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It's conference season, so academics merrily criss-cross the world as the planet burns

And there we have it! Choose between maintaining the life-support systems of this planet or AI! "Europe must choose between AI and climate goals, data center lobby says" www.politico.eu/article/euro...

Exciting news!! We have a fully-funded PhD place for a UK home student available 🚨 including a £21k+ a year stipend 🚨. Come and do a PhD with me as your supervisor! Critical tax law, value theory, global production and the legal form, that kind of thing ... fancy it? www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRX657/l...

Not fully done with the podcast yet but I second this recommendation!

Working on a paper on the Bank of Canada's Contingent Term Repo Facility. Using Access to Information requests to fill in some blanks (underused research method imo), I found my paper title. A 'juicy, interesting policy question' is one way to describe bringing asset managers under CB protection

We have a new paper out in EPA! 📊 @jhasselbalch.bsky.social Epistemic Derisking: Knowledge infrastructures in energy finance Beyond financial & regulatory tools, we show how states wield energy models to mobilise private capital for renewables & energy security journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New open access article on @antipodeonline.bsky.social with @nickbernards.bsky.social and Laura Quinteros. We look at green fintech to show how green finance works as fictitious capital. Builds on @cedricdurand.bsky.social

New article out in International Political Sociology, "Making Finance Legible: Speculative Fiction & the Sociology of Futures". It explores how finance builds invisible systems - debt, derivatives, algorithms - that shape the future, & how speculative fiction makes them visible. Link + thread below.

Must read by @danielagabor.bsky.social @benbraun.eurosky.social "This, we argue, is the pathway for the Santa Marta countries to achieve the decarbonized sovereignty imperative—the strategic pursuit of decarbonization as a matter of national security" www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/aga...

I wrote about AMOC newrepublic.com/article/2091...

The first paper of my dissertation is published now in @sociologyjnl.bsky.social! Press coverage of the richest Germans is rare but focused on a minority of highly visible individuals and varies along the historical origins of fortunes. doi.org/10.1177/00380385261428292

"For every additional dollar of windfall profit, approximately $0.20 is booked in tax havens. This diversion intensifies during commodity booms." Noteworthy in light of <gestures broadly at the world> taxobservatory.world/publication/...

This was a bit of a labour. First drafted in the first days of the trump in a fever that is largely gone from this version. But insurance, finance, theory and a Stuart hall cameo survive if you like that kind of thing onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The emerging political economy of deep-sea mining: an analysis of opaque ownership structures www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Today we published our latest investigation, into climate aid & carbon capture. UK funds that could have funded clean energy in poor countries instead developed Chinese oil extraction - including in Xinjiang while Uyghurs were facing human rights abuses. 1/7🧵👇 landclimate.org/xinjiang-ccus/

How is law used to make voluntary carbon markets liquid? Lukas Bogner traces how UNIDROIT's standardisation of carbon credits reshapes property rights in the Global South and drives jurisdictional competition in the Global North. Open access here:

🇪🇺🇮🇳 The EU–India FTA has landed. Two points: (1) The obligation to effectively implement Paris has been weakened: "effectively" has been dropped. (2) The dispute settlement process is 100% political: no expert review, no remedies. All in all, a significant weakening of the trade-climate nexus 🔻

New Paper out with @financeandspace.bsky.social (open access!) about attempts to make voluntary carbon markets 'liquid' via legal standardization, and a source of climate finance for the Global South. Plenty of strange things happening in the process. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

📣 Publication day! The first paper from my project on Europe’s EV battery roll-out is finally out I unpack how the EU’s EV battery boom is entangled with sacrifice zones—investment in Serbia & Hungary de-risked through autocracy. www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandg...

New interesting looking paper on Climate obstruction and the African Petroleum Producers Organization. Research on climate obstruction is dominated by studies of the North American and European context, so this kind of research is very welcome!

Check out our new article "Power in Fossil Fuel Supply-Side Policy: Closing Down and Opening Up Opportunities to Phase Out Fossil Fuel Production" co-authored with @peternewell.bsky.social @freddiedaley.bsky.social and Daniela Soto Hernandez in @gepjournal.bsky.social direct.mit.edu/glep/article...

I have a new review paper out in @environmentalpol.bsky.social! ✨ What would it actually take for states to pursue green transformations? I identify 5 capacities — planning, disciplinary, strategic, legitimation and adaptive — and their respective policy elements, capabilities and institutions

So instead of electrifying vehicle fleets to address climate change we are are instead using battery technology to drive more AI slop? No thanks. www.ft.com/content/8b0a...

