It is unclear whether many on the right understand why we have institutions. It is actually rather rare that the positive case for liberal institutionalism is put forward, and much more frequent that institutions are condemned for being out of touch with the public in some way. /1

The time to confront it was 20 years ago but those of us who argued for it were dismissed or ridiculed. China was going to be coaxed into the liberal democratic world by trade and the Olympics. Didn’t happen and was never going to.

cooked his ass

I’d always wondered why no one had ever published a full, detailed map of the 1960s plan to turn London into a giant web of US-style urban motorways…. It turns even the politicians and designers didn’t make one at the time. It just didn’t exist. Until now.

Okay a nice unironic one now.

This video is brilliant: buff.ly/1zyTWmM Seems a total slam dunk that owners of private jets should pay fuel duties. Doesn't it? The answer is annoying. Thread:

there's an entire sub culture of middle age men who are so impervious to other views that at no point have they ever read any of the many comments pointing out that an obsessive interest in student politics is deeply fucking creepy? anyway, this is worse.

Travelling on a train packed with Preston fans, and I wish the very best of luck to their opponents Millwall today.

This is almost a perfect study in how complicated market rules create opportunities to do things that the rule makers did not expect. Because the incentives to find margin will always beat the incentive on the harassed bureaucrat trying to find edge cases. We should've just banned Russian oil.

Ed Miliband is entirely right about this. There are legitimate critiques of specific climate policies, but much of the criticism is either scientifically illiterate denialism or ‘it’s just too hard’ defeatism - and often it’s both. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

The Wilkes, "Tech founders are crippling nerds who don't understand people," theory of innovation failure.

Fellow map painters who are on the shelf about the latest iteration of the greatest map painting application: this opinion is Correct.

Deeply disappointed that the Saudis didn't even get far enough to create something whose ruins would be an awesome location for games and films. But still, this couldn't happen to a nicer autocrat.

NEW REPORT: POWERING HOMES, POWERING GROWTH Taking the carbon out of heating buildings is one of the hardest parts of climate policy. Our new report starts by pointing out that while it is indeed hard, that doesn’t justify the poor performance of multiple governments in trying to tackle it. /1

Pretty extraordinary story here www-bbc-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.bbc....

Displaced elites invoking the common people to try and reconquer their place at the top of the social and political hierarchy, innit.

DESNZ have dropped the new Carbon Plan. I have two tests: is this legally robust, and does it have a plausible pathway for heat? /1 www.gov.uk/government/p...

FACTCHECK: The frontpage of today's Daily Telegraph has a very confused story about offshore wind, which is all sorts of wrong It says a technical change means higher subsidies & fewer new windfarms from the upcoming AR7 auction Oopsie! This is the opposite of the truth 🧵

"How 40 years of change brought globalisation without trust" - my latest long read (based on a talk given this morning) seems immediately relevant given further US-China tensions over global supply chains. Global markets are a reality ---> ecipe.org/blog/the-new...

I must disagree with Andrew here. Democracies are in a race to demonstrate that the vote is both instrumentally valuable as well as morally valuable; that popular control is better for people than the Chinese model of state-backed capitalism. /1

"To say 'Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class' is an insulting, facile distraction from the fact that Sultana refuses to support the Ukrainian people’s fight for existence." Proper cold fury and moral clarity from @paulmason.bsky.social on Sultana. open.substack.com/pub/htsf/p/c...

AR7 analysis: How much offshore wind will the govt be able to contract at the upcoming CfD auction? It depends on the "strike price", but roughly… 6GW at £70/MWh 5GW at £80/MWh 4GW at £90/MWh THREAD 1/6

£900m for offshore wind is a strong signal to the sector that holding down costs is paramount, and accepting that it may not deliver enough offshore wind to meet the Government's decarbonisation target. At this juncture, this is the correct move. www.gov.uk/government/p...

There is a serious, principled case for a codified constitution, for some of the reasons George sets out. But botching together a constitution to stop Farage - a constitution that could not command widespread support and that was widely seen as rigged - would deepen our problems, not resolve them.🧵

So here for old energy industry people being extremely pedantic in the pages of the Times.

