Danny Cullenward
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ghgpolicy.org
Danny Cullenward
@ghgpolicy.org
13K followers 1.5K following 1.5K posts
Forensic climate economist and lawyer. The carbon accounting canary in your climate policy coal mine.

https://ghgpolicy.org
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Reposted by Danny Cullenward
waiterich.bsky.social
Does burning more wood lead to more forests & help the climate? In a new Nature paper, WRI & Yale researchers show such claims rely on flawed accounting and models, and misinterpret underlying studies.

Read the papers: rdcu.be/eNkXX

RSVP to a webinar 10/31, 9:30 ET: hub.wri.org/events/2025/...
Reply to: Carbon implications of wood harvesting and forest management Timothy D. Searchinger, Steven Berry, Liqing Peng The critiqued study by two of the authors of this Reply uses the carbon harvest model (CHARM) to estimate carbon emissions from wood harvest as the carbon added to the atmosphere—fully accounting for silvicultural gains—relative to the carbon that forests would store if left alone. This comparison to no-human-activity is the standard approach for calculating emissions from burning oil, driving cars and other human actions, and is the same forestry-accounting approach used in land-use change models long relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Global Carbon Project and many other papers. In the accompanying Comment, Sohngen et al. reject this approach, arguing mainly that emissions of one activity should be compared with those in an economic counterfactual, which means the emissions produced by the economically estimated, most-likely alternative activities. Citing their previously published global timber model (GTM), they claim that new wood harvests “can reduce” atmospheric carbon, which means they are carbon negative. However, although economic models, when credible, can usefully project shifts in behaviour, they do not determine the emissions of these behaviours; by confusing emissions of one activity with emissions avoided by another, the approach by Sohngen et al. makes physical emissions disappear. We elaborate below and also explain how the GTM’s findings that economic forces offset new wood-use emissions by creating more forests stem from large misinterpretations of underlying studies (even by a factor of 75) and from modelling structures that largely assume their conclusions.
October 30, 2025 at 8:49 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
jeffreytumlin.bsky.social
SF made it easy for residents and business owners to remove car traffic for safe community celebrations. Thanks, Safe Streets for All, for mapping car-free Halloween night celebrations. For your own next block party, see
www.sfmta.com/block-party-...
www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/v...
Halloween 2025 Street Closures -- Streets For All SF - Google My Maps
Halloween 2025 Street Closures -- Streets For All SF
www.google.com
October 29, 2025 at 9:59 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
jamellebouie.net
consider this part one of what will be an ongoing series making the case for an imperial congress (gift link)
Opinion | The Empty Promises of Trump’s Imperial Presidency
www.nytimes.com
October 29, 2025 at 1:39 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
andrewdessler.com
this is a very impressive analysis of some of the statistical "oddities" in Pielke Jr's analysis that normalized climate impacts are declining. Everyone should read this.
economicsfromthetopdown.com/2025/10/26/r...
Roger Pielke Jr.’s Appallingly Bad Analysis of Billion Dollar Disasters – Economics from the Top Down
In a recent paper called Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters”, Roger Pielke Jr. published a chart that's so bad I've devoted a whole essay to debunking it.
economicsfromthetopdown.com
October 29, 2025 at 1:53 AM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
sevier.io
Thanks to everyone who has helped raise $575.80 so far! ICE is being deployed in our city, and we're week from the suspension of SNAP and LIHEAP - two essential, life-saving federal programs affected by the federal shutdown. Every bit is going to help. Could you help get us to $675?
sevier.io isaac @sevier.io · 19d
OK folks. I make a monthly donation to support the San Francisco food bank. Right now they have a matching program, meaning every $1 turns into $2. Would you join me? Let's raise $1200.
October 23, 2025 at 11:44 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
coyotemedia.org
While this federal administration has been busy empowering ICE to become, essentially, an extrajudicial militia allowed to disappear people from our streets, the Bay has been organizing. We will not be beaten down.
What We Can Do About ICE
ICE is in the Bay Area. And yes, we can all do something about it.
www.coyotemedia.org
October 22, 2025 at 10:12 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
solarchase.bsky.social
Time for 2025 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread. If you like these, you might like the second edition of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon. A 30% discount code WSQ0437 is valid on publisher website until end of November 2025.

www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook...
Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon
www.worldscientific.com
October 20, 2025 at 7:43 AM
ghgpolicy.org
Important new carbon markets story from @benelgin.bsky.social in Bloomberg:

Verra acknowledges it issued too many carbon credits to a controversial forest offset project, but hasn't implemented a remedy — despite backing companies' use of these credits.

🎁 Gift link below.
Majority of Carbon Credits From Tarnished Project Deemed Bogus
After a two-year probe, findings by the world's largest offset certifier raise pressing questions for the struggling carbon markets.
www.bloomberg.com
October 17, 2025 at 4:29 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
jtemple.bsky.social
How Microsoft, Google, Meta and others are depending on trees, plants & waste to meet their climate goals
Big Tech’s big bet on a controversial carbon removal tactic
Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage can scale faster than other approaches. But some experts are dubious about the climate benefits.
www.technologyreview.com
October 15, 2025 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
deephunk.bsky.social
He deserved to grow old. He deserved the space to be more creative and share more art w/ the world. He deserved to be adorned in praise while he was still able to receive it in the physical. Luckily, music and spirit is eternal.

