Sharon

Can Someone Explain? What the EPA PM 2.5 (Soot) Rule Means for Wildfire and Prescribed Fire

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Here’s a link to their Fact Sheet. There are many words in it about wildfire and prescribed fire.

Here are my questions for someone who is involved in this:

(1) What new things do wildfire folks have to do (if anything)?

(2) What new things do prescribed fire folks have to do (if anything)?

(3) Does EPA think “hey since we have wildfires (this year? over time? future using computer models?) and prescribed fire, and then we have to ratchet all other activities further down (e.g. industry, cars, etc.)?

Perhaps if we can find an expert, they can also answer your questions.

What does it mean in practice to deal with Exceptional Events? What is a demonstration?

Prescribed Fire Demonstration Example. EPA is committed to ensuring that air agencies have a clear pathway for needed exceptional events demonstrations for prescribed fires ignited to mitigate the effects of high-severity wildfires. EPA recognizes the importance of significantly increasing the application of prescribed fires to wildlands. To that end, EPA is working closely with the State of California, the United States Forest Service, and other collaborators to develop an exceptional events demonstration for a prescribed fire in Northern California. A public review opportunity on this document was offered in December 2023. This actual prescribed fire demonstration will go through the entire exceptional events process as an example of a successfully developed demonstration and will identify opportunities for land management and air agencies to efficiently collaborate on prescribed fire exceptional events demonstrations.

Donate Now: National Museum of Forest Service History Has Opportunity for Up to $500K Match

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I don’t usually make donation requests for anything besides TSW, but this is an amazing opportunity for the Museum.  A group of  dedicated folks, current employees, retirees and a wide array of partners, have been working on the Museum since at least the 90’s and groundbreaking in Missoula is THIS spring (!).

The National Museum of Forest Service History is close to finalizing our Capital Campaign to build the National Conservation Legacy Center in Missoula, Montana. Once it is built, the Center will be a one-of-a-kind, world class destination. It will showcase America’s conservation history – the U.S. Forest Service, its people, partners, and legacy.

If you’ve ever thought about donating, now would be the time, because donations will be matched (individual or corporate!).  Please forward this post to anyone who might be interested..

BIG NEWS! Donor has offered us up to $500,000. IF WE CAN MATCH IT!

Our highest priority continues to be completing the Capital Campaign for the National Conservation Legacy Center (CLC), the flagship building on our Missoula campus. We will break ground this spring but still need to raise funds to ensure all costs are covered for both the building and exhibition.  Here’s the website.. the video of the Museum is above.


MORE ON THE BIG NEWS: At the end of December, one of our long-time donors, offered to help us finish the capital campaign. He and his wife will donate up to $500,000 by matching every new cash donation (both individual and corporate) we can raise by June 30,2024. In essence, any new capital campaign cash donation we receive by June 30,2024 will be doubled! Our very generous donor has provided us a tremendous opportunity to complete the capital campaign!

 

Reimagine Recreation Workshop Summary

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Here’s a link to the planning effort.

Here’s a link to the report.

We had an offer from the FS to answer questions about the effort, so if you have questions please put them in the comments. It’s at a pretty strategic level. It would be interesting to compare this with the BLM Blueprint for 21st Century Outdoor Recreation. Apparently BLMers participated in the FS effort and vice versa.

I took some bullets out of the report. I don’t think there are many surprises, and many similarities to other FS programs.

The purpose of the workshop was to:
• Share knowledge and learn from one another’s experiences working on complex recreation challenges and opportunities on lands the Forest Service manages.
• Inspire solution-focused brainstorming on recreation issues ripe for national-level action by both partners and the Forest Service.
• Create a space for partners and staff to dissolve barriers to collaboration, illuminate shared interests, and improve communication

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Different styles of communication are needed to reach different generations and backgrounds.
• Working with partners to communicate data or other information can be beneficial because partners can typically share information faster than agencies due to the specific focuses of each organization.
• In addition to quantitative data, qualitative or story-telling data is important to gather, understand, and share.
• Consolidate and streamline public communication to create a “one-stop shop” for trip-planning information and data.
• Identify communication strategies and tools that have worked well for the Forest Service and partner organizations to serve as a model for recreation programs moving forward.
• Create a web-based communication platform for partners to share information.

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• Representation plays an important role in increasing the diversity of the collective recreation workforce.
• Pursue creative recruiting methods and tools in collaboration with partners and local organizations instead of relying only on traditional approaches.
• Remote work options for recreation positions have increased access to recreation careers.
• Limited housing and high cost of living in areas with high recreation demands has caused ongoing workforce and capacity challenges.
• Recreational employment is increasingly seen as a solid career path rather than a temporary job.