I don't understand how anyone who delegates firing people thinks they can retain the support of their staff. If you're not willing to wield the knife yourself, how can anyone respect you?

My column in the @ftweekend.com: Keir Starmer is in trouble because he has not been serious about governing, and the best way for him to turn things around is for him to become serious:

I'm in the Telegraph today, making the point that keeping support for clean power means holding down costs. /1 www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...

Turning and turning in the collapsing gyre.

Delighted that our Independent Review of Greenhouse Gas Removals has now been published. It was chaired by Dr. Alan Whitehead and staffed by a small, dedicated, secretariat, all of whom deserve great credit for achieving so much in a short period of time.

We don't do mass democratic politics anymore (Skocpol!); we do authenticity theater. Where authenticity is determined through an inchoate theory of mind as implemented by a wealthy consultant class.

Equilibrium effects could drive Stephen's hypothesis - i.e. if the population declines then there's more housing available, so people can accrue wealth and stability earlier and are therefore more likely to have kids earlier.

"Equator is founded on our conviction that the storied titles of the Anglophone West cannot be internally reformed, nor redeemed by their periodic U-turns and belated mea culpas. The time has come to create something new." Today we publish Equator's editorial declaration. Join us: www.equator.org

Such a bad way of doing this sort of thing. Business responds, "I don't like X," Civil Service responds, "But X provides important co-benefits Y and Z," in equivocal advice to a non-expert Minister, and nothing changes.

Directing capital is the highest value add activity under capitalism, and therefore those that direct capital will pay the most for the brightest minds. Only those who can already afford to will enter into the culturally important jobs the author identifies.

For all the concerns about battery fires, it's worth noting that we've been using electrically powered transport for over a century and have figured out how to manage risk. This is from the old Mail Line at the Postal Museum.

sort of curious to know what video games the disgraced royal is playing. is he a big paradox guy or is he just putting 100s of hours into romance visual novels

WE NEED TO BE MORE FRENCH. This is the theme of our new paper on cutting bills through energy saving measures, published today and highlighted in The Times. /1 www.thetimes.com/uk/environme...

You're absolutely right — starting a land war in Asia wasn't just a bad call, it's 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰 𝗯𝗹𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀. Thank you for calling me out on that — really. I'll be extra-strategic from now on. Would you like me to get cracking on those 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗼𝘀𝗰𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿?

Thank you so much to @gabyhinsliff.bsky.social for writing this. Pretty much every dad I know feels this way, but also often feels they can’t articulate it. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The lesson from every attempted coup in history is that if you are not absolutely brutal with the coup plotters they will try again. Going softly softly after Jan 6 is why America is in the state it is today.

Okay, I am totally changing my position on AI, as I've just discovered ChatGPT can convert an image of a table into an actual Excel table. The productivity of WonkLand will skyrockets. Relatedly, the productivity of the UK will plummet.

Love this for him, perhaps the most Rishi Sunak imaginable after-premiership bit of good work he could do.

The Pope, the Terminator, and a Wicked Problem walk into a bar. If you told me 2 yrs ago I'd spend a week in the Vatican w them I'd say you were nuts. But then if 20 years ago you told me the Catholic Church would be standing up for climate science vs denialist freaks I'd have you committed.

This is also a story of failing to learn lessons- ten years ago (!) I worked on an energy efficiency scheme at the Treasury, the Green Deal Home Improvement Fund. That was also ripe for fraud and poor quality work, and the NAO found that the "lack of consistency... could increase the long-term cost"

Two points in this appalling story of Government failure. Firstly, solid wall insulation is by some degree the most expensive form of insulation. This means that these measures are now guaranteed to cost more than they would ever save. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Missed opportunity to say, "The Hunt for the Slow November." www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This is just automated PUA stuff, the modern negging for the modern pathetic wazzock. These men deserve to contribute to the 'male loneliness epidemic' until they stop thinking women have cheat codes and start thinking of them as people.

The only notifications I get from Twitter now are from climate sceptics having a go at me for something I said in the media. I am very happy to never go back.