Rob Ralston

a thing you quickly learn when researching business power, is the lengths to which seemingly ‘legitimate’ corporations will go to extend markets and maximize profits

I’ve heard senior UNEP officials use this discourse around pollution during plastic treaty talks - it seems a pretty widely used narrative in IOs and multilateral spaces

Trump out here systematically dismantling every complex theory of policy making we have

There’s something to be said for places that have minimal signposting, where you have to dig around for stuff

There’s a lot of record shops that have lost that, despite the digging being the best part!

my platonic ideal of a secondhand bookshop - just absolute chaos

new article (building on old fieldwork) in the Journal of Critical Public Health

an attempt to apply theories of post-politics to multistakeholder governance which highlights how norms of inclusion paradoxically lead to the exclusion of critical voices

even got stressed watching the highlights

this is the least scottish thing that's ever happened

surreal watching us qualify for the world cup with a chip from the halfway line

this will never be topped

at least the tech bro seems to getting dunked on for this awful idea

There’s probably a link here between the obsession of Silicon Valley tech bros with immortality and these weird apps

virtually indistinguishable from the plot of an A24 psychological horror

I really want to believe that there’s no market for these ghoulish AI apps

'Proximity to drilling wells, processing plants, pipelines + other fossil fuel facilities elevates the risk of cancer, respiratory conditions, heart disease, premature birth + death, as well as posing grave threats to water supplies + air quality, + degrades land.'

Other than that, great stuff

Protecting the right to science in multilateral environmental agreements addressing chemicals and plastics pollution Scientific evidence supports dominant institutional understandings of the global socio-ecological crises of the triple planetary crisis-climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution-demonstrating...

new open access paper on the right to science and pollution with several fantastic colleagues including
@bcarneyalmroth.bsky.social @jptilsted.bsky.social and @taraolsen.bsky.social

Mapped: Big Food’s Routes to Influence at COP30 In the city of Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon rainforest, Brazil has kicked off the COP30 climate conference, a summit framed as a pivotal moment to reduce emissions and keep the Paris Agreement al...

🔴 NEW 🔴

Mapped: Big Food’s Routes to Influence at COP30

Interactive map shows the food & farming corporations, trade groups and initiatives at COP30 in Brazil and how these are set to navigate the summit

📝 @rachelsherrington.bsky.social & Gil Alessi👇

www.desmog.com/2025/11/10/m...

COP websites emit 10 times more carbon than average webpages - Energy Live News COP conference websites emit more carbon per page view than typical webpages

We are featured in over 50 news outlets today: PhD student David Mahoney's research using web archives, @archive.org, to measure historic website emissions, offering a new method and open-source code for analysing & highlighting online environmental impact. www.energylivenews.com/2025/11/11/c...

history will ultimately decide this but i think joyce carol oates might have just landed the most devastating burn in human history. like the death star trench run of posting

It’s one thing to have different environmental/health priorities for your foundation, it’s quite another to have been bankrolling one of the primary sources of bullshit on the topic.

Opinion

America First and the Fragmentation of Global Health: How Africa can Reimagine Its Agency

www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/06/11/2...

I’d also say that many of these billionaire philanthropists are the direct beneficiaries of neoliberal reforms and it’s probably inconceivable for them to promote anything other than marketised or financialized solutions

yes, and I think there’s also a tension between philanthropists wanting to exert control over development initiatives and the reality that the most effective policies are not the techno-solutions favoured by billionaires

They just gutted Teen Vogue which had top notch political journalism. The media is continuing to purge any sort of political dissent to Trump and the oligarchs.

www.vogue.com/article/teen...

PepsiCo downgrades its sustainability goals PepsiCo, in its latest sustainability update, becomes the latest major company to scale back its climate targets.

PepsiCo follows Coca-Cola in backtracking on commitments to reduce virgin plastic + abandoning reuse

despite all the talk of corporate sustainbility in UN plastic treaty negotiations, the reality is that Big Food companies are continuin to expand their use of single use plastics

and as a metric for deciding who is ‘at risk’ of redundancy

I’ve said this jokingly to colleagues but a universal research income (URI) of 10k would be a far more equitable and productive system than the current funding model

staggering to think of the time and effort put into applications that have a 1% chance of getting funded

🚨 New working paper alert 🚨
Missing summer — and the Tour de France? Don’t worry, we got you covered. 🚴‍♂️🚴‍♂️🚴‍♂️
In this paper, we show that being on the route of Tour de France reduces far-right voting. osf.io/preprints/so...

shamelessly promoting this paper again - open access thanks to @uoe-sps.bsky.social

Inside the Republican network behind big soda’s bid to pit Maga against Maha A Guardian investigation finds the US soda and snack-food industries, threatened by RFK Jr’s movement to change Americans’ eating habits, have turned to a group of well-connected strategists, shadowy ...

🚨New from me & @fieldnotes.co in @theguardian.com → Revealed: The network of GOP hired guns behind Big Soda’s bid to turn MAGA against MAHA www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

[stares forlornly at inertia of Edinburgh city council]

YouTube video by Jesse Damiani Overshoot & Climate Breakdown - Wim Carton & Andreas Malm | #39

"If geoengineering works well initially & you see this temperature drop, the tempempation to keep going & extracting fossil fuels will be greater than ever, because it will seem that you have a technologically that can cut off the link between temperature rises & fossil fuel combustion."