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• The stories that are told on public lands should be inclusive to all, well-informed, and developed, with input from the people who the stories are about.
• Clear and consistent communication between partner organizations and the Forest Service is vital to successful, long-term partnerships.
• Equity-centered work is not going to be comfortable.
• Telling diverse stories is not the role of the Forest Service alone and should be done in partnership with other stakeholders, organizations, communities, and individuals.

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Making connections between recreation, the economy, resource protection, and long-term vision spur momentum when working with partners and organizations.
• New projects can generate interest among industries and create reciprocal relationships between different entities.
• Focusing on long-term, tangible culture changes rather than short-term successes in an industry or agency can create sustainable change.
• Acknowledging the importance of and building transparent communication builds trust, furthers relationships, and leads to successful projects and endeavors.

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Sharing small successes on the way to achieving a broader vision can help maintain momentum to complete long-term projects.
• Cross-boundary collaboration can occur across roles, skill sets, and entities.
• Using a more strategic approach would be beneficial around (1) the types of resources that are being dispersed and (2) where resources are shared to decrease competition between agencies.

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• Visitor use management data can be leveraged to make informed decisions about improving recreation and other infrastructure. This type of data should be part of infrastructure investment conversations.
• Informing and educating visitors before they arrive at recreation sites is crucial. Conservation messaging can be woven into visitor communications before visitors arrive.
• Recreation and conservation organizations need to consider the perspectives and voices of Native American Tribes and respect Tribal wishes on how to use and manage public lands.

Recreation is part of a larger ecosystem and should be woven together with other issues and interests, from wildland fire and fire management to economic development.
• “Everyone who steps into the natural world has the tool to develop an environmental ethic.”
• Agency and organizational culture matters! Forest Service staff need to be consistently supported to show up as a great partner. This includes fostering a culture of transparency and willingness to share responsibility from the highest levels of the agency.
• Cross-boundary collaboration requires that we depend on one another’s strengths and engage partners and organizations to fill the gaps.
• Agency staffing levels and turnover negatively impact relationships. The Forest Service should invest in “professionalizing” the recreation workforce, streamline hiring processes using private partners, engage in transition planning, and coordinate with local governments on shared issues such as limited housing.
• Recreation funding is challenging and requires stability, flexibility, and streamlining.
• Data can convey great meaning, especially when framed as part of achieving
collective goals.
• Equity-centered work is not easy work. We must commit to take up this challenge
together, embrace tough conversations, and deepen our relationship with the
history of the land.
• The Forest Service should base recreation planning and stewardship work in
community, place, and relationships.
• “Recreation management is an all-hands-on-deck situation.”

 

Energy News II: LNG Exports and Met Co-location of Renewables Idea

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LNG Exports

I guess the big news is the Admin’s LNG export infrastructure pause. I think the Admin’s reasoning was climate-related, or at least related to desires of certain climate activist types.  The Admin claimed that the analysis was out of date. Which I think is true, since there has been a war in Ukraine and hopeful a general reduction in Russian LNG exports to them.  Except that those need to be replaced by someone or something.  In the absence of our contribution, would that mean that worldwide supply would go down, which means Russia could make more money.. and our European allies trust us less.  This is all pretty obvious, but what I hadn’t heard in most of the coverage was that if exports are cut off, then it’s a boon to our own domestic gas prices (so will we use more?), and a boon to chemical industries who will make more profits (and produce more? with environmental implications?).  Thanks to Doomberg for that additional information.  Who knows? This seems to me like silly season fire hose flailing to get support from certain quarters (the Bill McKibben/John Podesta/random activists nexus), seemingly more of a political symbolic gesture than actually reducing emissions.  And yet.. wars use a great deal of carbon, so wouldn’t we want to starve Russia of profits?

I guess there are two questions in my mind: 1) will restricting exports have any net impacts on carbon emissions?  2) will restricting exports actually cause more carbon to be emitted due to the actions of other countries? (e.g. continuing to fund war, firing up coal plants)?

The industry association Eurogas was quick to condemn the move:

“Europe is committed to phase out its dependency on Russian gas in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and has tied this shift to its 2050 climate goals. In achieving both, imports of US LNG have increased by both volume and importance, and have helped to stabilise gas and electricity prices for European consumers. However, current volumes of LNG coming from the US still leave a supply gap, for which we must continue to increase imports, rather than scale them back, as has been put forward by some interests in the US’ governing institutions.

