Ash Sarkar

Going travelling for a month, so I'll be on here less! For anyone trying to get in touch for work purposes, email is best (but I'll be slow to respond). Ta ra!

“I need you to lock in stop being distracted right. I BELIEVE in you but YOU’VE got to want this moment. This isn’t my story alright?” IM READY TO RUN THROUGH A BRICK WALL

At what point are you going to accept that settler terrorists are operating as an extension of the Israeli government, under the protection of the state?

Great piece

Strong Naomi Wolf energy here. @andytwelves is factchecking the book and finding evidence it's littered with AI hallucinations. Fake quotes from Hayek and Roger Scruton. Those aren't cherries, they're errors - some with the Chatgpt urls attached. Did this book have an editor?

@AlamNisar Should have been grounds for a child abuse case on her part tbf.

@AyoCaesar She's Spurs - no parent would do that to their child - proof deffo no Nepo-baby privilege there -- ignore em Ash and enjoy ya hols 🌞

Nepo-baby? My mum (now retired) was a social worker, and has yet to secure me employment with the London Borough of Lambeth 😭

Gonna start doling out child protection plans and see where that gets me.

NATO withdraws from Iraq Strait of Hormuz shut for weeks F-35 hit Parts of US & Gulf elite saying Israel has captured US foreign policy Cyprus saying lets reexamine British presence Billions going to Moscow on back of oil price rises Stop calling it Suez. It’s worse!

Follow @stevenjmethven - our man in Havana.

a trillion dollars spent on ai risk teams and no one thought to hard code into the model to not tell Bernie Sanders that you do crime

Remember this while seeing the fossil fuel industry and its many unofficial spokespeople piling on pressure to start fresh drilling in the North Sea. New drilling won't yield for years, and the longer we delay getting off fossil fuels, the more vulnerable we are to price shocks.

Bessent himself said it 👇 It's just too good, going to war against Iran and the outcome 3 weeks into it is they remove sanctions on Iranian oil. No scenarist could have written that one 😅 x.com/i/status/20346…

I'm going to make some obvious points. (1) Blowing up all the oil infrastructure in the Middle East is an insane idea, and may well result in a global economic crash and humanitarian crisis unrivaled in the lives of those now living. We're talking about the price of everything everywhere rising, from food to gas, at a moment when inflation was already high. All of that will be laid at the feet of the authors of this war. (2) The antebellum status quo of Feb 27, 2026 was just not that bad, but we're unlikely to return to it. Expect indefinite, long-term, ongoing disruptions to everything out of the Middle East. (3) Also assume tech financing crashes for the indefinite future. The genius plan to get the Gulf states caught in the crossfire has incinerated much of the funding for LPs, for datacenters, and for IPOs. Anyone in tech who supported this war may soon learn the meaning of "force majeure" as funding gets yanked. (4) Many capital allocators will instead be allocating much further down Maslow's hierarchy of needs, towards useful basic things like food and energy. (5) It's fortunate that all those progressives yelled about the "climate crisis." Yes, their reasoning about timelines was wrong, and much of the money was wasted in graft, but the result was right: we all need energy independence from the Middle East, pronto. It's also fortunate that Elon and China autistically took climate seriously. Now they're going to need to ship a billion solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, nuclear power plants, and the like to get everyone off oil, immediately. (6) It's not just an oil and gas problem, of course. It's also a fertilizer problem, and a chemical precursor problem. Maybe some new sources will come online at the new prices, but it takes time to dial stuff up, particularly at this scale, so shortages are almost a certainty. That said, China has actually scaled up coal-to-chemicals[a,c] (C2C), and there's also something more sci-fi called Power-to-X[b] which turns arbitrary power + water + air into hydrocarbons. But all of that will need to get accelerated. I have a background in chemical engineering so may start funding things in this area. (7) Ultimately, this war is going to result in tremendous blame for anyone associated with it. It's a no-win scenario to blow up this much infrastructure for so many people. Simply not worth it for whatever objective they thought they were going to attain. But unless you're actually in a position to stop the madness, the pragmatic thing to do is: scramble to mitigate the fallout to yourself, your business, and your people. [a]: reuters.com/business/energ… [b]: alfalaval.com/industries/ene… [c]: reuters.com/sustainability…

This is literally the dumbest war in human history. No hyperbole.

With fossil fuel prices surging, decoupling electricity bills from gas prices has never been more important. Important briefing from @Cmmonwealth:

“A wake up call” the CEO of Britain’s biggest domestic energy firm told me last night about the possibility of long term impact to global gas and oil infrastructure… but he pointed to electrification as the main lesson, while domestic gas would be preferable to shipped gas:

“wake-up call that gets us to electrify more of our economy and get more of our energy from homegrown sources.”


"The irony is, right now, we're emailing millions of customers saying their energy prices are going to fall..."
"You can't protect yourself against these global markets forever."
 "Traders are really worried about how long it's going to take these facilities to get back online."
"Our electricity system's too inefficient. We need to reform that markets so that people get the benefits of our homegrown resources."
“my own view is that shipping gas around the world is more inefficient and has more leaks of methane than if you use local gas. But we shouldn't kid ourselves. North Sea gas wouldn't meaningfully bring the price down because we're paying the global price. If we got more out of the North Sea, it would simply be sold to other countries at these very high prices or here at these high prices. And we can't kid ourselves we're going to be self-sufficient in gas again. What we can do is have a much cheaper approach to electricity than we have today. Our electricity system's too inefficient. We need to reform that markets so that people get the benefits of our homegrown resources.

Unfortunately threatening escalation after you have already killed Iran’s leadership and made it clear that you want regime change is unlikely to persuade Iran to back off. They believe they have less to lose than their adversaries and they are right

The consequence of years of having an 'Israel First' foreign policy.