Nick Taylor

The largest heat wave of the 1960s reached ~6% of the planet, lasting 46 days over the Atlantic and adjacent areas. The largest heat wave of the 2020s hit ~85% of the globe, lasted 367 days, touching virtually everyone. Calling these “heat storms" instead of “heat waves” seems like a good invention.

It’s a too weak rule that assumes markets respond rationally to public information (the ‘semi strong’ efficient markets hypothesis that gave us the GFC!), but now we’re not even doing this? Finance is still blind to the differences between systemic risk and cascading foundational ecosystem failures.

Debt and the Future of Workers by @ggouzoulis.bsky.social @qmul.bsky.social @brisunipress.bsky.social examines how household debt forms an essential part of the capitalist exploitation process. Read the review by Photis Lysandrou @lsereviewofbooks.bsky.social 👉 blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofb...

77% odds of 3C warming is very not good

The worst El Niño in recorded history is brewing — here’s how governments must prepare From southern Africa to the Amazon, the risks are mounting and the window for action is rapidly closing. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The recently formed Carbon Working Group asks what is carbon, how is the carbon value chain organised & who gets to govern it. Highlights from their first workshop here!

"Traffic erodes community ties – neighbours talk less, trust each other less, look out for each other less" - Prof. @jpinasanchez.eurosky.social, @universityofleeds.bsky.social

"The argument that we need more domestic production because otherwise we will import more oil and gas is essentially an argument for maintaining fossil-fuel demand. It takes the failure to reduce demand and uses it as the justification for producing more."

Global data centre investment has already surpassed solar PV, and will soon surpass all renewable investment combined sf-asset-manager.s3.amazonaws.com/97637/1139/8...

🚨NEW PUBLICATION🚨 It's gratifying to see this paper with wonderful friends and co-authors @savannahcox.bsky.social & @zacjtaylor.bsky.social in print at @jcultecon.bsky.social.Thanks again to guest editors @vapunkt.bsky.social & @nataschavanderzwan.bsky.social for sticking with us. Link below!

"DOGE famously used keyword searches for terms like "climate" to terminate federal grants. Among the victims: a collab between USAID and NASA for flood prediction, early warning, disaster readiness, glacier inventories, and mapping dangerous glacial lakes... ...in Nepal." x.com/JeremyKonynd...

On the one hand, some people want to make it so that kids and other people aren't crushed to death by cars. On the other hand, some people are upset that they might have to pay attention, slow down or be inconvenienced by about 15 seconds. So you can see how it's a "war on cars."

My piece on political economy of decarbonizing cement w/ @phenomenalworld.bsky.social A 'senior industry figure I spoke to said[:] “I mean, how are you going to get somebody to lend you money for the investments required if you aren’t making any money in your core business?”' tinyurl.com/c2f9z35s

Penguin has a page up for my new book, coming Feb 2027, HOUSE SOCIETY The epigraph is from Kenneth T. Jackson's famous "Crabgrass Frontier": "... no society can be fully understood apart from the residences of its members" The book is an exploration and affirmation of that thesis!

This stopped me in my tracks. An independent study by @qmul.bsky.social has found that after ULEZ was introduced, children’s lungs grew faster in Central London and have now caught up with children outside of the capital. Incredible.

Intellectually I know this, but seeing it on a graph makes me wince www.ft.com/content/ec59...

Rosette Nebula Image date: 23 April 2025, 16:00 This is a Hubble Space Telescope photo of a small portion of the Rosette Nebula, a huge star-forming region spanning 100 light-years across and located 5,200 light-years away. Hubble zooms into a small portion of the nebula that is only 4 light-ye...

Arday found dead and a very large number of British commentators are deleting posts and videos.

This is the coverage of Arday **just in the Telegraph** in the UK. This is only the first four pages of results, just in one outlet.

I feared this would happen. His story was troubling but the wave of hatred and obsession in the media when he was clearly someone who was vulnerable - whatever you thought of him - was entirely disproportionate and in my view fuelled by racists. My thoughts are with his loved ones tonight.

"By quantitatively demonstrating that local extreme event probabilities are proportional to CO2 emissions, this study shows that emitters cannot escape responsibility for climate impacts by claiming that those impacts are too diffuse or complex to be attributed to fossil fuels."

"Tenbury Wells ... the United Kingdom's first "uninhabitable" town, not because the water has made it physically impossible to live there, but because the withdrawal of insurance has made it financially impossible."

Bordeaux, France, has now recorded more days above 40°C in 2026 alone than during the entire 105-year period from 1920 (when observations began) to 2025. This is deeply shocking.

The growing intermittency of…conventional nuclear energy. www.reuters.com/business/ene...

Aside from defensive strategies, we should also call out investment manager strategies designed to *exploit* climate extremes... www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026...

"Keeping warming below 2°C requires global emissions cuts of 8% every yr... For wealthy nations such as the UK, which repeatedly claim they will lead the transition, the rate of cuts needs to be in excess of 10% yr on yr. Contrast that with the UK gov's enthusiasm for widespread airport expansion!"

The phrase “UK wildfire season” would have sounded strange not long ago. Now it’s becoming increasingly familiar. Climate change isn’t just about hotter days, it’s increasing the conditions that allow wildfires to ignite, spread, and become harder to contain. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Antitrust and the Age of Asset Management - this book by Andrew McLean on the corporate consolidation driven by asset managers looks like it will be an important read (forthcoming Nov) www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

Wow, removing 150 tonnes of CO₂ per year out of thin air! That's a time machine that takes a year to bring us back to an atmosphere we had 0.1 second ago (i.e., less time than it took to read this post).

This is a great defence of Law & Political Economy approaches against the dismissal they receive from Law & Economics. Lots of links to work on climate, antitrust, consumer credit & more lpeproject.org/blog/the-eco...

🔴 For the past year @lucasamin.bsky.social and I have been investigating Palantir in the UK What we found was a company with unrivalled political access, selling a product many data experts in the NHS don’t use, and don’t rate Please read and share democracyforsale.substack.com/p/its-just-a...