A comprehensive history of 'finitarian' ideologies. Timely, thorough, and terrifically useful for those working in political ecology. Sorry not to see David Harvey and other prescient critics cited, but lots of work here still to do.

We could build an AI-paper-writing-AI trained only on stuff written before 1990.

I have a small collection of snapshots from 1980s Artifical Intelligence books, and guess what:

[Automating the Synthesis of Expertise (1984), from the book "Machine Intelligence", second edition]

Our computer capabilities have increased at least a hundred fold since then [then = 1957] and we can do better, but not a great deal better; we are not calculation-limited, we are understanding limited.

This caalls for this evergreen quote

From the 1980s Handbook of systems analysis. "Then" is 1957.

Very happy to see our latest Peatscapes article out in Environment and Planning E, led by Nye Merrill-Glover!

Do give it a read if you're interested in peatland governance, carbon credit markets, or both!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Thanks as ever to @leverhulme.ac.uk! 🙏

Postdoctoral Researcher and Doctoral Researcher, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and aquatic restoration in the Nordic and Arctic regions We are looking to hire highly motivated Postdoctoral Researcher and Doctoral Researcher to join the Department of Anthropology, in the History, Culture and Communications Unit at the Faculty of Humani

We're hiring! Looking for a #postdoc (3 years) and #PhD (4 years) in #STS and aquatic restoration! Hired researchers will join University of @oulu.fi, the amazing SAFIRE multidisciplinary research programme, and a growing team of researchers interested in water and environment. Deadline 03.05.26.

No, that would be too clearcut. It’s more like everyone thinks everyone else is wrong, mostly with good reasons…

Yes, I think she has collected every paper with Allen or Grassi among the authors by now! We started from the inconsistencies between climate science and UNFCCC accounts and then everything pretty much unravelled…
The level of disagreement across expert communities is impressive, to say the least.

Oh, great to know you're into this! I'm currently working with a postdoc (well, she's doing most of the work, to be fair) on controversies related to land-use carbon accounting -- there is definitely a LOT to cover... and it is even more complex and fascinating than I expected.

I hadn't planned on falling into that particular rabbit hole today, but here we are... 🫣

Yep, it was around that time, it must have been Noah Kaufman (or a discussion started by Noah Kaufman)

The first time I came across someone stating this explicitly (maybe it was you as well, I can't remember, I think it was an extended twitter-debate between economists, atmospheric scientists and IAM people) really was an "oh wow" moment.

Has anyone written about it?

This is a fun fact because I think widely underappreciated that GWPs (or at least some of them) aren't purely physical metrics, but rather (discount-rate-influenced) policy analysis metrics in disguise.

We are hiring a tenure track (!) senior researcher in political economy!

This is obviously a great job (permanent without teaching obligation) and I hope you all apply.

However, I would like to take a moment to share just how significant this is in the German academic context ⬇️

eventually, i am going to to find a way to make my actual big-picture project happen: computers and the destruction of feminized secretarial knowledge.

Sure!

Because it is so far in the future, affecting our children's lives more directly than our own, the CO2 question has an unreal aura about it. It lacks the impact of an oil embargo. Yet the question is real, and while the work we present here indicates that major man-made climate changes may not be waiting just beyond the turn of the century, we do find that CO2 concentrations will almost certainly double within 100 years.

"... the CO2 question has an unreal aura about it. It lacks the impact of an oil embargo. Yet the question is real"

which follows a period of very slow emissions growth. This combination of lull and storm could delay the date of first detection of CO2 effects but at the same time present a perilous period after 2025 where climatic change is speeded up by rapidly growing annual emissions levels. Adaptation to climate change can only be considered more difficult and costly if com- pressed into a period of a few decades.

Continued

Third, any real shift away from the base-case scenario will require either reduced global GNP growth or an energy evolution from oil and gas toward CO2 benign technologies such as solar and nuclear rather than toward synfuels from coal and shale oil. The economics of energy seem to favor mixed path with an increasing reliance on coal and shale oil as conventional oil and gas run out. Slower GNP growth is certainly at odds with development programs of most of the world. As a consequence, there likely be a CO2 explosion in the second quarter of the 21st century,

Concluding paragraphs from Edmonds and Reilly, 1983, Global Energy and CO2 to the Year 2050.

