James Jackson

The role of central banks in perpetuating and tackling the economic patterns associated with climate change has increasingly been subject to academic and political attention. The Bank of England is no exception, having received a new mandate to ‘facilitate the transition to net zero’ in March 2021. This follows the Bank’s utilisation of its monetary tools to repeatedly stabilise the economic status quo since 2008, despite its ecological consequences. This article reveals the perceptions within the British state of the new mandate and the forms of institutional change demanded by it, based on a series of elite interviews with Treasury officials and other UK monetary policy experts, as well as a discourse analysis of Bank publications and speeches. We find that Bank actors lobbied for the new mandate to legitimise its development of climate risk assessments and licence internal dialogue on the implications of its monetary …

Using a data sample of 4.481× 10 8 ψ (3686) events collected with the BESIII detector, we report the first observation of the four-lepton-decays J/ψ→ e+ e− e+ e− and J/ψ→ e+ e− μ+ μ− utilizing the process ψ (3686)→ π+ π− J/ψ. The branching fractions are determined to be [5.48±0.31 (stat)±0.45 (syst)]× 10− 5 and [3.53±0.22 (stat)±0.13 (syst)]× 10− 5, respectively. The results are consistent with theoretical predictions. No significant signal is observed for J/ψ→ μ+ μ− μ+ μ−, and an upper limit on the branching fraction is set at 1.6× 10− 6 at the 90% confidence level. A C P asymmetry observable is constructed for the first two channels, which is measured to be (− 0.012±0.054±0.010) and (0.062±0.059±0.006), respectively. No evidence for C P violation is observed in this process.

HIV incidence in eastern and southern Africa has historically been concentrated among girls and women aged 15–24 years. As new cases decline with HIV interventions, population-level infection dynamics may shift by age and gender. Here, we integrated population-based surveillance of 38,749 participants in the Rakai Community Cohort Study and longitudinal deep-sequence viral phylogenetics to assess how HIV incidence and population groups driving transmission have changed from 2003 to 2018 in Uganda. We observed 1,117 individuals in the incidence cohort and 1,978 individuals in the transmission cohort. HIV viral suppression increased more rapidly in women than men, however incidence declined more slowly in women than men. We found that age-specific transmission flows shifted: whereas HIV transmission to girls and women (aged 15–24 years) from older men declined by about one-third …

Germany has long been admired for its coordinated state-business relations, aligning domestic industry, particularly the automobile sector, with political and economic objectives. This article finds, however, that in the case of the automobile sector’s transition to electric vehicles, there is little evidence of coordination. Informed by 31 interviews and a document analysis, the data shows instead that the Diesel Scandal proved to be a pivotal moment in German politics, as the state has looked to distance itself from the automobile industry. To reflect the data, I adjust Meckling and Nahm’s analytical heuristic to argue that against the backdrop of e-mobility, auto-state-business relations have become un-coordinated. I subsequently contend that the consequences of un-coordination stand to have profound implications for Germany, as it cedes ground to Tesla and China in the global automobile market. As a result, a decline …

As the transport sector remains the only sector in the United Kingdom (UK) in which emissions continue to rise, electric vehicles (EVs) have become an increasingly prominent political subject. This article finds that far from simply a low carbon transition, the EV transition in the UK is a means to address the attendant frailties of its economic model. Drawing upon an original empirical dataset of 33 interviews alongside a document analysis, I show that decarbonising the UK automobile sector is tied to a process of industrial and economic modernisation. These findings reveal the contested features of the transition, as the desire to capitalise on broader shifts in the global automobile market is brought into opposition with Britain’s financialised political economy. Finally, it shows that the modernisation tenet of Ecological Modernisation, which has come to be routinely neglected in the literature, should be revisited in the …

Earthquake moment tensors and centroid locations in the catalogue of the Global CMT (gCMT) project, formerly the Harvard CMT project, have become an essential resource for studying active global tectonics, used by many solid-Earth researchers. The catalogue’s quality, long duration (1976–present), ease of access and global coverage of earthquakes larger than about Mw 5.5 have transformed our ability to study regional patterns of earthquake locations and focal mechanisms. It also allows researchers to easily identify earthquakes with anomalous mechanisms and depths that stand out from the global or regional patterns, some of which require us to look more closely at accepted interpretations of geodynamics, tectonics or rheology. But, as in all catalogues that are, to some extent and necessarily, produced in a semi-routine fashion, the catalogue may contain anomalies that are in fact errors. Thus …

The scholarship on green state transformation has harnessed debates on the empirical and ideal transformations of the state in the Anthropocene, but central banks have thus far been elided from analysis. In this article, we draw into focus central banks as pronounced, if ill-considered, features of green state transformations in both theory and practice. Central banks exemplify the intractability, incrementalism and limitations of actually existing green state transformations. Yet simultaneously, these institutions of economic governance are, at least theoretically, vital constituents of fully fledged green states. In addressing the central bank lacuna in the analysis of green state transformation, we propose a research agenda at the intersection of environmental and monetary politics that centres on (i) the institutional variation and convergence of central banks across the global economy, (ii) the political-economic and …

The rapid expansion of renewable energy technologies entails massive resource challenges which are well illustrated by electric vehicles. Circular economy strategies are gaining traction as a potential solution to these challenges. However, while scholarship has emphasized the necessity of reducing resource use in absolute terms, policymakers are reluctant to include this in circular economy strategies, preferring to rely on ‘green growth’. We describe this phenomenon as the social construction of ignorance leading to green mission creep and bring knowledge about extractivism and sustainable mobility to bear on circular economy strategies for electric vehicles. Through conducting the first critical analysis of Norway's national strategy for a circular economy and the ambitions for an electric vehicle sector therein, together with the report that provided its knowledge base and 24 letters of input from civil society …