If additional US LNG export capacities don’t materialise it would risk increasing and prolonging the global supply imbalance. This would inevitably prolong the period of price volatility in Europe and could lead to price increases with the consequent implications that would have for economic turmoil and social impact.”

Now if Europe has economic and social turmoil, it’s possible that they might elect folks who don’t care about energy transitions that much and reduce efforts.. so there’s another potential impact.

So glad, I’m not involved in any EIS’s for these…it’s not clear to me what’s “reasonably foreseeable”.

Musician Has Federal Lands Co-Location Idea

Interesting idea of musician Met: Co-locating O&G and renewables on federal land. 

The idea began a little over two years ago with researchers at Planet Reimagined, a climate-focused nonprofit co-founded by Met. He said they mapped the federally leased oil-and-gas land and then worked with someone from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to determine the photovoltaic potential and the annual wind speeds on those leases. “There’s so much opportunity,” Met said.

New renewable generation can be built more quickly and cheaply on these sites, Met said. For instance, wind and solar applications could reuse the environmental site data collected for the original oil-and-gas project’s approval, cutting years off the environmental assessment process, he said. Sites often already have infrastructure including roads and power grid connections, reducing building costs and time.

Co-locating also avoids adding to the competition for land between conservation, agriculture, renewables, industry and other uses. It can also help transition the business of small, mom-and-pop oil-and-gas producers, their communities and their workers. Independent operators with a median of 12 employees produced 83% of U.S. oil and 90% of its gas in 2019, according to the latest data available from the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

Now I don’t remember seeing electric lines to O&G rigs and production equipment out on federal land, which seems like it could be a problem.  So I asked a person online who is familiar with the industry (and if TSW readers know more, please help out.)

The great majority of Federal O&G leases are in remote areas and most are probably are not connected to the grid. The drilling rigs have their own electric generation equipment, which moves on with the rig after the well is drilled. Most production equipment do not require electric service. However some centralized facilities serve multiple wellsites, and those sites generally source their electrical need from small onsite generators, or if they happen to be near a municipal infrastructure, they will connect to local utility lines. In many cases, production equipment can operate on a small amount of electricity produced by a small solar panel with battery backup. The point being, not much electricity is required for the average operating site.

It seems like it might be a good idea, but we run into the need for those pesky and expensive transmission lines again.  Perhaps building them along existing roads would not be so bad.  Anyway, it’s a novel and interesting  idea from an unusual source.

Energy News I: Western Solar Plan Public Meetings: First Virtual Session Tomorrow February 5, 2024

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Once again, I’m grateful for reporting by Sammy Roth of the LA Times.  Interesting that for this particular piece, he’s a columnist not a reporter.  I hope you can read the whole thing.  It’s interesting that Sammy says “the western solar plan sounds scary. But it’s better than climate change.” In my view, there are a variety of other decarbonization options.  Are renewables the only answer? No. Are renewables on federal lands the only way to get renewables? No. Could anthropogenic climate change occur even if the US were net-zero? Yes.

Members of the public can still weigh in. Before finalizing the Western Solar Plan, the Bureau of Land Management will host eight public meetings to gather input, including two Zoom meetings, the first of them this Monday at 10 a.m. PT.

Federal officials are also finalizing a regulation that would dramatically reduce the fees paid by renewable energy companies with projects on public lands. Another regulation nearing completion would put ecosystem protection on an equal footing with energy development — one more effort to strike the right balance between clean power and conservation on federal lands.

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The Biden administration released its long-awaited Western Solar Plan last month, laying out a vision for where sprawling solar farms should be allowed — and where they should be blocked — across 11 Western states, including California. The plan covers 162 million acres overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and tentatively concludes that companies should be able to propose solar projects across 22 million acres — an area roughly the size of Maine.

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Note: that’s only solar, not solar plus wind.

Weiner also described the federal government’s maps as “grainy,” saying they offer “more of a 30,000-foot view than a ground-level view” of which public lands are suitable for solar. It will be up to developers to study specific sites themselves.

Federal officials “don’t have the resources to do that level of planning,” Weiner told me.

I was intrigued to hear a similar observation from one of the most vocal critics of solar on Western public lands.

