Nick Taylor

BREAKING⚡️The High Court has just ruled that the government's draconian ban of Palestine Action was unlawful. This is a massive blow to the Home Office’s authoritarian approach. They need to stop criminalising people protesting a genocide and start ending the UK's complicity

New in @finandsoc.bsky.social: ‘The non-death of Adam Neumann’, unpacking the return of WeWork’s disgraced founder. It’s about Silicon Valley’s ambivalence to failure & fraud, and how venture capital rewards already-powerful, ruthless and deceptive serial founders. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Inside a Detention Site at the Heart of Europe’s Harsh New Approach to Immigration

On the hellish detention and deportation system built by EU countries. With quotes from the current and the former German chancellors expressing their commitment to the inhumane cruelty of this apparatus, described here in forensic detail.

"Specifically, firms exposed to greater physical climate risks are more inclined to pursue adaptation strategies, while firms facing higher transition climate risks are more likely to engage in anti-climate political strategies (such as lobbying against climate policies)."

The focus is on US publicly traded companies. The paper provides an interesting holistic view of these firms' climate risk strategies. And unsurprisingly suggests that firms' time horizons are the key variable in how they act on climate risk exposure.

Very interesting recent paper by Xia Li & Caroline Flammer, which suggests that when firms' exposure to climate risks increases, they tend to adapt & lobby against climate policies, rather than mitigate or transform.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

"Hydrologically absurd" 😲

Queensland's Premier, David Crisafulli, has a slogan on youth sentencing: "adult crime, adult time". What about when your own government violates binding legislation for emission reductions targets (for 75% below 2005 levels by 2035)?

Irishman detained by Ice appeals to Taoiseach to raise case with Trump amid ‘torture’ Seamus Culleton from Kilkenny has been in Texas Ice facility for nearly five months despite holding valid work permit

And here's what life is like in these camps - "locked in the same large, cold and damp room for 4½ months with more than 70 men [and] allowed outside for air and exercise fewer than 12 times in nearly 5 months." www.irishtimes.com/world/us/202...

It's horrific, unimaginable. You have to hope for a building resistance to this inhumanity.

The scale of the incoming inflation in the American prison industrial complex is mind-blowing.

🚨 The political economy of finance summer school is back, 3rd year running! Better still: We're bringing it to London via @lse-ei.bsky.social.

𝐓𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐜: Finance & democracy
𝙳̲̲𝚊̲̲𝚝̲̲𝚎̲: 4-5 June 2026
𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦: March 1. Link below.

We've got brilliant instructors as usual. Please spread the word!

Along with return of "new conglomerates" (@nsrnicek.bsky.social) in Big Tech, shift from publicly-traded to privately-held companies pointed out by @lenorepalladino.bsky.social is major shift of 21c capitalism.

PhD scholarship opportunity, to work with @sherilynmacgregor.bsky.social and myself on the 'local politics of climate backlash' at @uompols.bsky.social and @justcentre.bsky.social. Please circulate to anyone who might be interested! www.findaphd.com/phds/project....

Global Environmental Politics amid Geopolitical Turbulence Abstract. Over the past decade, three overlapping trends have fundamentally reshaped and now characterize the global geopolitical order: the rise of emerging powers, increasing military conflicts, and...

Excited this piece with excellent colleagues is now out! We examine implications of geopolitical turbulence in the world for the GEP research agenda @yixiansun.bsky.social @matpaterson.bsky.social
direct.mit.edu/glep/article...

Accounting for methane from natural gas infrastructure in United States greenhouse gas emission estimates The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that United States net greenhouse gas emissions have declined over the last two decades and are no…

Methane pollution from US oil and gas infrastructure causes more climate change than the entire economies of all but seven nations on earth.

(This is with methane's climate impacts conservatively evaluated over a 100-year time frame. Evaluated over shorter time frames, methane's impacts are worse.)

This helps us to make sense of VC fund economics & what Nils calls the 'abundance conjuncture' of 2010-2022, when monetary policy is loose & huge amounts of capital flow to VC. Dominant VC funds overpay, price out others & defend their share through funding rounds, fuelling asset-driven inequality.

Bringing ownership in: a conjunctural approach to venture capital valuations Abstract. High startup valuations are commonly perceived as expressions of venture capitalists’ (VCs) power. This study complicates this view and argues th

New in SER: Nils Peters shows soaring UK startup valuations in the 2010s were less about VC power & more about a struggle for ownership. Late‑stage funds pushed into early‑stage rounds, intensifying competition & a small elite captured outsized returns. doi.org/10.1093/ser/...

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math(s)- Revisited Revisting Bill McKibben's influential Rolling Stone piece from 2012 and how the maths stacks up today

My colleague @chaitanyakumar.bsky.social has a new substack on all things climate. This piece on the maths and models behind global warming is both terrifying and insightful. Have a read at open.substack.com/pub/chaitany...

Industrial policy for the prison & concentration camp sector

James Goldsmith, godfather of British populism Unlike Nigel Farage or Rupert Lowe, Goldsmith told the truth

ICYMI: for the @newstatesman1913.bsky.social i went back to the ground zero for contemporary politics, 1990, to track the career of the James Goldsmith and his turn against the reigning free market orthodoxies to a new form of populism and anti-globalism
www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2026/0...

Not taught it in a while but Robert Cox's problem solving Vs critical theory is a classic and students like it!

Article by article, how Big Tech shaped the EU’s roll-back of digital rights | Corporate Europe Observatory In a new analysis we trace Big Tech's fingerprints on the Digital Omnibus proposals - a major deregulation of EU digital laws including the GDPR and the AI Act. They are helped in this attempt by the ...

🎁 Just before the holidays, the EU Commission granted Big Tech its Christmas wish-list: an unprecedented attack on our digital rights.

Together with @lobbycontrol.bsky.social we have mapped how the Digital Omnibus closely matches Big Tech lobby demands.

👉 corporateeurope.org/en/2026/01/a...

On this, also Martijn Konings' work, esp his latest book.

Now available for pre-order and we're open for book talks to students, workshops and conferences, organisations etc.
press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

And the ones build inland (reliant on cooling from rivers/lakes) are increasingly threatened by drought

How South America’s Oil Rush Collides with the Climate Crisis A break down of why Venezuela’s oil boom is clashing with a hotter, more fragile planet

Super fun to talk about the US-Venezuela-Guyana oil triangle with @kendrawrites.com for SciAm's Science Quickly pod: www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/epis...

Underestimates in global warming pose major climate and financial risks New analysis suggests the planet may be more sensitive to greenhouse gases than many models assume, meaning temperatures could rise faster and bring much greater climate risks than policymakers and fi...

"An actuarial review of key #climate change assumptions shows we may have seriously underestimated the rate of warming as well as the related economic impacts. Unless we rapidly change course, climate damages will start to impact growth & future prosperity"

#ClimateEmergency

A third of a billion spent on ruining people’s lives doesn’t seem a wise use of education spending

President Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act into law on August 14, 1935, with Perkins among those witnessing the signing (third from right) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Signing_Of_The_Social_Security_Act.jpg

1/ I recently wrote about Frances Perkins—FDR’s Labor Secretary and first woman cabinet member. She is best known as the architect of the New Deal but she had a lesser-known achievement:

She dismantled her era’s version of ICE.🧵