Utopia, you are standing in it!

Many of the world’s biggest companies are failing to meet their own targets on tackling climate change, according to a study of 25 corporations.

They also routinely exaggerate or misreport their progress, the New Climate Institute report says.

Google, Amazon, Ikea, Apple and Nestle are among those failing to change quickly enough, the study alleges.

Corporations are under pressure to cut their environmental impact as more consumers want green products.

Some of the companies told BBC News they disagreed with some of the methods used in the report and said they were committed to taking action to curb climate change.

The firms analysed account for 5% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, the report says – which means although they have a huge carbon footprint, they have enormous potential to lead in the effort to limit climate change.

“The rapid acceleration of corporate…

The National Party, in particular, has been seeking to make the rate of inflation a key line of attack on the government. Headline annual CPI inflation was 5.9 per cent in the most recent release, and National has been running a line that government spending is to blame. It is never clear how much they think it is to blame – or even in what sense – but it must be to a considerable extent, assuming (as I do) that they are addressing the issue honestly.

I’ve seen quite a bit of talk that government spending (core Crown expenses) is estimated to have risen by 68 per cent from the June 2017 year (last full year of the previous government) to the June 2022 year – numbers from the HYEFU published last December. That is quite a lot: in the previous five years, this measure of spending rose by only…

We’re told that the majority of people in the UK are very concerned about global warming and climate change. But only 3% are so concerned that they are willing to pay even a trifling sum to offset their air miles. The Sunday Times carried a story about this and told us:

The airline offers all customers who are about to buy a ticket the chance to “fully offset your CO2 emissions for this flight” by paying a fee. The 730km journey from Dublin to Paris can be offset for €1.20, while a 486km journey from Dublin to London, one of the world’s busiest air routes, can be offset for 78c. Ryanair said: “The 3 per cent of customers that chose to go greener in 2019 has yet to substantially increase, with the impact of the pandemic on air travel potentially playing a part. To date, these customers have contributed €3.5…

This piece considers two recent decisions – one by the Court of Appeal (“CA”): D4 v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] EWCA Civ 33, and the other by the Supreme Court (“SC”): R (The Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] UKSC 3 (“PRCBC”). At a general level, the cases raised similar issues: both involved challenges to delegation legislation on grounds that they were ultra vires; both related to citizenship – D4 about its deprivation, PRCBC about its conferral. This piece seeks to draw some threads from the two cases about statutory interpretation and the common law in the context of citizenship.

D4 v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] EWCA Civ 33

D4 was deprived of her citizenship pursuant to an order made under s.40 British Nationality Act 1981…

Three years ago, I unveiled this video to help explain that trade deficits are nothing to worry about.

The most important thing to understand from the video is that the flip side of a trade deficit is a capital surplus.

To be more specific, foreigners earn dollars by selling products to Americans. They then use those dollars to buy goods and services from American producers, or they use those dollars to invest money in the American economy.

And when foreigners choose to invest their dollars, that necessarily is accompanied by a trade deficit.

At the risk of understatement, it’s not bad that foreigners want to invest in the United States.

Why am I discussing this topic today?

Because we have final data on trade flows for 2021. Here are some excerpts from a report by Ana Swanson for the New York Times.

The U.S. trade deficit in goods soared…

This morning Australia woke up to the news that at an all-night sitting which concluded around 5 am, the House of Representatives has passed the Religious Discrimination Bill 2022. (The link there will take you to official Parliamentary site for the Bill; as I write the updated version given a third reading has not been published but should be later in the day.) The government amendments which I noted in a previous post were apparently all accepted.

There was an amendment moved by the Opposition which came very close to being accepted, but which in the end did not pass. (It can be seen here in the Opposition amendments document.) It would have introduced a prohibition on “religious vilification”. I do not think Australia needs more such laws; in the time available now let me link a paper I produced a few years ago on the dangers of limiting…

Roger Pielke Jr. is a political scientist who writes on a diverse range of policy and governance issues related to science, technology, environment, innovation and sports. He is most famous (or infamous?) for his work on climate change. We cover his Iron Law of climate policy, his views on the problems with business-as-usual climate scenarios, and the challenges of attributing extreme weather. We also touch on the extent of his relationships with climate change skeptics and the efforts to discredit him, including the congressional investigation into his funding.

Roger is a Professor at the Department of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is the author ofThe Climate Fix: What Scientists…

Me in the WSJ.