Forrest Fleischman

Actually, my neighbors just tapped their maple today, the last day of the good season. But presumably they will still get some good sap flow, albeit lower quality, in the coming weeks, even if there are not forecast to be many nights below freezing.

From the forecast it looks like tomorrow will be the last day of Maple Syrup season, which began here in St. Paul in early February. Noting that many maple oriented events are scheduled in March (and my neighbors never tap their tree until mid March). We don't seem to be adapting to climate change.

Instead I first had to pay a private company to do my taxes, then spend hours figuring out the mistake, and then pay a fine. And all along, the IRS already knew how much I earned and how much I owed.

This is so infuriating. Several years ago I made a mistake filing my taxes and the IRS caught it because they had all the same documents I did and ran through the taxes just as I had. I would have saved money & time if they had just charged me what I owed based on what they already knew.

a better world is possible prospect.org/2022/11/30/b...

which (a) will drive the outcome, (b) will bear all the costs, and (c) are some of the poorest people in the world. In what kind of world does this make any sense at all?

Malawi has signed a 40-year contract with Portuguese engineering firm Mota-Engil to generate carbon credits from 550,000 hectares of the country’s forests Trafigura will market the carbon credits.

If people want to convince me that land based carbon markets have potential, please no more projects like this one, in which only 5% of the money from the sale goes to the local communities... reddmonitor.substack.com/p/malawi-has...

Years ago our admin did a red and black report. It took salaries & how much $ each instructor made in tuition $ for classes we taught-you were in the red or black. They released numbers once & shut it down bc humanities were producing huge $ for uni & engineers, business and scientists were losing $

"It means recognizing that healthy ecosystems are not just nice to have but rather, as Wet'suwet'en matriarch Freda Houston describes forests and water in her territory, ‘our critical infrastructure’

"This means moving ecosystems off the bake sale train and onto the pathway of big, serious public investment, on par with healthcare and housing.

"I see the support of offset markets as a clear invitation to double-down on building alternative pathways for ecological restoration and conservation that are decidedly not false.

"New projects would be announced, with little or no reflection on the ones that disappeared from view. The events paraded a seemingly endless stream of startups, high on eternal optimism, with market growth always right around the corner.

Bake Sales to Save Nature: Why Wall Street Conservation Survives Academics have spent decades analysing the harms and failures of market and finance-led biodiversity policy. Yet, even though ‘selling nature to save it’ looks less like the promised green capitalism...

Bake sales to save nature "year after year, speakers would reiterate the urgency of making diverse natures investable, followed by the requisite admission that it would not be easy. view.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/dech.70035

Here's my post on REDD-Monitor about this paper:

reddmonitor.substack.com/p/new-resear...

New research shows that social-ecological complexity creates “high levels of uncertainty” and makes it “very difficult” to attribute changes in carbon storage to carbon offset projects Social-ecological complexity “makes any carbon additionality estimation fragile”.

A recent paper by Pushpendra Rana, Ph.D., @forrestf.bsky.social, and Amit Sharma is titled "Why carbon offsets may fail in complex systems: A causal inference perspective."

Or, why carbon offsets cannot be fixed.

reddmonitor.substack.com/p/new-resear...

They sent 3000 ICE agents to the Twin Cities for 2 months and succeeded in arresting 4000 people.

The same day DHS announced the surge would end in Minnesota, ICE activity increased in small towns The less densely populated areas outside the Twin Cities make it harder for protesters and observers to organize.

There is no drawdown. There is no retreat. ICE is just redistributing their assets to better avoid accountability.

pro tip for sharing extremely fucked up climate news: if you don’t include a doable action step, it’s just gonna burn people out

I got about a bajillon of em. how bout: find out when your local planning and zoning people meet, show up and support clean energy projects and dense housing

UPDATE: He was just released. This shows that just indiscriminately took someone because they were Latino. Their illegal tactics continue so we still need neighbors to patrol, observe, and support our immigrant community.

This is an important thread for those (primarily outside) who I've heard wondering why there isn't more protest in the US. There is a historically large amount of protest going on in the US.

Ending the endangerement finding is a big deal, on the other hand it will likely be litigated in court, where the govt. is likely to lose, and it wasn't enabling much meaningful action anyway. The US climate movement needs a strategy that moves beyond your party winning alternating elections.

"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.