The French government has announced the measures of its plan to accelerate electrification: - a ban on gas boilers in new houses from the end of 2026 - increased support for replacing old heating with heat pumps - 100 regions will pilot comprehensive heat transition plans to phase out gas by 2030

Thought this was fascinating. '[Extracted soil] deposits contained...undecomposed organic matter, inc. fish bones from meals eaten [on board], fragments of leather, wooden tools, chopsticks, and flakes of lacquer. These remnants promise a window into the daily texture of life on a doomed vessel'

Read more in my (open access) book on climate optimism: doi.org/10.1007/978-...

Endo Homare, emeritus professor at Tsukuba University, calls on Japan to resume Russian oil imports from the ESPO pipeline to Kozmino. She accuses Takaichi of being unfaithful to Abe’s legacy by maintaining a tough stance against Russia. news.yahoo.co.jp/expert/artic...

For the quants in Baraqua, it's linear regression all the way (source: www.reddit.com/r/economicsm...)

Japan introduced its joint custody system on Wednesday, marking a sweeping overhaul of the country's family law under a revised Civil Code, the first of its kind in over a century. 👉 ebx.sh/rzYXel

The combination of a political demand on the right for ICE-style deportation campaigns, and the woeful data-management of the Home Office, looks like a calamity waiting to happen. Windrush should cast a longer shadow than it does. www.economist.com/britain/2026...

R-Hacks N.13 is out: Calling a Chatbot from R with ellmer Stop copy-pasting between R and AI tools. Bring AI directly into your workflow instead. Minimal example • Python comparison • Analyst use case Read it here → romerusersgroup.github.io/content/rhac... #rstats #RProgramming #AI #DataScience

Nice article. Also, I want that robot.

This kind of thing is why @danwphilosophy.bsky.social idea of a “marketplace of rationalizations” is useful. People are more willing to make up (supply) absurd things because there’s such a strong demand for them. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Glad to see Ami town council in #Ibaraki leads clamping down on the #cricket scourge. #クリケット NO MORE mei-thwacku! Stop overtourism! No Barmy Army in balmy Ami.

📢 Our paper has been published in @commsearth.nature.com How does extreme heat 🥵 change the “value” of urban green spaces 🌳? Using smartphone location data 📍 combined with a survey, we evaluate how high temperature & humidity affect the recreational value. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

I recently learned about this new bill, which risks taking away reproductive rights from anyone not in a heterosexual marriage. digital.asahi.com/articles/DA3...

When young immigrants were shut out of South Korea during COVID, firms did not simply substitute native workers. Instead, many contracted, some exited & some reallocated domestic workers to lower-skill tasks at lower wages Jongkwan Lee, Giovanni Peri, Hee-Seung Yang cepr.org/voxeu/column... #EconSky

The Tokyo studios of NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corp.), c. 1948.

In the March Environmental and Resource Economics: lead exposure is falling in many countries, but risks from legacy water systems remain. Chanheung Cho & Younghyeon Jeon assess an intervention to replace domestic lead piping in the US. #EAERE

In the March Environmental and Resource Economics: The Ricardian model is a widely-used approach to measuring economic impacts of climate change when farmers adapt their behaviour. Charlotte Fabri, Sergei Schaub, Steven Van Passel & Tobias Dalhaus examine its robustness. #EAERE

In Environmental and Resource Economics for March: Exposure to pollutants is often related to income. Xiao Wang, George Deltas, Madhu Khanna & Xiang Bi investigate how plant relocation affects environmental inequalities for the US. #EAERE buff.ly/jdmgO02

An exciting milestone for @plosclimate.org! Learn more about the journal’s development, achievements to date, and direction for the years ahead in this new editorial. ⬇️

YES!

Hi Sunder, thank you for your consistently excellent reporting on this. In case it's useful, Reunite Families UK has just published a report detailing families' concerns about the impact of the proposed Earned Settlement reforms. reunitefamiliesuk.co.uk/rfuk-members...

The government's "earned settlement" proposals "pull the rug from under those who have planned their lives and commitments and are contributing to our economy and to our society...I believe in a country where we keep our word and live up to our values” Absolutely right from Angela Rayner.

the spatial distribution of tsunami-derived place names across three Tōhoku prefectures Black shading: place names tied to narratives of tsunami events Hatched: place names referencing physical traces of past tsunami

Ministers abandon ‘opt-out’ policy after backlash from Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney over the ‘theft’ of creative material for software training

Industrial carbon pricing is not the reason groceries are more expensive. Our latest analysis shows its effect on food prices is a miniscule 0.1%—like adding a penny to the cost of 2 cartons of eggs. Read more ⬇️ nationalnewswatch.com/2026/03/16/i...

