Michael

Our Madison Common Council endorsements are out. Make sure to vote by April 1st!

Madison!

US farmers switch to renting out sheep as lawn mowers for solar sites For the first time in four generations, the Raines family didn't plant a single cotton seed last year. Chad Raines parked his tractor and rented out most of his Texas farmland to a neighbor.

As US farmers grapple with soaring debt and slumping incomes, some crop producers are trading their tractors for flocks of sheep, and starting up solar grazing businesses to help make ends meet reut.rs/3QFJCEC

ICONIC: Yosemite National Park workers just hung an upside-down American flag—THOUSANDS of feet up on El Capitan. That’s not decoration. That’s a distress signal. They’re telling us the country is in danger. Are you paying attention?

www.sfchronicle.com/outdoors/art...

Op-Ed: Convert Street Parking to Trees to Hit Seattle Canopy Goals Sooner - The Urbanist # Seattle could meet its 30% tree canopy goal much quicker by converting a quarter of its 500,000 on-street parking spaces. The paving to planting conversion would convey many benefits, cooling neighb...

These streets will be narrower, slower, safer, and greener. The perfect place for a Shared Street where pedestrians come first and the speed limit is 10 mph. www.theurbanist.org/2025/02/22/o...

Trump Has Paralyzed Renewables Permitting, Leaked Memo Reveals The American Clean Power Association wrote to its members about federal guidance that has been “widely variable and changing quickly.”

what do you do when crucial federal permitting offices won’t even talk to renewables developers?

welcome to our new reality, according to a leaked industry memo i reported last night for @heatmap.news

heatmap.news/plus/the-fig...

Trump’s Wind Order Could Hit ‘More Than Half’ of New Projects The American wind industry faces a potentially existential threat.

NEW: Trump’s anti-wind order does *not* just apply to offshore wind.

That’s because all wind projects need federal permits, even if they’re not on federal property.

Lobbyists believe that Trump’s order could hit “more than half” of wind farms now under development. heatmap.news/plus/the-fig...

Imagine if we made infill like this legal to build everywhere in America.

Nothing says freedom quite like a neo art-deco single-stair apartment building! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

SFH lot next to an alley. The mental fence surrounding the home has been smashed, presumably by a driver of a car who turned into the alley (across a sidewalk) too fast.

When you move around primarily or exclusively by car, you may not see the evidence of car crashes around you:

smashed fences & retaining walls
bent sign posts
broken car pieces
broken windshield glass, etc.

For those who travel by 🚶🏻, 🚲,🦽 & 🚌 these reminders are everywhere on sidewalks & streets.

Thanks and farewell to an incredible Secretary of Transportation.

With the incoming administration, there's going to be a lot of bullshit and misinformation about offshore wind floating around. Here is a well-documented summary of the best scientific information on the subject:

oceanconservancy.org/wp-content/u...

Today I wished my coworker a safe bike ride home and in return they wished me a safe bus ride, qualifying it with how “dangerous” the bus is. I replied, “the bus is not dangerous at all!”, and they let me know it was! they saw a story about someone getting attacked on a bus in a diff *country*

Wow.

Thanks for covering all this… such drama! Re: the parking pilot - this vote means it will NOT be included in the budget and implemented? That is a shame.

Cool job alert: Madison, WI is hiring a new Director of Transportation: www.governmentjobs.com/careers/madi...

A unique chance to shape transportation policy in a burgeoning city that just installed its first BRT -- while working alongside innovative mayor @satyaformadison.bsky.social

Ridgeline chart showing the distribution of global daily air temperature differences from the pre-industrial reference period (1850-1900), for every year between 1940 and 2024. Each individual year resembles a hill, shaded in a darker shade of red and further to the right for warmer years. The trend is clearly towards warmer years, with 2024 standing out as first year above 1.5C.

NEW: 2024 has just been confirmed as the warmest year on record, and the first to breach the 1.5C threshold.

We used a ridgeline (Joy Division inspired) chart to visualise daily temperature anomalies since 1940.

2024 clearly stands out with 100% of its days above 1.3C and 75% above 1.5C.

An article from The Onion featuring a humorous headline about an SUV shopper's preference for safety in accidents: “Conscientious SUV Shopper Just Wants Something That Will Kill Family In Other Car In Case Of Accident”. The image shows a smiling woman driving an SUV.

So many replies like this

A bicycle in front of a frozen lake and a lot of fog

great day for a leisurely froggy ride 🐸😶‍🌫️

Monarch butterflies to be added to threatened species list in the US US Fish and Wildlife Service extends protections to ‘iconic’ insects, who experts say may not survive climate crisis

Pollinators will protect us if we protect them.

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Just stumbling upon this, but wow! What an incredible resource. This would be huge to expand to other cities.

every commenter on the internet who complains about bike lanes once saw a cyclist pedal through a red light and now uses it as justification for why they should be allowed to run over anyone else on the road

before coffee: I hate everything

after coffee: I hate everything but nervouser

What's Coming: Peak Oil, Maximum LNG and Ethanol, State Violence, the CCS Boom, and a Lot More Climate Litigation I haven't sent out a newsletter for a couple of weeks, partly because I'm working on a book that's due in February, which is keeping me even busier than usual, but also because I didn't want to write ...

Really good newsletter today from @amywestervelt.bsky.social that ties together a LOT of things in a very short text.

My takeaway: fossil fuel companies are more vulnerable and more dependent on taxpayer money, meaning they'll be even more desperate to influence politics.

This is not to say that a bike path will always outweigh street trees. Of course, each situation is different. But we need to be smart about identifying limitations and evaluating real costs and benefits that are based on data, not emotion or misinformed reporting of science.

This bothers me as two people, who ultimately want to have a similar impact in increasing our urban sustainability, end up pitted against each other. We need to find a way to have more collaborative conversations about the actual benefits of different assets (trees or bikes).

Of course, trees are a component in fighting climate change through carbon sequestration. However, here, the purported benefits were vastly overstated and weaponized against a street improvement that would likely have a much greater climate/carbon impact through shifting trips from cars > bikes.

I am troubled by attacks on recent local developments (ex: a protected bicycle path on a unsafe road) that had tree impacts (removing some trees). Of course trees are an incredible asset, but antis cited the tree's individual climate-change fighting benefits that would be lost with their removal.

How can we encourage considerations for street trees during planning processes without becoming a barrier to much needed change?

Trees do so much to make our cities livable yet are often either 1) completely overlooked in the development process or 2) weaponized against sustainable housing and transportation projects.

But sure, let’s focus on the plastic straws! The automobile blind spot is literally killing us, and our environment.