstung ausgeben, es dürfte aber kaum eine Handvoll Ökonom:innen geben, die sich ernsthaft mit Rüstungsökonomie, Waffen-Innovationen und strategischer Planung auskennen. Ein sehr teures Versehen der BuReg.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau personally intervened to obtain a US visa for former Polish justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro, who fled criminal charges in Poland, according to Reuters' sources. He argued Ziobro is being "unjustly prosecuted" and the matter is one of "national security"

Alliance building... "During his summit with Xi, Trump also suggested that the US, China and Russia should join forces to combat the ICC, saying their interests were aligned, according to the people familiar with the talks." www.ft.com/content/567c...

"During his summit with Xi, Trump also suggested that the US, China and Russia should join forces to combat the ICC, saying their interests were aligned, according to the people familiar with the talks."

Think I need to buy How to Win a Trade War? (The rest of you have lost the book promotion arms race.)

Personally, what I reject most are arguments that the EU would seek to make it difficult for the UK to rejoin. Yes, there might be some discussions on previous opt-outs, but ultimately a UK rejoin would be the biggest symbolic triumph of European integration in a long long time.

Für Akzeptanz zwingend notwendig: - Sozialer Ausgleich (sozial gestaffelte Förderung bei Regulierung oder sozial gestaffelte Rückzahlung bei Preis) - Langfristige stabile Vision, denn jede Änderung der Richtung führt zu Fehlinvestitionen und Frustration www.tagesschau.de/wissen/klima...

"Wes Streeting, one of the candidates to replace Starmer, said publicly last weekend what many have said in private: that in the interests of winning an election, the prime minister created a hostile environment for new thinking or ideas." www.ft.com/content/1958...

I'm baffled at the vehemence with which some academic and analyst colleagues claim that the UK would never rejoin the EU in their lifetimes For the last decade we have seen crazy shit happen on a monthly basis that was declared impossible 20 years ago, yet Rejoin is not worth contemplating? Really?

"Greenlandic and Danish officials ... tried to argue that the agreement gave the United States such a free hand for forces on Greenland that there was no need to take over the island." Unfortunately, for Trump that same free hand also means there's no reason not to take over the island.

Dass die CO2-Emissionen nicht mehr so stark ansteigen wie 2011 im 'worst-case' Szenario (RCP8.5) angenommen, ist mindestens teilweise Erfolg der Klimapolitik. Es ist ein wichtiger Schritt in die richtige Richtung, aber keineswegs Grund zur Entwarnung. www.theclimatebrink.com/p/on-the-dea...

It would, however, be a rather fascinating historical irony if Rejoining the EU becomes one of the core dynamics making Labour unmanageable in the way that Leaving the EU became the cause that made the Conservatives unmanageable

Tatsächlich hält nicht nur dieses von der Klimaunion beauftragte Gutachten Reiches "Heizungsgesetz" für verfassungswidrig - ich kenne überhaupt niemanden in der Zunft, der das anders sieht. www.faz.net/aktuell/poli...

8/12 The consequence of its refusal to adjust is that today China has the second largest debt burden of any country (after Japan) and the fastest-growing debt burden in history. China's growth model simply isn't sustainable.

The people behind this are openly neo-Nazi. Reminder that the Conservatives argued this march was fine as it did not directly target any particular groups, beyond “criticism of religion”.

"In country after country the birth rate plunged after the introduction of smartphones, no matter what the previous trend was. " www.ft.com/content/fba3...

The reason people keep doing crimes for Trump is that you get rewarded for doing them, congratulations to Colorado's Dem governor for making sure we get more people trying to overturn elections on his behalf bsky.app/profile/kyle...

Commuting by bicycle in Belgium pays off as employees earn compensation for every km they ride. 1 in 6 employees commute by bike and get a bicycle allowance of €0.28/km. People cycling to work in 2024 earned an average of around €460 net per year (some as high as €810), up 20% over the past year.

Der Normenkontrollrat urteilt: Reiche's Heizungsgesetz sei "das handwerklich schwächste und praxisfernste Vorhaben", das ihm in den letzten Jahren vorgelegt wurde. Der Städtetag warnt vor Wirrwarr in den Kommunen. Die SPD muss im Bundestag das Gaslobby-Gesetz stoppen! www.spiegel.de/politik/deut...

this Elon Musk plot to steal your 401(k) money is really going underdiscussed

For two years, I've watched some Americans on the left insist that there is no way anyone in Hamas could have committed sexual violence against Israeli Jews on October 7, 2023, or against hostages in Gaza, despite Amnesty documenting it. Now I'm seeing pro-Israel people doing the same denial.