That would be Patrick Donnelly, who lives near Death Valley National Park and is Great Basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group. He told me his biggest problem with Biden’s plan is that it’s a “desktop exercise” that uses “a pretty arbitrary set of criteria” to determine which lands should be closed off to solar. Federal officials, he said, failed to take advantage of “on-the-ground knowledge” to more precisely map out appropriate development zones and protected areas.

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The federal government’s criteria for deciding which areas should be off limits to solar — including endangered species habitat, popular hiking spots and places sacred to Indigenous tribes — “didn’t flag areas that should be obvious,” Donnelly said.

As I talked with Donnelly, Weiner and others, I kept thinking back to something that Tracy Stone-Manning, the Bureau of Land Management’s director, told me when I interviewed her at an environmental journalism conference in April.

To speed up solar and wind development on public lands, she said, her agency needs a lot more money from Congress to hire additional staff members, who can more thoroughly map out the best spots and conduct environmental analyses.

“The biggest problem is having enough people to do the work,” Stone-Manning said.

At the time, that sounded to me like a bit of an excuse. Now I find myself nodding along.

As long as Republicans retain at least partial control of Congress — they currently run the House — more money for clean energy isn’t likely. It almost certainly won’t happen if Donald Trump returns to the White House. Elections have consequences.

What I thought was interesting about this is the idea that more staff can “thoroughly map out the best spots”.  If that were the case, then, wouldn’t it be letting leases and companies bidding on them rather than developers picking sites? I’m not sure how that currently works.  It could be like an oil and gas leasing decision, then someone leases it, then an APD-equivalent kind of analysis for the specific site.  But then that might be three levels of NEPA, this programmatic, a “leasing decision-like” level and an “APD-like” level.

I also wonder about what Stone-Manning says about “enough people”.. if the FS can have contractors do NEPA work funded by proponents (with ultimate authority and review by Feds) why not the BLM?  Maybe someone understands these legal underpinnings.

Also it almost sounds like Sammy is saying “vote for R’s if you want pristine federal landscapes..”

The Bureau of Land Management estimates that over the next 20 years, solar projects will be built across nearly 1 million acres under its jurisdiction in the West — the 700,000 acres I mentioned above, plus an additional 280,000 already open to solar developers in the California desert under an Obama-era federal plan. That’s three times as many acres as the agency estimates will need to be dedicated to solar on all other lands, public or private, in the 11 Western states included in the new plan.

Does that make sense? Should public lands be responsible for hosting three-quarters of the West’s solar farms?

As a lover of those gorgeous landscapes — some of my most cherished memories include backpacking Wyoming’s Teton Crest Trail and camping in Death Valley — my gut reaction is, “No.” Even the federal officials behind the Western Solar Plan seemed to agree, writing that the amount of public land they assumed would be needed for solar was “likely an overestimate.”

For some conservationists, those questionable numbers are one of several reasons the idea of opening 22 million acres of public lands to possible solar development “doesn’t really pass the laugh test,” in the words of Matt Kirby, senior director of energy and landscape conservation at the National Parks Conservation Assn., an advocacy group.

“Why open up all that land and let industry choose?” he asked.

Kirby would prefer to see the Biden administration ditch its current “preferred alternative” — the one with the 22 million acres — and instead select Alternative 5, which would limit solar applications to 8 million acres of previously disturbed lands.

“We’re now in a situation that essentially puts industry in the driver’s seat,” Kirby said.

Members of the public can still weigh in. Before finalizing the Western Solar Plan, the Bureau of Land Management will host eight public meetings to gather nput, including two Zoom meetings, the first of them this Monday at 10 a.m. PT.

I also thought that it was interesting that John Podesta is the “senior advisor to the President for clean energy innovation and implementation.”  It seems like more and more, effort which have a substantial technical component are led by people with no technical background.  This seems to me as if it could be a problem, since there are many pathways to decarbonization, and choosing among them would tend to have a technical element.  I’d be for an open discussion and analysis of all alternatives, including costs, social and environmental impacts, technical feasibility, availability of needed material, national security and domestic job implications, and including the fact that different technological horses in the race will have unknown success (uncertainties and scenarios).  It’s kind of funny that none of this is done, and yet all the analysis is done by someone at a BLM Field Office on a particular piece of ground.

For the record, I don’t think it’s pay-offs to CAP by solar and wind purveyors.. or that nuclear hasn’t paid enough into D coffers.  I think some super-important people have “all renewables” as an ideological bent, no matter what the outcome and to whom.  And I think that the lack of rationality makes people suspicious, which makes them suspicious of “the climate change issue.”

Anyway, back to Sammy.