PhD Position at Roskilde University - indigenous rights, green transition in the arctic. Great colleagues! Feel free to share. candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

EU research excludes refugee scholars through contradictory policies. Academic freedom is meaningless if it applies only to scholars with the privilege of unrestricted mobility. Read the statement by the @europeanisa.bsky.social endorsing concerns raised by @isanet.bsky.social

In honour of the FT and Statista declaring Deloitte and PwC the top consultancies for sustainability services, worth re-upping @rosiecollington.bsky.social's and my piece on the rise of climate consulting:

Ownership infinity pools: finding control strategies in multinational enterprises, by David P. Castro & Leonard Seabrooke

"Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions, even in the near term, without imposing hardship on communities and the environment" SpaceX is 100% correct about this, even if their proposed solution is hollow nonsense www.spacex.com/updates#xai-...

On the 22nd of January (incidentally, the date of Gramsci's birthday) my article came out in @gpejournal.bsky.social bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journal...

Roskilde University has an open call for PhD proposals at the international section, great for interdisciplinary critical research in IPE, sciology, socio-legal studies, etc. Come and apply! (and please share if you know someone who would want to join us) :) candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

Central bank independence and financial market reaction appear to be two more supposed liberal bulwarks against fascism which have, shockingly, failed.

Just a few things I'd like to say about this @hausfath.bsky.social piece. The first is that every 10th of a degree of heating over 2C raises risks for multiple irreversible catastrophes MORE than every 10th of a degree of heating under 2C. That's why the 2C target exists. It's not random. 🧵

How did ESG go from BlackRock's mainstream opportunity to a political battlefield? Christiansen et al's new commentary maps the anti-ESG backlash: 418 legislative proposals, $12B in divested funds, and the rise of explicitly anti-ESG investment products.

Great reflection points: post-neoliberalism isn’t a rupture; it’s the new centrism. A depoliticized consensus language of “place,” “dignity,” and “storytelling” that avoids power, omits justice and climate, and stabilizes elite rule, serving as a rhetorical bridge between left and right elites.

New commentary! I’ve been doing some work on World Bank experiments with trust funds for conservation in the 1990s. It looks like, having run out of other ways to private finance our way out of climate crisis, they’re back at COP 30 with the TFFF. theconversation.com/the-worlds-n...

I've written a short piece on international law, fetishism, and ideology - now out on Legal Form. I suggest that international law is an ideological fetishism of international relations.

I'm very happy that my dissertation about legal expertise in climate finance was accepted for defense, which will be on November 24th, 14:00 CET. For those interested in listening in online, there's more info here: ruc.dk/en/events/lu... :)

🚨New Article Out! “The Scottish Road to Net Zero: Corporate Welfare and Assetization Cascades” The article focuses on the evolution of the land-based natural capital market in Scotland in light of the country's net zero efforts.

The fact that not only is the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is still increasing, but the *rate of CO2 increasing* in the atmosphere is still increasing is true nightmare stuff.

#Denmark politicians wage a #culture #war on #academia —with @roskildeuni.bsky.social as their go-to target. These attacks are assaults on #freedom, #rights and #democracy. We spoke out: @berlingske.bsky.social : www.berlingske.dk/synspunkter/... @politiken.dk : politiken.dk/debat/debati...

Me and a bunch of brilliant colleagues got an op-ed responding to the recent political attacks on Roskilde University in the Danish newspaper Politiken today.

Hostility towards #academia and #immigrants is widespread. #Denmark is no exception. Under political and media pressure, earlier this week @roskildeuni.bsky.social decided overnight to close its Master's degree in Business Administration and Leadership (BAL) from 2026. 🧶 1/20

Governing through guesstimates: mock precision in international organisations, by Lukas Linsi, Seiki Tanaka, Francesco Giumelli, & @lenseabrooke.bsky.social

I'm hiring two Post-Doctoral Fellows in International Political Economy/Economic Sociology as part of the ADD project funded by the Velux Foundation. The posts are linked to an AI Sustainability package led by Christina Lioma at KU and me at CBS, drawing insights from comp sci & political economy.

“Historically, science fiction has served as a playground for radical imagination, challenging oppressive systems and imagining alternatives. But in Silicon Valley, the genre’s emancipatory potential has been stripped away, repurposed as a legitimizing script for what I call reactionary futurism.”

This is very good so far but one thing it doesn't have is a visual representation of just how far these companies are from breaking even on their AI-related capex:

Deutschland muss zur Einhaltung des 1,5-Grad-Ziels bis 2035 aus fossilem Gas aussteigen. Trotzdem lobbyiert Siemens Energy weiter für den ungebremsten Ausbau von Gaskraftwerken. Fakt ist: Sauberes Gas ist eine dreckige Lüge! Mehr dazu im neuen Bericht von urgewald: www.urgewald.org/shop/siemens...