Flavien

1953 Iranian coup d'état - Wikipedia

In 2000, Madeleine Albright, U.S. Secretary of State, said that intervention by the U.S. in the internal affairs of Iran was a setback for democratic government.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Ir...

The presumed upcoming El Nino will help cement and quantify global warming acceleration, showing that 2C global warming is likely to be reached in the 2030s, not at midcentury.
See Another El Nino Already? mailchi.mp/caa/another-... Also available on Substack: jimehansen.substack.com/p/another-el...

A Fossil fuel crisis, not an energy crisis. Smart countries who deployed renewables at scale will not be as hardly hit than those who backtracked on necessary green investments

Green dividends

Oil surges above $90 a barrel for first time in Iran war Traders are bracing for a longer conflict and further production shutdowns

Oil surges above $90 a barrel for first time in Iran war ft.trib.al/u1vg5gR

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring - Wikipedia

And this one en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring,... ?

A picture of PEW poll on global attitude survey, saying the % who rate the morality and ethics of people in their country as good vs bad, where the US has the worst rankings and Canada the best

Americans: we live in a fallen state—embroiled by sin, cheating, lying, and evil. You cannot trust anyone, not even those who claim to know you best

Canadians: I love my neighbors and my friends!

Everyone knows there will be energy market disruptions but how much will it affect inflation?

Good to remember this rule of thumb from Goldman Sachs:
every $10 increase in oil prices will increase headline inflation by 20-30 basis points.

ie Will it cause a 2022 style inflation surge? No.

Natgas...
"In sheer volume, this could be worse than 2022"

www.ft.com/content/78fb...

But... zoom out

Finland cut VAT on haircuts in 2007 to see if cheaper prices would boost demand and jobs. But when the tax fell by €4, many salons lowered prices by only €2 and kept the rest as profit. When VAT rose again, prices jumped by the full €4, turning a temporary tax cut into a permanent price hike.

Always check both Uber and Lyft:

“NYC riders collectively forgo approximately $300 million in potential annual savings by not comparing prices between platforms”

www.nber.org/202602/diges...

Separated Bike Lanes Means Safer Streets, Study Says — Streetsblog USA Cities that build protected lanes for cyclists end up with safer roads for people on bikes and people in cars and on foot, a new study of 12 large metropolises revealed Wednesday.

“After analyzing crash data over a 13-year period in areas with separated bike lanes on city streets, researchers estimated that having a protected bike facility in a city would result in 44% fewer deaths and 50% fewer serous injuries than an average city.”

Safer for ALL.

Via @usa.streetsblog.org

A graph of US office construction

Real US office construction sunk to a new 14-year low in official data released today, continuing a steady decline that's been going on for more than 5 years at this point

Since the start of COVID, inflation-adjusted investment in new office buildings has fallen by nearly 59%

Collapse of UK property lender sends shockwaves through Wall Street Lenders weigh losses linked to Market Financial Solutions, which financed a Bangladeshi politician’s real estate empire

Let’s hope this doesn’t turn out to be today’s biggest story in retrospect
www.ft.com/content/6731...

Ukraine / IMF new EFF staff report. Interesting discussion (paragraph 32) of the extremely rapid growth in crypto transactions, with potential implications for efficacy of capital flow measures. www.imf.org/en/publicati...

The Nazis stopped Jewish doctors from practising, so thousands of them left the country (my great grandfather was one of them). So many left that this was a good natural experiment for estimating the causal effect of losing doctors on infant mortality (& thousands died)

Chief executive Dario Amodei said the start-up ‘cannot in good conscience’ agree to the US government’s terms, citing concerns over lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. ft.trib.al/e9W6Dto

Your regular reminder: NBER WPs are also not open access (any more than a published journal article is).
Still very useful to put a non-paywalled version on your website

Now suppose that the sample on which AI were trained to compute their statistical values of life had composition biases…

Social media distorts second-order beliefs

Summers To Resign From Teaching Appointments, Relinquish University Professorship Over Epstein Ties | News | The Harvard Crimson Former Harvard President Larry Summers will resign from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of the academic year, relinquishing his University Professorship — Harvard’s highest...

Breaking:

Former Harvard President Larry Summers will resign from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of the academic year over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein

He will also relinquish his University Professorship — Harvard's highest faculty distinction.

How to Tax Billionaires - The American Prospect The details are complicated. The politics should be simple.

The proposed California wealth tax isn’t perfect, but it brings the need to tax extreme concentrations of wealth into the public conversation. It will be on California’s ballot in November — if proponents can get the signatures.

Human interaction is going to shift to discords and group chats, invite-only. The open web and social media are going to be left for the agents lurking amongst the ruins. Everything public will be Moltbook.

It hasn’t fully hit BlueSky yet, but LinkedIn and X are just meaning-shaped comments by LLMs

This is genuinely really bad, the kind of shit that guarantees a bad outcome. Very dodgy

a graph of texas monthly solar generation

Solar power also continues to skyrocket in Texas, with solar generation up 34% compared to last year.

Over the last twelve months, solar has made up 10.7% of Texas' electricity, a record high!

European car sales fall in January, petrol cars sharply decline New car sales in Europe fell year-on-year in January for the first time since June, weighed by declines in major markets including Germany, France, Belgium and Poland, data from the European auto lobby ACEA showed on Tuesday.

European car sales fall in January, petrol cars sharply decline reut.rs/3OHTEr0

An infographic from Our World in Data titled "Global land use for food production" uses a series of stacked horizontal bar charts to visualize the distribution of Earth's surface and the disproportionate land requirements of livestock. The first bar shows Earth's surface is 71% ocean and 29% land (141 million km²); the land surface is then broken down into 76% habitable land, 10% glaciers, and 14% barren land. Of the habitable land, 45% (48 million km²) is used for agriculture, while 38% is forests and 13% is shrubland. The agricultural land bar reveals a major disparity: 80% (38 million km²) is dedicated to livestock (meat, dairy, and textiles) including grazing land and cropland for feed, while only 16% is used for crops for direct human consumption and 4% for non-food crops. Finally, two smaller bars at the bottom contrast this land use with nutritional output, showing that while livestock uses 80% of agricultural land, it only provides 17% of global calories and 38% of global protein, whereas plant-based foods provide 83% of calories and 62% of protein.

80% of agricultural land is used for livestock (and textiles), yet this huge land use provides only 17% of our calories and 38% of our protein.

16% of the land used for crops provides 83% of our calories and 62% of our protein. It's past time we rethink what we eat.

This chart says it all

Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox Meta Superintelligence Labs’ director of alignment called it a “rookie mistake.”

NEW: Meta’s director of AI safety, supposedly the person at the company who is working to make sure that powerful AI tools don’t go rogue and act against human interests, had to scramble to stop an AI agent from deleting her inbox against her wishes...