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I wrote in the fall about “Uncommon Dialogue,” a Stanford University initiative that produced a first-of-its-kind agreement in which a dozen prominent developers and environmental groups pledged to work together to limit ecosystem damage from solar farms. Their dialogue continues, with six working groups crafting development guidelines and policy recommendations.

One of their goals is to come up with incentive programs that encourage companies to build fewer solar farms on pristine public lands and more on already disturbed areas such as Superfund sites, landfills, former mines and water reservoirs — places where it’s typically more expensive to build. The “Uncommon Dialogue” partners also hope to promote solar development on farmland, which helps save water in drought-stressed regions but can provoke opposition from neighboring farmers.

Dan Reicher, the Stanford University researcher and former Clinton administration official who launched and leads the initiative, told me he expects most solar projects in the United States to be built on private lands, rather than public lands.

“The vast proportion is going to be on private agricultural lands,” he predicted.

President Biden’s solar plan forecasts a different outcome, at least for the American West.

FIA is National Treasure; Eastern Forests are Thriving in Current Climate

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Story worth reading by journalist Gabe Popkin, including a journalistic shout-out to FIA:

To my mind, the FIA is a national treasure, like the James Webb Space Telescope. There’s probably no comparable public dataset in the world, yet unlike the James Webb, most people have never heard of it.

It’s long been known both from FIA and other data that eastern U.S. forests are soaking up carbon dioxide as they rebound from a near-total deforestation that started in the early 1600s and ended only in the early 1900s. One shocking photo I came across recently shows what is now the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, D.C. during the Civil War.

A view of Fort Bunker Hill and a military camp in what is now Washington, D.C.’s Brookland neighborhood. See here for more details. Source: Library of Congress

Sidenote: I’ve been reading a memoir by an Alexandria native who describes the Union Army cutting their woodlands for firewood and structures, so I imagine that’s part of what happened to this area as were farm fields.

This desolate scene is hard to square with the lush, green city D.C. is today, especially in outlying neighborhoods like Brookland. Yet around the time of the Civil War, large swaths of the District were apparently nearly as treeless as a western desert — as, indeed, was much of the eastern half of the country.

The scientists found, unsurprisingly, that American forests have bulked up as they rebound from the deforestation that created scenes like the one captured in the photo. While this regrowth will eventually taper off as forests mature, so far it seems to be going strong.

More remarkably, the researchers also found that regrowth alone cannot explain the blistering pace at which our trees are putting on wood. By examining forest growth rates while controlling for age-related differences, the scientists determined that something else is supercharging growth.

And while the study did not directly answer what that something is, the authors highlighted one likely explanation: Trees are gobbling up some of the excess carbon dioxide we’re putting into the atmosphere. Essentially, by burning fossil fuels in our cars, buildings and factories, we are fertilizing nature. And nature is responding.

Many studies have speculated about carbon fertilization using computer models, experiments and theory. It’s clear that all things being equal, plant leaves respond to higher carbon dioxide levels by ramping up photosynthesis (the biochemical process plants use to turn carbon dioxide into sugars), which could cause plants to grow faster and ultimately store more carbon.

But in nature, many things can affect how fast trees grow. Experiments have pumped high levels of carbon dioxide into young forests and found that trees initially grew faster than in unfertilized control plots but eventually leveled off, presumably as nutrient limitations or other factors throttled trees’ growth rates.

The new study is among the first to provide clear evidence that real-world forests over a vast landscape are indeed able to use the extra CO2 to bulk up. And our trees are feasting on carbon dioxide, those in other places with moderate temperatures and ample moisture, such as northern Europe and eastern Asia, likely are too.

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Now, “carbon fertilization” might sound like a wonky scientific abstraction. But for the 180 million of us who live in this part of the world, it has had real, measurable benefits. The trees in our neighborhoods and parks, and even our own yards, have grown faster than they otherwise would have. That means more shade, more storm protection, more wildlife habitat — and, not least of all, more wood. We have all benefited, in multiple ways.

Now, on to the western US:

In the western U.S., unfortunately, the data tell a different story. Forests there are growing less and less robustly, as heat and drought limit trees’ ability to benefit from high CO2 levels. (Interestingly, the Forest Service has reported this for years based on FIA data, but I suspect their reports rarely get read.)

The plight of western forests has gotten plenty of coverage, so I won’t dwell on it here except to note that the fact that some forests are benefiting from high CO2 levels does not mean we can simply assume that all forests will — and certainly does not suggest we don’t need to worry about climate change.