Ziel war: ab 2035 100% emissionsfreie Neuwagen. Die EVP macht 73% daraus. Und Plug-in-Hybride sollen als 80%iges E-Auto zählen, obwohl sie 80% Verbrenner fahren. Für den Hochlauf der E-Industrie ist das der Killer. Wer das will, kann den Markt auch gleich an China übergeben.

Again, the point at which Democrats needed to burn it all down & stop the authoritarianism in its tracks was December 12, 2000, when the Wizards In Robes decided that people's votes didn't need to be counted. Everything since has been the inevitable outcome of that levee breaking.

2012: "The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

Yeah. bsky.app/profile/bbko...

2. First, as Cosma and I have argued for years, Singularity Brain is a bad way to think about the future. So too, a related set of claims along the lines of How AI Will Perfect [Markets/Bureaucracy/Democracy]. We argue that Herbert Simon + Coarse Grainings is a better way to think about this.

One of the many curiosities of this decision is that Nigel Farage is the only serving UK political leader (to my knowledge) to have been criticised by the Board of Deputies for personally using rhetoric linked to antisemitic conspiracy theories, for which he has never apologised.

Reform mobilising non-voters looks to be a big story from this year’s locals. As so often, non-voters are the “dark matter” of politics - rarely discussed but so numerous they even mobilising a small slice can have big effects. Particularly in low turnout local elections.

Es ist ja außerhalb von Sachsen kaum bekannt, aber dort hat sich in den letzten Jahren eine Partei rechts (!) von der AfD etabliert, die Freien Sachsen (Reichsbürgermillieu), die bei den letzten Kommunalwahlen überall dort in dir Kreis- und Stadträte kam, wo sie angetreten ist.

Habe lange keine #tagesthemen mehr geguckt, aber ist es normal das dort - quasi in der Herzkammer unseres ÖRRs - sexistische Protagonisten eines Hetzportals zu Wort kommen und als zitierbare Quelle normalisiert werden? 🤯

We have implemented the competitive authoritarian system from the book, Don't Implement the Competitive Authoritarian System

Noch deutlicher wird die Adressatin mit Sätzen wie diesem über die Redispatchkosten: „Wer pauschal ‚drei Milliarden Verschwendung‘ in den Raum stellt, betreibt keine seriöse Kostenanalyse, sondern politische Stimmungsmache.“

„Wer den Ausbau der Erneuerbaren verlangsamt, handelt grob fahrlässig, da er Deutschland in einer ineffizienten, teuren Vergangenheit festschreibt.“ Das schreibt CDU-Klimaexperte Thomas Heilmann - und auch wenn er keine Namen nennt, dürfte klar sein, wer gemeint ist… table.media/ceo/tablesta...

beloved pastimes (ranked): 1. root canal 2. hearing podcasts about what "the left" did wrong

Breaking: it turns out that a strategy that literally every political scientist went 'No, don't do that. That's nuts!' is, in fact, nuts.

This website collects, summarises, analyses and visualises the starvation of Gaza in the last 30 months. Initiated by colleagues of mine from the Hebrew University. bearing-witness.com/starvation-s...

The entire right wing ecosystem, from politics to media to business, is just for-profit contrarianism. The formula is: they name a real shortcoming of the imperfect status quo and once they got you they sell you horseshit that's much, much worse

"To build his mammoth White House ballroom, President Trump last summer chose Maryland-based Clark Construction... In January...the Trump administration secretly gave the company a no-bid contract to do another job at a sharply inflated price." Plus declared it all an "emergency." Orban Playbook.

Meanwhile the California grid now boasts the equivalent of 12 nuclear power plants worth of batteries -- the total cost of which was, I suspect, less than a single nuclear plant.

🇪🇺 & 🇩🇪 haben ein LNG-Problem: Weil Katar in den nächsten Jahren weniger Flüssiggas liefern kann, droht man abhängiger von US-Importen zu werden. Schlechte Aussichten. Besser ist es Gas durch heimishce Erneuerbare zu ersetzen. Die Energiewende wird zu einer Frage der nationalen Sicherheit.

Auch in Deutschland und Europa ist (wäre mehr) grüner Strom Sicherheit - und natürlich Klimaschutz. So viel win-win ist selten, weshalb die Energiepolitik der Bundesregierung selten dämlich, halt lose-lose ist.

dems should explicitly pitch "reducing" US international aid to only 5% of GDP, a reasonable proportion that the median voter would approve of