iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

"Ethics of science cannot be separated from who funds it" Goes for AI, goes for climate, of course, too. Spot on @financialtimes.com letter:

FT letter: "Ethics of science cannot be separated from who funds it"

1169

Not particularly funny, or serious. www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...

Using AI, a professor wrote 200-plus papers

350

Definitely. The reason we had 3 Australians on our panel last night bsky.app/profile/gwag...

010

Yes, there's a better way for 'middle powers' to organize themselves in a low-CO₂ world order: "Canada and EU are missing the big prize — green steel" @steelwatch.bsky.social's Pascal Husting in today's @financialtimes.com

320

Gernot Wagner @gwagner.com · 24/09/2026

Every successful climate week panel should conclude with a ride home on the Hudson Greenway on a solar-powered e-bike.

Riding down the Hudson Greenway with Saul

2182

Tonight @ @columbiauniversity.bsky.social, a couple seats still remaining. Dinner included with (free) registration. " I survived climate week" t-shirts optional business.columbia.edu/climate-week

262

Reposted by Gernot Wagner

Markus Marterbauer @markusmarterbauer.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

🇦🇹 gibt 10 Mrd € pJ für Import von Öl & Gas aus. Je rascher wir das beenden, desto größer der wirtschaftliche Vorteil. Wir sind nicht länger von fossilen Preisschocks betroffen & gewinnen 10 Mrd für Wertschöpfung u Beschäftigung im Inland. Lesenswert: @gwagner.com www.derstandard.at/story/300000...

derstandard.at

Klimaökonom: "Ergibt für Österreich null Sinn, Gas zu importieren"

Beim European Forum Alpbach diskutierte Klimaökonom Gernot Wagner zu Fragen des STANDARD-Forums. Er sagt: Europa muss bei Klima und Wachstum keine Kompromisse eingehen – aber schleunigst weg aus Gas

23484143

Gernot Wagner @gwagner.com · 23/09/2026

Another day, another reminder that getting off fossil fuels is an economic necessity, not just an environmental and health one www.wsj.com/business/ene...

Latest in Energy & Oil

The Global Fuel Crisis Is Driving Up the Costs of Home Heating Oil, Too

Homes in the Northeast and Alaska are especially dependent on heating oil in winter.

0134

Gernot Wagner @gwagner.com · 23/09/2026

Less popular opinion: (almost) all flights have a free-rider problem. Yes, start with mandating 100% actually sustainable aviation fuel for all private jets landing in Davos, but of course don't stop there. Same for burning of any kind of fossil fuel for (almost) any use.

1286

Meanwhile, the tools being proposed are...not quite what any serious economist would recommend. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Latest in Energy & Oil

Trump Weighs Diesel Export Ban as Fuel Prices Soar

The president said a decision would come “fast” on a potential restriction that several Republicans are championing.

031

The LinkedIn comments on this one are...something else. www.linkedin.com/posts/gwagne...

251

Sweet baby Jesus! Amazing research, though. Also fun: this is today's @nature.com newsletter linking to People¹ linking to @pnas.org. ¹ people.com/limiting-sug...

Sugar-rationed babies saw host of benefits
A study of people who lived their early life during post-war sugar rationing in the United Kingdom found that they had lower risks of all-cause dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, depression and anxiety than people born after rationing ended. A separate study found they were much less likely to develop certain cancers later in life. Even in adulthood, low-sugar babies continued to consume less sugar and had healthier diets overall. “This suggests that the level of sweetness people are exposed to very early in life may shape their taste preferences for a long time,” says economist Weilong Zhang, who co-authored the latter study.

People | 4 min read & The Conversation | 6 min read
Reference: npj Aging paper & PNAS paper

094

I love the simplicity of the @economist.com's take of yore, how climate folks should want to extract the E from ESG, and preferably focus on the C (as in CO₂) within the E (environment). But yes, they are indeed all linked:

023

Gernot Wagner @gwagner.com · 21/09/2026

Happy Climate Week Tuesday Lots going on: business.columbia.edu/climate-week

030

The @financialtimes.com rings in New York Climate Week with this front-page story: "US drivers face motor oil rationing as prices quadruple and supplies run dry" Yes, the only answer is to get off fossil fuels, all of them. Hormuz just made that even clearer: gwagner.com/nature-fossilflation

FT: US drivers face motor oil rationing as prices quadruple and supplies run dry

4385

Gernot Wagner @gwagner.com · 21/09/2026

Running into her 49th year. Happy 48th, honey!

