Forrest Fleischman

"We find that firms that reduce or exit voluntary offsetting... subsequently achieve larger reductions in operational
emissions intensity than firms that continue to rely on offsets." www.tse-fr.eu/sites/defaul...

The Trump admin has a terrible record on actually carrying out their deregulatory agenda, most of this stuff has gotten thrown out in court. I'm surprised that this is presented as a fait acompli rather than a first step in a battle they are likely to lose. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

If Bad Bunny can cover the history of Puerto Rico, colonialism, transatlantic slavery, hemispheric consciousness, as well as contemporary life and politics in under 14 minutes, you can do your 15- or 20-minute conference presentation with time to spare.

Personally I think that naming an ugly, inefficient, and very outdated train station after the President might be kind of fitting.

Future restoration should enhance ecological complexity and emergent properties at multiple scales Ecological restoration has a paradigm of re-establishing ‘indigenous reference' communities. One resulting concern is that focussing on target communities may not necessarily create systems which fun...

The mainstream aim to restore “native reference ecosystems”

Reminds me of people of my age who go to see touring bands from their youth

Trying to recreate something that never quite existed

And has limited relevance in a changing world
doi.org/10.1111/ecog...

I know it’s intentional but we should stop calling everything AI, lumping useful machine learning techniques for science with large language models that tech companies are trying to cram into everything.

The Border Patrol also recruits heavily along the southern border because... that's where their work is concentrated. And this reflects the demographics of the southern border, which is very heavily hispanic.

Do either of these companies make any money? I guess SpaceX has some government contracts, and xAI maybe has some contracts for making pornography or something like that?

Big flocks of robins (100+?) show up in my yard in St. Paul every few days, I think they are eating hackberries (but I imagine they would eat through them pretty fast). I thought they went south for the winter? Its weird to hear them twittering like its spring in sub-zero temps.

Fun fact though... solar cells are way more efficient than plants! www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Sorry, your views as expressed in this dialogue are incoherent. On the one hand, solar generates energy so poorly, on the other hand, people who sell energy from solar have made so much money doing so that they've corrupted the entire scientific establishment?

This is a cool but kind of weird policy. We get a discount on *all* our electricity use in winter because we have a heat pump. Also, heat pumps are awesome.

I'll sign up for any energy source that doesn't involve wiping out natural habitats. Unfortunately, such sources don't exist. There are tradeoffs between energy sources, and between particular siting locations, and we try to analyze them to figure out what's best in any given setting.

I am nominating Saint Paul for the FIFA Peace Prize.

Here's an analysis of a solar facility in my hometown. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Could you provide me one you think is biased and explain what bias you perceive in it?

but I'm hoping our formalization and analysis can provide a clearer explanation of why this is a problem for carbon offset programs.

I don't think we are at all the first people to say this (in fact I think its so glaringly obvious that I've struggled to understand why this hasn't been the first reaction of the entire scientific community to these policy tools)

Therefore, the paper argues that measuring additionality and leakage in forests is not really possible, and this presents a fundamental flaw in the design of programs that rely on forest-based carbon offsets.

and that statistical approaches to analyzing observational data provide measures of average effects, whereas carbon offsets are developed with the assumption that one can measure the effects of particular projects.

In brief, this paper formalizes the insight that you can't measure a counterfactual, that its very difficult to develop quasi-experimental causal insights in complex systems (e.g. such as forests)

Here's the 50 day open access link authors.elsevier.com/c/1mWeE5Ce0r...

Why carbon offsets may fail in complex systems: A causal inference perspective Social-ecological system dynamics present a fundamental challenge to the attribution of changes in carbon stocks to actions taken by carbon offset sel…

In our latest article we argue that the problems with carbon offsets can't be fixed. The problem is causal complexity which observational methods can't sort out. open access link in the second post. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thanks, the ones I've read were done by academics with zero external funding. Actual social science research is rarely funded by "big" corporate interests.

Metsitystä tärkeämpää #suojelu ja ekosysteemien laaja #ennallistaminen.
Our findings underline that near-term emission cuts remain critical for achieving the Paris Agreement and emphasise the need to shift from a dominant focus on large-scale tree planting to broader ecosystem restoration.
#metsät

This pre print did not examine that question. Analyses I've seen show that the potential footprint of wind & solar globally is small relative to global natural landscapes, but of course in particular locations it could be harmful.

How many STEM Ph.D.s were lost from the U.S. federal government last year?

My colleagues @mghersher.bsky.social and @policyhound.bsky.social dug into a recent data release to find the answer. A @science.org exclusive.

www.science.org/content/arti...

the level of absolutely bonkers disinfo around food reaching millions of people is absolutely galling. netflix pushing straight up nonsense. otherwise progressive and smart people amplifying it.

This pre-print suggests that forest conservation is good for biodiversity, but large-scale afforestation is *bad* for biodiversity, and also will have little impact on short-medium term climate, underscoring the need for rapid emissions reductions. assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-822...

Social movements are transformative agents for biodiversity conservation | PNAS Civil society has long been a catalyst for social change by reshaping structures, influencing values, and challenging power dynamics; however, its ...

Social movements and non violent direct action play a key role in protecting biodiversity globally, yet consistently face violent threats and receive limited support from conservation funders and big NGOs. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...