This is one of those TSW features we all like called “we told you this would happen, but you didn’t listen.” Even without our joint knowledge, sheer logic would have said that the two ideas “based on climate change everything will burn up” AND “if we pay people to leave things alone in western dry forests, they won’t burn up” don’t fit together. I’ve always found that when combos of ideas are illogical, someone is probably making a buck, and that person may well have the ear of political interests.
It makes sense that if you start a policy intervention, you would ask experts (us, for example) and when something doesn’t seem to be working the way you intended, change the way you are implementing it, or decide the intervention wasn’t a good idea.
We’ve covered the individual cases here before, but Shawn Regan went ahead and ran some numbers.
California is home to some of the nation’s strictest climate mandates. Its cap-and-trade program mandates that large emitters obtain allowances for each ton of carbon they emit. They can meet part of that obligation with carbon offsets, including credits generated by forests that purportedly store carbon over long periods.
Over the program’s history, California companies have spent billions of dollars on these carbon offsets, the vast majority generated by forest projects. The state’s logic is that a company can continue emitting carbon so long as it pays someone elsewhere to keep enough carbon stored in trees for up to a century. That assumes the forests don’t burn up in the meantime—and this summer, many did.
At the Opal Mountain site in central Oregon, more than 85 percent of the 14,000-acre forest-carbon project burned in a wildfire this summer. The project has generated over 500,000 carbon credits, purchased by companies including Southern California Gas, Shell, and Pacific Gas and Electric. Elsewhere, in Washington State, fires this summer burned tens of thousands of acres at the Colville forest-carbon site, an enormous project whose credits have been bought by Chevron and other major firms.
Here’s a thought. Maybe PG&E would be better off spending the money, oh, I don’t know…doing fuel treatments around their powerlines? Or maybe updating or checking on them?
Altogether, nearly 80,000 acres of land set aside for California carbon banking have burned in wildfires this year, according to data compiled by the climate-focused nonprofit CarbonPlan.
Some of these projects commanded high prices despite significant fire risks. The Opal Mountain project has been marketed as a “premier carbon forestry investment,” with millions of dollars of value tied to its carbon credits. In 2024, California regulators gave the project a “Direct Environmental Benefits in the State” designation, making its credits especially valuable under state rules. California regulations require that at least half the offsets used by a regulated company come from projects deemed to provide direct environmental benefits within the state.
Why would protecting trees in Oregon provide a direct environmental benefit to California? The owners of the Opal Mountain site claimed their fire-management activities would reduce the risk of wildfire smoke drifting into California. The approval for its special designation claims that its “forest management plan will reduce the risk of wildfire.” Many of those measures were still being planned or considered, yet California regulators nonetheless approved the designation. Now, less than two years later, a wildfire has burned most of the project—including a fire lookout cited as evidence of its wildfire protection.
Now, we all know what direction prevailing winds go from Oregon. If you don’t know, you might think about the St. Helens ash plume if you were around then. Even trusty Google AI says:
Prevailing Winds: Oregon experiences prevailing westerly and southwesterly winds coming off the Pacific Ocean, especially during storms and certain seasonal patterns.
Downwind Regions: Air masses moving east-northeast from Oregon typically carry weather systems, smoke, or particulate matter toward Idaho, Washington, Montana, and parts of Wyoming and Canada.
Hmm.. I don’t know about you, but I would volunteer to work on a proposal review team for CARB. It would be funny if it didn’t involve bilking someone (California taxpayers?)
California has tried to account for wildfire risks by establishing a “buffer pool,” to which each project is required to contribute as a kind of insurance policy. When a fire destroys a forest-carbon project, credits from the pool are canceled to cover the loss. But this approach has proven inadequate. A 2022 study found that fires had already consumed at least 95 percent of the credits set aside to cover wildfire losses for a full century. Subsequent research found roughly 10.7 million credits lost to wildfire, far more than the amount reserved for fire risk.
Opal Mountain illustrates the problem. State records show that the project contributed roughly 80,000 credits to the buffer pool. Yet CarbonPlan estimates that the recent wildfires could result in the termination of the project, which would wipe out all of its roughly 500,000 credits—more than six times what it contributed to the pool.
Such difficulties have long plagued California’s program. A recent analysis by UC Berkeley researchers criticized the state for spending heavily on what they call “highly dubious” offsets from out-of-state projects. The researchers concluded that the program has produced “little-to-no actual climate benefit.”
The program may even be deepening the region’s wildfire problem. Western forests need periodic thinning, brush removal, and controlled burns to maintain healthy conditions and reduce extreme fire risks. But forest-carbon projects often get less active management because landowners can make more money if they grow more wood on each acre. The result, as wildfire news and analysis site The Lookout recently reported, is forests that are often “overstocked, prone to insects, drought, and disease, and flammable.”
At Warm Springs, much of the burned land had been kept from active management in favor of conservation and carbon revenue. “It burned hot because we weren’t able to get in there and treat it and manage it,” the natural resources manager for the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs told the Bend Bulletin.
Shawn doesn’t explicitly make the connection, but if fuel treatments aren’t done due to what the Warm Springs person said, it’s actually worse for carbon to have so-called “carbon offsets.” Maybe it makes more sense to fund fuel treatments themselves instead of the current offset idea.
Just saw this from Nick Smith today..