I asked Lichstein and his colleague Aaron Hogan what implications their research has for natural climate solutions — the idea that natural ecosystems like forests can soak up some of the carbon dioxide we humans emit by burning fossil fuels. Their answer, perhaps surprisingly, was not much. In fact, they said that at the global scale, the strength of the carbon fertilization effect is probably exaggerated in most of the computer models scientists use to forecast climate trends.

In other words, as future warming stresses forests, they will probably absorb a smaller and smaller fraction of our total carbon dioxide emissions. Right now that fraction is one quarter, so the strength of the carbon sink diminishes, we could be in real trouble.

This aligns with my view, based on years of reporting on forest science, that at a broad scale, forests and other ecosystems are probably already doing about as much as we can hope for to slow climate change. The idea that we’re going to jam tons of additional carbon into trees or soil strikes me as more aspirational than realistic.

It seems to me that there are three things going on here (which may be investigated somewhere, hopefully commenters will point this out).  1. Western forests are very different from each other, and some (like the Black Hills) are supposed to be getting wetter based on climate models. 2. Fire suppression allowed many more trees (increased density over time)  in some spots, so competition for water would cause them to grow more slowly. 3. After cutting trees for railroads, firewood, and lumber in various places, at various times from in the 1800s and 1900’s trees are growing back and age might be an important reason that growth slows down.  I don’t know how well the study adjusted for those factors.

It’s also worth noting that most of these fast-growing forests are not in parks or preserves, but on private land. That means they can legally be cut down, but it also means that millions of people have a stake in them. The public ownership that’s more common in the West — and that’s often assumed to be more protective — can also be more neglectful, especially when governments don’t have the resources to properly care for vast tracts they’ve been tasked to manage.

While private ownership is not a panacea either, when a lot of people live among forests, there are a lot of people with reasons to keep an eye on them and care for them. Technologically speaking, we could easily cut down every tree in the eastern U.S. — as far fewer, less technologically advanced people once did. Yet instead, we’ve allowed them to grow at the same time that our own population has grown.

This pushes strongly against what I would describe against the prevailing narrative that people are simply bad for trees. This kind of simplification has even been embraced by the august New Yorker, a publication I would expect to do better.

It’s time to ditch simplistic morality tales for a more nuanced and reality-based view of the relationship between trees and humans. After all, we need trees to thrive in places where people actually live. I’ve argued previously that the densely populated Mid-Atlantic could be a climate refuge, in part because our cities and towns are embedded within what, so far at least, appear to be remarkably climate-resilient forests. The new study suggests the same might be said about much of the eastern U.S.

From The Hotshot Wakeup: The Story of the Beachie Creek Fire and Team Prescribed Fire Tabletop

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OK, I get it.. permitting reform is not everyone’s favorite topic.  So I thought I’d highlight some interesting stuff on Wildfire, before I get back to permitting.

The Hotshot Wakeup Person had a couple of interesting items on Substack.  If you’re interested in this stuff, please consider subscribing to The Hotshot Wakeup Substack. I always learn something from his posts and often I find myself laughing out loud as well.

The Story of The Beachie Creek Fire: Put It Out, Or Let It Burn? Both Have Consequences.

I know some TSW readers are very interested in Oregon fires.  I  like how Tim explains to us non-Fire folks some of how pre-planning is done and MIST techniques and what I like best of all is that he can see both sides.  I do think we get better reporting from people who can understand different points of view. Anyway, I recommend it.  The PG&E part is a little depressing, especially since, as I’ve pointed out before, the Princeton study say to meet net zero by 2050:

“The current power grid took 150 years to build. Now, to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, we have to build that amount of transmission again in the next 15 years and then build that much more again in the 15 years after that. It’s a huge amount of change,” said Jenkins.

And PG&E can’t afford to bury the lines they have..  oh, well.

Here’s his summary of the podcast contents.

  • The story of the Beachie Creek Fire in Oregon.
  • Multiple lawsuits on how the fire was handled by the Forest and $1B demanded from the power company.
    The Beachie Creek Fire
  • MIST tactics V.S. full suppression. Safety V.S. engaging. What’s the cost in the end?
  • PG&E come to a settlement on the Dixie Fire trial.
  • Did PG&E just pay itself as a result? Where does the money actually go?

I’ve never heard anyone report on this PG&E stuff before..