(added to the list of "papers that are older than me but make a point that people are still trying to make today")

📣 #AAC

Le @cired.bsky.social organise sa 28e école d'été et les candidatures sont ouvertes !

Thème : "Environmental Sustainability and Energy Transitions in the History of Economic Thought".

📍 Cité du développement durable à Nogent-sur-Marne
🗓️ 31 août - 4 septembre 2026

👉 urls.fr/sceoMY

I'm excited to announce this new paper we have in Nature Climate Change, establishing the core principles of a post-growth climate mitigation scenario that can achieve rapid decarbonization and high well-being. nature.com/articles/s41...

Yes, I think that was part of my confusion when I wrote this. But I find it also very difficult to wrap my head around the very commensurability of abatement costs and damages, each with their own intertemporal dynamics.

Ironically, though, the quote is calling for putting skilled modellers to work on something that sounds very much like IAMs...

Open PhD and postdoc positions in STS at the TIK Centre, @uio.no . Come join us!
Postdoc: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...
PhD: www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

📢[We're hiring] CIRED is hiring a Chapter Scientist to support the author team of IPCC Working Group III – Chapter 3 for the AR7 cycle.

This role contributes directly to the scientific assessment on projected futures in the context of sustainable development and climate change.

Ecology and social energetics: the Podolynsky-Vernadsky connection - Dialectical Anthropology Dialectical Anthropology - In 1880 Serhiy A. Podolynsky (1850–1891) described the human economy as a metabolic flow of energy and was later praised for it by ecologist Vladimir...

⚒️🌲Soviet Ecology paper alert: Marco Vianna Franco, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, and Joan Martinez-Alier write about the Podolynsky-Vernadsky connection link.springer.com/article/10.1...

☀️🍉Join us for the ESHET Summer School in the history of economic thought, economic philosophy, and economic history from 31 Aug - 4 Sep, 2026 in Paris. Deadline for applications is April 15, 2026. More info 👇
www.centre-cired.fr/eshet-2026-s...

This is the first paper in a forthcoming Special Issue on the "Environmentalization of Economics" that will explore the intersections, frictions & synergies between economic and ecological ways of relating to the environment - so more coming soon(-ish)!

From Malthus to planetary boundaries: the genealogy of ‘carrying capacity’ as a political technology Vicky Kluzik ABSTRACT How much is too much? The concept ‘carrying capacity’, believed to be first employed in the context of shipping in the nineteenth century, became a key element of Neo-Malthusianism of the 1960s and 1970s, which aimed to curb surplus populations against the backdrop of looming ecological collapse. Adopting an approach that merges a Foucauldian governmentality perspective with Science and Technology Studies (STS) sensitivities, the article investigates the lively genealogy of how ecologists and economists approached the ‘population problem’ through ‘capacity thinking’ to envisage, model, and predict planetary futures. By examining several discursive constellations from the 1920s to the 2000s, the paper illuminates the ascendancy of ‘carrying capacity’ as a ‘fixed ideal’ and a ‘political technology’ that traverses scientific disciplines and societal discourses. This exploration unfolds the presumably simultaneous economization of the environment vis-à-vis the environmentalization of economics, cautioning against claims of a hybridization of these interlinked yet distinct processes. This retro- and prospective analysis unfolds both the ascendancy and the persistence of ‘carrying thinking’ by illuminating how contemporary rationalities of ‘capacity thinking’ are echoed in conceptions of planetary boundaries, circular economy, as well as right-wing and techno-libertarian visions of economic and ecological futures.

Recently published in @jcultecon.bsky.social: @vkluzik.bsky.social on the genealogy of the concept of "carrying capacity" and how it was seized and shaped by both ecologists and economists. Must read for anyone interested in the links between population and the environment.
doi.org/10.1080/1753...