Emil Dimanchev

As we wrote: "a limited reliance on carbon pricing provides a disproportionately large share of the benefits offered by theoretically optimal carbon pricing."

What our research showed is that there is a range of policy mixes that are near-optimal. This is because the efficiency advantage of carbon pricing has diminishing returns, which is the main fundamental insight from the paper.

This is not meant to let nations off the hook. The proposal being discussed in Italy is highly ill-conceived. But the point is that climate policy can overcome political challenges by changing how much it relies on different instruments within the policy mix.

As EU lawmakers are looking to soften the continent's CO2 price, it's worth remembering that policy makers can overcome political constraints by complementing CO2 pricing with subsidies without sacrificing much economic efficiency, as I and @knittelmit.bsky.social show here: doi.org/10.1016/j.en...

It’s definitely harder, don’t get me wrong.

There’s a lot to say but to start it makes uncertainty/ignorance explicit. The process itself helps forecasting improve over time. And you can track accuracy with Brier scoring, etc.

Have you considered making probabilistic forecasts?

YouTube video by The Independent Resurfaced clip shows Trump accusing Obama of wanting a war with Iran

"Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective."

-- Donald J. Trump (Nov. 2011)

www.youtube.com/shorts/siIXY...

I know right!

Thanks! Yes, feel free to use without restrictions, attribution optional.

A moving stairway leading to an airplane door in Trondheim, Norway. The stairway walls are covered with solar PV panels.

Solar is cheap, exhibit 3,141,592,653.

In other words, Trump’s mandate is not what he and some others think it is. It is in fact much, much narrower. Also, he is failing it.

Opinion | The Great Capitulation Is Over. What Will Take Its Place?

Reason for hope:

“The 2024 elections weren’t a tectonic social and cultural shift. They were not about rejecting the Enlightenment; they were a complaint about the cost of ground beef. Voters were not embracing patriarchal dictatorship“.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/o...

Map of US states and Canadian province, color coded by their largest source of electricity.

www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-what-...

Love a good map

An important and underappreciated fact of electricity economics: The US average *wholesale* electricity price is ~5 c/kWh, or ~25% of the average *retail* price of ~19 c/kWh. The other ~75% of the electricity prices we pay is about poles, wires, transformers, generation capacity, and utility profit.

British wind farms drive down day-ahead wholesale energy prices by almost a third in 2025 British wind farms helped limit the role of gas power plants in setting prices, cutting power prices by almost a third, according to new analysis.

‘Great Britain’s day-ahead wholesale prices in 2024 could have been up to 33 per cent higher had there been no large-scale wind capacity…around £83/MWh, but could have been as high as £121/MWh…has over 29 GW of operational wind capacity’

We’re just not a free country.

Any American watching this play out between regime forces and journalists overseas would recognize it for what it is.

A lot of things are incomprehensible these days. I don't understand what exactly these 32% are thinking, for example. bsky.app/profile/emil...

Right. They think this liar is the de-escalator?!

Are you watching, America?

Yep. Big tech has more to do to earn its social license.

Bring. Your. Own. New. Clean. Energy.

Good point. Here the approach was top-down and we fitted an S curve. This does capture the network effects at the beginning where they act as a brake, but is in contradiction at the end (where the ICE phase out slows down rather than speeds up).

In our case we are not using consumer electronics as a reference class and I agree that would be an inaccurate analogy.

Yeah I don’t think this word should be used lightly.

"Ultimately, failing to accurately price the chaos of a blackout prevents the very investments that could stop it — investments in resilience."

What a front page.

Pepper-Sprayed While Pinned Down: A Searing Scene Provokes Outrage

Source: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/u...

Photo showing ICE agents pepper spraying a subdued person pinned down by three other agents on a street in Minneapolis. Photo credit: Vincent Alban / The New York Times

One heck of an image of ICE inhumanity from Wednesday last week in Minneapolis.

The point here is that what matters for emissions is how many miles are being driven in clean vehicles. A closely related proxy for this is how many of of the total vehicles on the road are clean; i.e. the share of EVs in the "fleet". The problem we face is that the fleet turns over very slowly.