Team Prescribed Fire Tabletop Exercise

A lot of Region 5 folks were involved in the large-scale Team Prescribed Fire out on the Stanislaus National Forest last year, as California’s weather allowed for it. It was a live-action “sand table” that a lot of people in the D.C. office were watching. A full ICP was brought in, caterers, loads of crews, and drones.

A lot of kinks were worked out during this operation. It was new to a lot of those involved, and things like overtime limits, R&R issues, people on crews timing out before others, and more arose. It wasn’t expected to go off without a hitch, and plenty was learned from this operation. Now they can implement those lessons learned going forward.

Just last week, the Forest Service put out their Strategy to Expand Prescribed Fire Training in the West. This new report lines out what federal firefighters, contractors, NGOs, tribes, and tech folks can expect as policy and money flow into prescribed fire across the nation.

The announcement, made by Alex Robertson, Director of Fire and Aviation Management, looks to expand the National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center into the Western United States.

The National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center is currently operating out of Florida; however, this new policy and working group aims to expand its operation and reach into the western United States.

The three key elements for building out PFTC-West include:

  • increasing staffing
  • establishing focus groups to explore new curriculum and prescribed fire modules, including unmanned aircraft systems (UAS)
  • expanding the PFTC Steering Committee.

The current committee is comprised of national leadership from the USDA Forest Service, DOI agencies, TNC, the Florida Forest Service’s State representative for the National Association of State Foresters, and a Tall Timbers Research Station representative. The committee is looking to add representatives from the western states into the mix.

While there are many stated goals, one is to increase training and qualifications for prescribed fire across the West and bring in operators from the private, state, and local sectors.

They are also looking to create a new “drone division” in this expansion, bringing on new tech, pilots, and operators.

The National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center is currently operating out of Florida; however, this new policy and working group aims to expand its operation and reach into the western United States.

The three key elements for building out PFTC-West include:

  • increasing staffing
  • establishing focus groups to explore new curriculum and prescribed fire modules, including unmanned aircraft systems (UAS)
  • expanding the PFTC Steering Committee.

The current committee is comprised of national leadership from the USDA Forest Service, DOI agencies, TNC, the Florida Forest Service’s State representative for the National Association of State Foresters, and a Tall Timbers Research Station representative. The committee is looking to add representatives from the western states into the mix.

While there are many stated goals, one is to increase training and qualifications for prescribed fire across the West and bring in operators from the private, state, and local sectors.

They are also looking to create a new “drone division” in this expansion, bringing on new tech, pilots, and operators.

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So what does this all mean for the future?

It means lots of new positions, career paths, large-scale Team ignitions, completely new divisions for UA S platforms, pilots, and operators, and hopefully, plenty of good quality acres burned across the American West.

What Do We Think? BPC Goldilocks Report on Permitting Reform: 1. Public Engagement

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Reminder: why we are interested in “permitting reform”? 1. BLM and FS authorize energy projects, 2. think tanks involved have really smart people and more political clout than traditional forest groups, but 3) my experience with Coastal think tanks is that may not be talking to NEPA practitioners. So they have fun and novel ideas that may actually get implemented, and maybe we can contribute by some ground-truthing.

As I’ve pointed out (yes, I know, tediously) before, there seems to be a thread of “if only agency practitioners did their jobs better” that I first noticed at CEQ.

CEQ: your documents are too long.  Agencies: but case law requires it.

CEQ: programmatics should be used more.  Agencies: they generally don’t do much in practice.. suck up a lot of time and go out of date readily.

(Note that recently the Biden Admin said it had to redo an LNG analysis as it was out of date after five years (not sure it was a NEPA analysis, but still); if it takes three years to do a programmatic.. you do the math)

CEQ: if you only did better public involvement, you wouldn’t have litigation.

What these views have in common is a kind of punching down on the lowest ranking people in the system, and not looking at the problem as real-world policy disagreements that need to be ultimately settled through political processes.

Anyway, let’s check out what BPC has to say.

The Bipartisan Policy Center recently published “Finding the Goldilocks Zone for Permitting Reform.”  and if TwitX is to believed, folks from there are currently making Hill visits.

How does BPC characterize the “permitting reform” quest?

A more efficient permitting system for energy infrastructure would reduce energy costs, increase energy reliability, increase quality of life, and reduce emissions.

One could argue that “a more efficient permitting system for fuel treatment projects and prescribed burns would reduce risks of catastrophic wildfire and associated safety, health, watershed, wildlife and infrastructure impacts.” So maybe these would be relevant to other kinds of FS and BLM work?

