Nick Taylor

Insurers regain appetite for coal despite climate pledges Chubb is the lead reinsurer of an entirely coal-fuelled plant in Vietnam, after pulling back from the fossil fuel

Insurers regain appetite for coal despite climate pledges - demonstrating stranded asset risks are low for financial actors who can selectively dip back into underwriting e.g. coal on a year-by-year basis to bump profits on.ft.com/4faZRoC

Tell the Government what you think about parental leave

Please complete this survey on parental leave in the UK, as the gov reviews this broken system. Having taken shared parental leave twice, I can say that it is stupidly hard to organise & too often makes no financial sense. Mat pay is too low, statutory pat leave is too short!

bit.ly/4fgwPUQ

The EU’s ‘fantasy’ $750B energy promise to Trump Technical issues, limited U.S. supplies and the EU’s minimal control over imports render the pledge infeasible, experts say.

🧵Yesterday’s trade deal is predicated on forcing the EU to buy more US oil and gas—specifically triple what it imports now. Lots of scoffing among the data crowd.

Fantasy or not, achievable or not, the fight against further #LNG build-out just got even harder. 1/4

www.politico.eu/article/eu-t...

Open letter: Request for biometric deferral and safe evacuation of incoming Palestinian students and scholars from Gaza to UK Universities More than 40 students currently trapped in Gaza with full scholarships to UK Universities are asking for a safe route to come and study. We, the academic community hoping to welcome these scholars, ca...

More than 40 students currently trapped in Gaza with full scholarships to UK Universities are asking for a safe route to come and study. Please sign and share ⬇️ docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Serious about sustainability? A history of HSBC’s climate commitments HSBC becomes the first UK bank to quit the green alliance it founded, we look back at its pledges, plans and deals

HSBC signed up to the Net-Zero Banking Alliance and pledged to provide up to $1 trillion to help the net-zero transition back in 2021

Since then its public pledges have been repeatedly undermined by deals done behind closed doors

Was HSBC ever serious about going green?👇

I am both unable to bear it but cannot look away. I am. Beyond Reason.

⚠️Who should phase out fossil fuels first?⚠️

As countries confront the need to ditch oil, gas, and coal to meet climate goals, one question looms:

Which nations should move first and fastest?

@lslothuus.bsky.social offers a geopolitical approach to answering this question

🧵

One really consistent pattern whenever I look at the energy and financial data for large big tech companies is that energy + revenue are being decoupled. They keep having to buy more and more energy each year to make the same $1 of revenue.

This is a pretty new thing

ketanjoshi.co/2025/05/31/t...

An unbearably sad statement from the Editorial Committee (SDJ) of the AFP news agency, please read:

"Without immediate intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die.
AFP has been working with 1 writer, 3 photographers and 6 videographers, all freelance, in the Gaza Strip… /1

BlackRock: A Case Study in Finance Capital (Part 1) [This post may appear clipped in your inbox.

Check out the first part of this deep dive into BlackRock & its political economic effects. It'll be an excellent teaching resource too! open.substack.com/pub/thisisfi...

The Age of Irresponsibility is over, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney told City in 2015 bit.ly/3GGSR6e after many financial scandals. This month Chancellor told City controls introduced to stop them happening again will be weakened. Sacrificed on the altar of growth

New government data on the impact of the two child limit: 469,780 households now affected, with 1,665,540 children in those households

Almost 40,000 more children affected since last year

It's a child poverty machine & it will cost us all more in the long term - get rid of it

An inspiring change in Paris. Great to see new urban forest, even better when it is space reclaimed from cars. 🌲

"In Ireland, nearly half of all units delivered since 2017 were purchased by investment funds. Across Sweden, the share of private rental apartments with institutional investors as landlords has swelled to 24%. In Berlin, €40bn of housing assets are now in institutional portfolios, 10% of the total"

Just reposting in case of interest. Applications close next week. Come to work with @harveymurenow.bsky.social, Jack Copley, Eugenia Giraudo and me!