1140

Gernot Wagner @gwagner.com · 21/09/2026

So many coincidences. In my econ PhD entering class of 25, a sweet half dozen had parents who were tenured econ profs at top schools. Took me another decade or so to (sometimes) introduce myself confidently as a first-gen high school grad.

0150

Gernot Wagner @gwagner.com · 20/09/2026

Hi 🙋, I co-wrote the paper that Luke Iseman credits with giving him the idea for "solving" climate change gwagner.com/decentralized Newsflash: Balloons won't, and the paper doesn't.

gwagner.com

Highly decentralized solar geoengineering

by Jesse L. Reynolds and Gernot Wagner

2193

Wendell Berry urged Americans to think little, local and deep

"Such individual protests, though tiny, might ultimately work better than the mass protests he had staged since the 1960s against Kentucky’s addiction to fossil fuel. …Saving the planet had to be reduced to the scale of each person’s competence." www.economist.com/obituary/202... [gift link]

economist.com

The agrarian writer, poet and activist died on August 31st, aged 92

045

"He himself wrote only by daylight and rejected computers, to reduce his dependence on strip-mined coal."

130

I'd have missed Wendell Berry's passing without perusing an old @economist.com still with me: "Critics accused him of romanticising the past and recommending the impossible. He strongly denied that. The past had also been full of bad choices, most of which had contributed to the present horrors…"

Obituary | Into the woods
Wendell Berry urged Americans to think little, local and deep
The agrarian writer, poet and activist died on August 31st, aged 92

Critics accused him of romanticising the past and recommending the impossible. He strongly denied that. The past had also been full of bad choices, most of which had contributed to the present horrors. Of course, too, not everyone could be self-sufficient. But even city-dwellers had porches or entryways in which they could grow food. They could go to farmers’ markets and buy local. Above all, they could change their ways of living. He himself wrote only by daylight and rejected computers, to reduce his dependence on strip-mined coal. Such individual protests, though tiny, might ultimately work better than the mass protests he had staged since the 1960s against Kentucky’s addiction to fossil fuel. Public campaigns too often turned into fads that faded before the root problem was tackled. Saving the planet had to be reduced to the scale of each person’s competence.

His scale was the farm, and that minute scrap of earth represented, for him, the whole. Amid his joys and satisfactions he also blazed with anger, and fretted over the sort of world he would be able to leave to his children. But living as he did, on his own patch, he knew exactly how to cope. He went to the woods.

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

140

Why more fossil fuels won’t fix the Iran energy crisis

It's always been a mystery to me how this isn't the most obvious of tautologies gwagner.com/nature-fossilflation

gwagner.com

by Gernot Wagner

060

Reposted by Gernot Wagner

Phil BuildTheFutureNow @philsustainability.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

An energy minister using an oil shock as the argument for electrification is exactly the move. Every price spike is a billboard for why "the timing is right" never expires.

051

Climate Risk Economics @climateeconomics.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Narrator: The Thai energy minister is right to say the timing is right to accelerate the energy transition to (clean) electricity.

2256

Reposted by Gernot Wagner

Europe was the ‘most unusually hot place on the planet’ this summer. Can renewables cool us down? “The human and economic costs of fossil fuels are playing out in real time, and the urgency to shift away from them has never been clearer”... www.euronews.com/2026/09/17/e...

euronews.com

Europe named most 'unusually hot place’ on Earth after sizzling summer

“These past three months are a warning sign we cannot afford to ignore – the human and economic costs of fossil fuels are playing out in real time.”

182

Ahhhh... AI will kill us all. Narrator: It may yet, but the much bigger problem is the pernicious Slow Burn of lulling us all into another germanicism: bsky.app/profile/gwag...

030

Deciphering germanicisms is the only true Turing test.

130

Yes, key bit here I omitted, unconsciously, I might add

010

Clearly, it's: Hufkutschenexternalisierungsewigkeitsgestrigefossillobbyprofiteure Or, for short: Rußrenditenritter

2151

Once again, the German word is superior to its English cousins: Ohnmacht (/ˈoːnmaxt/) means both powerlessness/helplessness and outright impotence And yes, it's the most dangerous of feelings, in more ways than one.

2122

What's the compound German word for dead thralls of the horse-and-buggy crowd trying to print one more quarter worth of ill-gotten profits based on 19th-century technology while externalizing CO₂ costs and hurting future competitiveness?

1237

Jury duty. Send fair, impartial, open-minded vibes.

270