Over 300 people in Tokyo marked the 30th anniversary of the settlement reached in high-profile lawsuits filed by hemophilia patients who were treated with HIV-tainted blood.

Coventry, City of Peace and Reconciliation 🙏

You can find some follow-up work to this paper posted on the I4Replication website. i4replication.org/the-vanishin...

Good opinion piece by Harvard Professor @naomioreskes.bsky.social ”EPA throws out science in favour of anti-regulatory ideology” … true. www.bmj.com/content/392/...

* in the EU. (I'm not saying the same wouldn't be true elsewhere, but as the authors acknowledge, even within the EU the distributional effects are very different across countries).

TV tonight: how the Dunblane massacre led Britain to ban handguns

Which makes me wonder, what is the longest running unchanged price in Japan?* * for something regular, not those carrots from the mujin hanbai

BIOECON Conference #27 “Economics, Finance and Nature Based Risks” Call for submissions is now available. The conference is at St John’s, Cambridge Uni, 6th-8th of Sept 2026. www.bioecon-network.org/pages/27th_2... Keynotes: Pr. Jennifer Alix-Garcia (Oregon State) and Pr. Robin Burgess (LSE)

In Environmental and Resource Economics for March: nations incur losses if they tackle climate change in a non-cooperative and self-interested manner. Thomas Eichner & Rüdiger Pethig revisit scope for global cooperation when countries are not completely self-interested. #EAERE

Wuhuu, Publication Alert! 📣 My first, first-author article (and first chapter of my dissertation), ‘Farmer Identity and Risk Preferences in Farmers' Choices Between Public and Private Agri-Environmental Contracts’, is now published #openaccess in #QOpen. 🔑🔒 1/9

This is great news. Finland to restore marshlands, which will (1) act as an natural barrier to deter a Russian invasion, (2) be a carbon sink to slow down climate change, (3) protect biodiversity. Superb!

Well, I knew Japan had coal mines but I still hadn’t expected the Karst landscapes of Yamaguchi ken, let alone the caves of Akiyoshido.

Earthquake refugee camp [バラック, ‘barakku’] on the Imperial Palace plaza, Tokyo, 1923.

When you collect data online, are the results from humans or AI? In a project led by Booth PhD student Grace Zhang, we estimate the prevalence of AI agents on commonly used survey platforms: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

In Environmental and Resource Economics for March: using Europe's carbon trading system as a case study, Fabio Di Dio & Lorenzo Frattarolo investigate how environmental regulation affects the impact of macroeconomic shocks. #EAERE #EconSky

In 2000, Ted Chiag published a short story in Nature that started like this. It’s been on my mind a lot these days. Definitely recommend it and Chiang’s science fiction if you don’t know it already.

Markus Englund built a tool for identifying repetitive sequences in scientific datasets! Read up here: www.sciencedetective.org/scientific-d...

there i was, thinking about a piece defending the EU ETS, and the big boss has already done it: "Few policies have done more to combat climate change than the European Union’s emissions trading system." gift link via @opinion.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Time to get into grounds maintenance

🗃️ In the first part of three articles, Tsz Ho (Brian) Wong explores how to use NDLJP's digital collections to reconstruct the biographies of little known historical figures 📜 🏺 ⛩️ #digitalhumanities #history #historicalfigures #Japan #coding #academicsky 🔗 digitalorientalist.com/2025/02/11/u...

In March's Environmental and Resource Economics: Ilona Dielen, Patrice Bougette & Christophe Charlier calculate that delays in introducing emissions regulation created by a European a lorry cartel increased average infant hospital admissions by 12–18 cases per 1000 births. buff.ly/EeOe293

A hugely important message from the UK PM. It is vital everyone listens to it in full to understand the situation in the Middle East tonight. As things escalate, there are 200,000 British citizens in the region who are at risk. www.instagram.com/reel/DVW0LmL...

Cultural tightness reduces a person’s ability to be funny

Our recent report on unlocking thermal energy looks at how capturing, storing and re-using waste heat from industrial processes could be a huge opportunity for the UK to make progress towards #NetZero: https://royalsociety.org/news/2026/01/thermal-efficiency-in-industry/