RIP Michael Eugene Archer aka D'ANGELO. 🕊️
October 14, 2025 at 4:22 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
burritojustice.bsky.social
October 11, 2025 at 1:09 AM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
resnikoff.bsky.social
If you live in California, please call @gavinnewsom.bsky.social at (916) 445-2841 and urge him to sign SB 79. Here's my post about why the bill is so important: publiccomment.blog/p/newsom-s-f...
Newsom's Fateful Choice
Why the governor needs to sign SB 79
publiccomment.blog
October 9, 2025 at 4:59 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
jeremywallace.bsky.social
New Good Authority post by me

goodauthority.org/news/china-u...
China updates its climate commitments, in disappointing fashion
But China remains a key player in climate politics, unlike the U.S.
goodauthority.org
September 26, 2025 at 4:17 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social
"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply."

me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually

www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...
How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review
Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.
www.bostonreview.net
September 23, 2025 at 5:09 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
jennmjacksonphd.bsky.social
When I was placed on the Professor Watchlist in 2021, people sent death threats about my children. I had security officers monitor my 8yo at school.

Where is all the outrage for those of us who have been targeted for years? Where is the outrage for our families?

My own colleagues are silent.
September 15, 2025 at 8:25 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
rebeccasolnit.bsky.social
I wrote a thing. As someone who survived the 1970s and kept the receipts.
Shocked by Epstein’s birthday book? That culture was everywhere before feminism | Rebecca Solnit
Feminism exposed the ubiquity of child abuse, rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence – and helped fight that culture
www.theguardian.com
September 13, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
sifill.bsky.social
September 14, 2025 at 1:52 AM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
cristianfarias.com
The New Yorker asked me “how bad” today’s Supreme Court ruling was. I boiled it down to one paragraph:

link.newyorker.com/view/5bda429...
"Just the other day, I was in the audience at Lincoln Center when Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, while promoting a new book, that she doesn't think the United States is in a constitutional crisis," Farias told us. "Today, the Supreme Court, without offering a single line of reasoning, more or less declared that the Fourth Amendment, which protects everyone from unreasonable searches and seizures, nonetheless allows the Trump Administration to arrest and detain anyone who looks Latino, citizen or not, on account of the language that they speak or the kind of jobs they do. The ruling putatively covers the Los Angeles area, but the effect could be national," he continued. "If that's not a constitutional crisis, then what is?"
September 8, 2025 at 9:52 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
scottwiener.bsky.social
We’ve been informed by the Governor’s Department of Finance that it won’t agree before our legislative session ends (on Friday) to finalize a $750M bridge loan to Bay Area transit.

This loan was agreed to in our June budget. Without it, BART, Muni, et al will cut service.🧵
September 6, 2025 at 6:59 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
gidden.bsky.social
Our paper is out today in @nature.com where we assess a Prudent Planetary Limit for Geologic Carbon Storage:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A prudent planetary limit for geologic carbon storage - Nature
A risk-based, spatially explicit analysis of carbon storage in sedimentary basins establishes a prudent planetary limit of around 1,460 Gt of geological carbon storage, which requires making explicit ...
www.nature.com
September 4, 2025 at 8:56 AM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
adamjschwarz.bsky.social
Illinois Gov. Pritzker vows to pursue Trump officials who participate in an illegal National Guard deployment to Chicago:

"If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me - not time or political circumstance - from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law."
August 25, 2025 at 8:36 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
timmonsroberts.bsky.social
My lab's been attacked by an anti-wind group and their lawyers. They threatened the science funding of my whole university, to shut me and my undergraduate research assistants up.

NYT just covered it. 1/n

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...
Law Firm Pressures Brown University to Erase Research on Anti-Wind Groups
www.nytimes.com
August 25, 2025 at 11:32 AM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
audrelawdamercy.bsky.social
Justice Jackson is basically reporting live from inside a garbage fire

www.ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/nih-c...
Ketanji Brown Jackson Stops Just Short of Saying the Supreme Court Is Breathtakingly Full of Shit
“Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”
www.ballsandstrikes.org
August 22, 2025 at 6:50 PM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
katemac.bsky.social
While procrastinating on the insurance piece, I made the mistake of checking up on a few headlines I've seen recently about China's green tech manufacturing & exports.
Big mistake, huge etc.
August 21, 2025 at 4:59 AM
Reposted by Danny Cullenward
alecluhn.bsky.social
I fell while hiking near Folgefonna glacier & broke my femur, pelvis & some vertebrae. I was trapped on the mountain for 6 days & had to drink my urine.
Bad calls got me into this. What got me out of it was the love of my wife, family & friends. I’m lucky to get a 2nd chance youtu.be/EM96OFPR6Mc?...
Hiker's incredible survival story stranded 6 days in Norwegian wilderness
YouTube video by Good Morning America
youtu.be
August 20, 2025 at 5:56 PM