Historic heat is forcing the French government to rethink its spending plans.
Austerity and climate (in)action
In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, many governments implemented austerity policies aimed at reducing budget deficits through public spending cuts. This column examines the rollout of programme awarding grants for home energy efficiency upgrades in the UK examine the extent to which cuts to local government finances may have impacted efforts to promote climate action. The findings suggest that austerity, combined with poor digital skills, undermined local authorities’ efforts to effectively carry out a climate action policy that was centrally planned but locally administered.
RETRACTED ARTICLE: The economic commitment of climate change
Global projections of macroeconomic climate-change damages typically consider impacts from average annual and national temperatures over long time horizons1–6. Here we use recent empirical findings from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years to project sub-national damages from temperature and precipitation, including daily variability and extremes7,8. Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty). These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices. Committed damages arise predominantly through changes in average temperature, but accounting for further climatic components raises estimates by approximately 50% and leads to stronger regional heterogeneity. Committed losses are projected for all regions except those at very high latitudes, at which reductions in temperature variability bring benefits. The largest losses are committed at lower latitudes in regions with lower cumulative historical emissions and lower present-day income.
China’s Shift to Clean Energy Is Saving the Paris Climate Accord
Beijing’s massive manufacturing investments have driven the costs of clean energy down.
In Deep
The numbers are simply mind-blowing: up to £264 billion for a climate “solution” that will increase emissions. Has the government lost its mind?
Green economic planning as ‘directed entanglement’
Sustainability transformations depend on ambitious state action. We propose green economic planning as a framework for states to set ambitious climate plans and ensure policy coherence across three dimensions: inputs (sources of information, planning directors, and political regimes), processes (technical expertise and political negotiation), and outputs (monetary-financial, fiscal, and state ownership strategies). To capture how green economic planning works across democratic and authoritarian institutions, we conducted a comparative case study of three countries. France’s intersectoral non-green and Denmark’s sectoral green planning covers democratic institutions, while China’s intersectoral green planning covers authoritarian institutions. Through these cases, we show that 1) green economic planning is both feasible and adaptable across diverse political economies, 2) effective planning requires balancing decentralized information flow with strong central coordination, 3) successful planning depends on managing tensions between autonomous planning agencies, market discipline, and long-term political legitimacy. We term this ‘directed entanglement,’ positioning it as a cornerstone for the emerging research agenda on green economic planning—a blueprint for navigating the use of the state to steer a green transition under capitalism.n analytical framework of elite and resistant imaginaries to trace how these actors construct competing futures of platform labour in EU regulation. These imaginaries transpire in response to the reorganisation of labour relations amidst the digital transformation of socioeconomic institutions. They reveal how platform infrastructures challenge institutional boundaries and reshape the governance of work in the EU. Through a qualitative methodology that combines critical thematic and discourse analysis of stakeholder submissions, the study investigates the frictions that transpire when elite and resistant imaginaries encounter one another. The inductive framework of ‘elite’ and ‘resistant’ imaginaries of platform work illuminates the strategic negotiation of categories and its evolution throughout the policymaking process. The research contributes to scholarship on digital labour and the governance of platforms and algorithmic systems within the EU by offering a critical communications account of how competing imaginaries interact within the regulatory infrastructures of the digital economy. The central empirical contribution of the project lies in re-situating regulatory arbitrage through the analytical lens of elite/resistant imaginaries and discursive friction. The analysis demonstrates how BusinessEurope takes advantage of longstanding techniques of regulatory escape, such as burden shifting and legal fragmentation, and combines them with the systemic structural asymmetries within the European single market to incentivise lenience for platform self-governance models and soft law (Scharpf, 1999). By analysing digital transformation and status classification, the thesis demonstrates how the future of the platform labour economy is co-constructed through frictions that culminate in a sophisticated arbitrage strategy, organised around the ontological construction of the platform as an ‘intermediary’ (Gillespie, 2010). The next chapter discusses the conceptual map of regulatory arbitrage in the PWD as a critical output of the research and considers the limitations of this project, and the future trajectory of trade union discourse on platform work.
Le modèle social français coûte-t-il trop cher ?
[10 questions pour comprendre le budget] Les comptes de la Sécu sont dans le rouge depuis plusieurs années. Cela s’explique davantage par la baisse des recette…
Europe is BURNING - why are politicians not acting?
L’état du climat mondial en 2024 : ce qu’il faut retenir
Source : Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024, juin 2025 L’univers virtuel des réseaux sociaux est celui de l’immédiateté. Un utilisateur de TikTok y navigue en moyenne 95 minutes chaque jour, …
A silent majority of the world’s people wants stronger climate action. It’s time to wake up | Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope
About 89% of the public want their governments to do more to tackle the climate crisis – but don’t know they’re the majority
Carbon Captured
How the fossil fuel industry turned the plan to solve climate change into a plan to save itself
Morality vs. Politics as a Framing Problem: How (Not) to Misunderstand the Fight Against Climate Change
Topoi - This paper is guided by two research hypotheses: (1) In contemporary public discourse, many of the most urgent political problems are predominantly framed and understood in moral terms; (2)...
Green economic planning for rapid decarbonisation
Sustainable futures require deep social and economic transformations to address climate change adequately. The current landscape of intergovernmental and market-based coordination is not delivering...
Pourquoi il est légitime de s’inquiéter du plan de relance de Biden
Traduction française du billet de blog "In defense of concerns over the $1.9 trillion relief plan" d'Olivier Blanchard (PIIE)
We’re the mayors of Paris, Milan and Phoenix. The heat crisis has us all facing the same question | Emmanuel Grégoire, Giuseppe Sala and Kate Gallego
Our three cities are learning from each other about how to protect residents. These climate policies are also public health measures
Did the hot summer make more people worry about climate change? Here’s what the latest indications show
Around 65% of the British public are now concerned about climate change.
annotations: La faiblesse des taux d’intérêt nous oblige à reconsidérer la politique budgétaire
Traduction française du billet de blog "Why low interest rates force us to revisit the scope and role of fiscal policy: 45 takeaways" d'Olivier Blanch