France’s big climate problem: The budget crunch

RETRACTED ARTICLE: The economic commitment of climate change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.

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...

Political Scenarios for Climate Disaster - Dissent Magazine

In the Global North we often act as if our future will be a warmer version of today: liberal capitalism, plus flood insurance, minus coral reefs. That future is a fantasy.

Correcting climate ‘misperceptions’ may not boost climate action - Carbon Brief

Most people "underestimate" general support for climate change and "overestimate" actual, real-world climate action.

The i-frame and the s-frame: How focusing on individual-level solutions has led behavioral public policy astray

An influential line of thinking in behavioral science, to which the two authors have long subscribed, is that many of society's most pressing problems can be addressed cheaply and effectively at the level of the individual, without modifying the system in which the individual operates. We now believe this was a mistake, along with, we suspect, many colleagues in both the academic and policy communities. Results from such interventions have been disappointingly modest. But more importantly, they have guided many (though by no means all) behavioral scientists to frame policy problems in individual, not systemic, terms: To adopt what we call the “i-frame,” rather than the “s-frame.” The difference may be more consequential than i-frame advocates have realized, by deflecting attention and support away from s-frame policies. Indeed, highlighting the i-frame is a long-established objective of corporate opponents of concerted systemic action such as regulation and taxation. We illustrate our argument briefly for six policy problems, and in depth with the examples of climate change, obesity, retirement savings, and pollution from plastic waste. We argue that the most important way in which behavioral scientists can contribute to public policy is by employing their skills to develop and implement value-creating system-level change.

Comoros slams France over aid-for-migration threat

French prime minister Sebastien Lecornu said Paris could make development aid conditional on greater cooperation in curbing irregular migration to Mayotte.