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/09/24/new-report-shows-major-progress-in-california-on-preparing-for-wildfire-avoiding-millions-of-tons-of-carbon-pollution-and-toxic-smoke/
I hope Governor Newsom and CARB are talking…
Then there is this that supports your point, Sharon: “In untreated forests 70% of the remaining total ecosystem carbon shifted to decomposing stocks after the wildfire, compared to 19% in the fuels-treated forest. In wildfire burned forest, fuels treatments have a higher immediate carbon ‘cost’, but in the long-term may benefit from lower decomposition emissions and higher carbon storage.” https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/41628
So many variables of course: Intensity/severity of fires; rate and type of regrowth; amount of carbon stored in the ground and how that is impacted. Seems like a long-term look at the 100-year carbon budget would give the most accurate results.
I’m OK with “we don’t know for sure, and hey thousands of acres of dead trees are also bad because.. wildlife, watershed values.” And “it will take a while to regenerate trees again with associated carbon benefits”= not good.
I am not OK with offset grift based on series of people raking in taxpayer bucks from a bet when if they lose, the taxpayer still has to pay. No accountability, as John Gordon points out below.
I agree Sharon, I also see carbon offsets as mostly a grift. Maybe it would be okay if the money was used to create a protected area and plant trees in a tropical rainforest that was cleared for agriculture. But then you are putting a lot of faith in the protected area staying protected.
“Leaving forests alone” is not an option if it means isolating forests from human agency. By our existence in huge numbers we manage forests by our own decisions everywhere and always, regardless of our quibbling. Only in that context can we have a conversation about forest carbon offsets that is grounded in reality.
The real question, as with all endeavors. Is who bears the risk and who gets the rewards. For example keeping forests from burning up is an inexact science but one that is applicable and worthy of effort if we want in-forest carbon storage. What we are missing is accountability for risk and effective management , at least in many carbon offset projects.
You mean, like everyone involved in the sales of credits giving the money back when they burn up? That kind of accountability??
Thanks for this thought provoking article.
I agree with some of points, in particular the suggestion that power companies should be more proactive in maintaining corridors.
However, I’m disappointed that the author doesn’t recognize- or admit – that a burnt forest has lost all of its carbon offset effects. Or is he just a proponent of widespread forest “management”? What about the millions of board feet of snags? Do they not contain carbon? Won’t they be standing for many decades while fulfilling at least part of what that forest was intended to do (I.e, store carbon), since they will (I hope) be protected from the vultures who view a snag as wasted board feet, to be harvested ASAP?
I view carbon offset programs as a bandaid scheme to let corporations off the hook, and that they are largely a PR stunt that puts money in pockets of mainstream “Big Green” environmental groups. I believe the money and effort could be better expended, perhaps with wind/solar projects that won’t burn down!
Thanks for the opportunity to comment.
Re-burns are a virtual certainty in the western US. We’ve seen what happens when vast snag patches burn again. BTW, I do think that the accounting should also include the carbon not sequestered, due to severely-reduced growing conditions, for the next several decades. This would include soils damages and losses of seed sources.
Sorry, but in my recent reply I meant to write, “ burnt forest has NOT lost all of its carbon offset effects
Glenn, I’m not expert on carbon accounting, but the idea of offsets is that it changes the management so there will be more sequestration with storage for the time period than there would otherwise be. So it’s not that burned forests don’t have some carbon stored in dead trees or in areas without dead trees. But the offset requires that there will be more carbon sequestered and stored than there would otherwise be…given the management that the landowner would otherwise do. Now you can see the opportunity for gaming the system here… the landowner needs to be honest about what they would otherwise do, and I’m not sure that skepticism has a place in approval (apparently not when CARB, which is conceivably about air, says wildfire smoke from Oregon is likely to end up in California. There is no accountability, as John Gordon says, for when they are wrong.
Even academics question the utility of these things (as well as other problems).
So, it’s a system that enables and encourages grift with taxpayer dollars. In the name of climate. No wonder people are skeptical, not of climate change, but of various groups making money by hawking climate “solutions.”
Regarding “if we pay people to leave things alone in western dry forests, they won’t burn up” and, “That assumes the forests don’t burn up in the meantime,” AI disagrees (even citing the same sources): “Carbon offset programs do not strictly assume forests will never burn, but their risk management systems (such as insurance buffer pools) are often mathematically undercapitalized and struggle to account for the scale of modern climate-driven wildfires.” I wonder if anyone is recalculating the capitalization needed, and if it were more realistic, would anyone pay for it.
As for “landowners can make more money if they grow more wood on each acre,” this seems like it could be fine-tuned. I wonder how existing fire risk and expected fire frequency are considered for offsets.
Count me wary of “risk management systems”… how could you possibly guess whether an area will burn or not in a certain time period? Or how large the buffer pool should be?
I think of many financial guesses that have some form of accountability.. like stocks go up or down. With offsets it appears you can guess wrong and everyone still keeps their bucks. Essentially it doesn’t matter, once the system is set up, whether it works to reduce carbon or not.
“Essentially it doesn’t matter, once the system is set up, whether it works to reduce carbon or not.”
Lack of accountability is a charge you have leveled at a lot of other things that we don’t monitor the effectiveness of. But they are doing that now. And trying something new with a lot of uncertainty is a lot different from “grift.” Some parties just thought it looked like it would work for them financially – unless they were part of setting up the system. Is that the case?
The assumption that “landowners make more money if they grow more wood per acre” is an oversimplification. These programs have existed long enough that it is understood that fire resilience is more of a premium than maximal stocking. I have not seen a carbon project in CA which did not utilize fuel treatments in some form. Whether these have been effective is another question.