Extreme weather expected to increase insurance premiums even further Policyholders have claimed more than $1.8 billion on insurance due to extreme weather in the first half of this year alone, with the rising cost of cover almost certain to be passed on to consumers.

Climate change is a driving force in cost of living pressures.
www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07...
The insurance industry knows this, politicians keep kicking the can down the road.

Welfare reform bill: what changes did the government make to get it over the line? The bill passed without its major changes to personal independence payments.

Richard Machine of our Council of Management summarises what's happening with the welfare reform bill:
uk.news.yahoo.com/welfare-refo...

Freedom as Autonomy: platform workers’ struggles and the future of work in Argentina — CLaSP Blog Sofia Negri asks how we can build a future of work that transforms the salaried relationship to reconcile autonomy with social protection.

New on the CLaSP blog: Looking at platform workers in Argentina, Sofia Negri asks how we can build a future of work that transforms the salaried relationship to reconcile autonomy with social protection

www.claspblog.org/blogposts/ac...

Canicule : écoles fermées, réacteur nucléaire à l’arrêt et pic de pollution, la vague de chaleur s’éternise dans toute la France Météo-France a placé 16 départements en vigilance rouge, le plus haut niveau de surveillance, et 68 en vigilance orange, à partir de mardi midi. Pendant deux jours, la France va subir le pic d’une trè...

one of france's nuclear power stations is turned off because it's 28°C so the water in the river is too hot to cool the reactor

this is while it's gonna hit 40°C in other parts of the country

building the world's most expensive kettles that rely on plentiful cold water isn't a climate solution

Excerpt from proposed NOAA budget showing zero funding for Climate Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes

Proposed NOAA budget zeros out ALL climate laboratories and cooperative institutions.

GFDL, NSSL, GML, etc.

This appears to also end the US greenhouse gas sampling network, including at Mauna Loa, the oldest continuous carbon dioxide monitoring site on Earth.

www.commerce.gov/sites/defaul...

Almost every paragraph of this article describes another atrocity or war crime, with first-hand testimony from Israeli soldiers.

Beyond obscene, and the callous indifference of the UK political and media establishment equally so.

archive.ph/3LjoW

Incredibly clear and incisive warnings about the dangers of ceding our lives to data scraping platforms posing as 'assistants'.

In the age of asset manager capitalism, do asset owners still matter? And what does this mean for the green transition?

@nataschavanderzwan.bsky.social and I investigate this through an in-depth study of how some of the most important asset owners - pension funds - invest.

Now out in SER!

🧵

On this more generally, this recent review & analysis of critical geographies of heat was excellent journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

The housing conflicts around heating/cooling in cities affected by climate crisis are only going to intensify. Much of the focus on British housing has been on cold & mould understandably, but inequalities around heat are severe & worsening here.

Nearly 100,000 adults in England denied state-funded social care due to cuts Exclusive: Number of people receiving subsidised care has fallen far more quickly than the country’s disability rate, analysis finds

New report from @instituteforgovernment.org.uk out today - social care is having to be rationed by local authorities in areas of high demand www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Culmination — Sidecar Israel attacks Iran.

"This fantasy bears the unmistakable imprint of early 2000s neoconservatism. It is a reheated version of the same delusions that underpinned the US invasion of Iraq."

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi in the @newleftreview.bsky.social
newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

HSBC helped raise billions last year for companies expanding the production of coal in deals that seem to violate its coal phase-out policy

The bank was ranked the UK’s second largest funder of fossil fuel companies in a recent report by ‪@ran.org

Banks boosted fossil fuel finance by more than a fifth in 2024, report says US banks and Barclays each increased sector lending and underwriting by more than $10bn

Banks boosted fossil fuel finance by more than a fifth in 2024, report says

https://www.ft.com/content/dbb34bdf-fff6-4df3-93ea-de779b5783e7

Haha me too, me too