They used stakeholder roundtables to help develop and rate the recommendations across two dimension: Effectiveness and Controversy.  Let’s see what they came up with.  It’s kind of a neat approach.  So let’s see what we think of these.. I’ll post each set of recommendations in a separate post.  We can discuss and I’ll give feedback to the BPC.

It seems to me that the question facing energy infrastructure is “why do we have to have this here and impact my community and wildlife and so on?” It doesn’t seem to me that any of this really answers the question of “why here and not there?”

If we are talking about energy infrastructure (onshore and offshore wind turbines, solar installations, transmission lines), it looks like their most promising is:

Conduct and provide resources for extensive community information hearings that address public comments and concerns of the community .

Which to me is a bit like “do public involvement better”.. which is good, but hard to say it increases efficiency in any way.  Some people just don’t want projects no matter how they are educated.  I’ve had grumpy people turn around with more information, but at the end of the day that’s not what delays projects.

I also thought it was interesting that BPC thought that this.. which sounds a bit like the successful Blue Mountain Partners in our world:

Establish a monitoring committee for individual projects, comprised of local stakeholders, that ensures standards are met and provides an avenue for continued public engagement for the life of the project [Pg. 21]

Here are their 3’s..

Require or incentivize agencies to engage stakeholders before developing a public notice of intent to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement [Pg. 23]

This is interesting. Right now it seems a bit random.  Like the FS probably does before an EIS for a large vegetation project; and maybe that counts for the national OG EIS, but I don’t think it helps increase “efficiency”.

The underlying idea seems to be “if only agencies had better public involvement processes, there would be less resistance and projects that are unpopular in some quarters will move forward readily.” I think good public involvement processes are important, and I also know that the FS and BLM have pretty robust ones,  and there are still disagreements about the project at the end of the day.

The funniest one to me was this one, which they fortunately rated as “not worth discussing”.

Establish commissions to advise agencies on the design, implementation, and evaluation of public participation processes [Pg. 24]

Increase efficiency by .. establishing commissions!

These ideas seem to reflect the “if practitioners only did it right, there wouldn’t be a problem” school of thought.

Next: Linear Infrastructure

Committee Hearing on Various Federal Lands Bills, and Root and Stem Bill Testimony from PERC

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TSW could really use someone to report on legislation.. there was a Committee Hearing today on several bills that may be of interest. Here’s the FS testimony.

 

Here’s Hannah Downey’s written testimony.

The Root and Stem Project Authorization Act
The Root and Stem Project Authorization Act (H.R. 674) is a bipartisan proposal to add more resources to advance forest restoration projects through the often-cumbersome environmental review process. For projects on Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management land that have been collaboratively developed and meet local and rural community needs, a sponsor can front the funding for an approved outside contractor to complete the NEPA analysis for the project and be repaid through any receipts generated by the project that would otherwise go to the federal treasury.

The “A to Z” Project
The Root and Stem Project Authorization Act builds on the “A to Z” pilot project in the Colville National Forest in Washington.
This innovative project was highlighted in PERC’s 2021 Fix America’s Forests report as a way to leverage the value of timber to reduce bureaucratic burdens.
Several years ago, the Northeast Washington Forest Coalition, a collaborative group of public and private partners, was looking to advance a forest project, but the Colville National Forest did not have the financial or staff resources to complete environmental reviews for the project. The coalition proposed allowing timber contractors who would perform the harvesting and restoration work to also bear the costs of doing the NEPA analysis. This “A to Z” project—so named because the winning bidder would be responsible for the entire process from initiating the project, to environmental review, to implementation—presented the opportunity to use the commercial value of harvested timber to advance the project and fund forest restoration.

A local sawmill, Vaagen Brothers Lumber, won the 10-year Forest Service stewardship contract in 2013 to test the privately funded, publicly managed NEPA process. It subcontracted with a third party to plan and perform the environmental analysis. To avoid any conflict of interest, the subcontractor’s performance was overseen by agency personnel rather than Vaagen Brothers. The NEPA analysis was completed in 2016, and the Vaagen Brothers began commercial thinning operations on more than 4,500 acres of national forest lands that contain excess wildfire fuels.
With a mill that can process small-diameter trees and nearby processing facilities that can turn that timber into laminated building products, the contract provides Vaagen Brothers with a supply of merchantable wood products. In exchange, the terms of the stewardship contract also require that the private company rehabilitate streams, replace culverts, restore roads, and control noxious weeds, leaving the forest ecosystem more resilient to insects and disease, enhanced wildlife habitat, and a substantially reduced risk for severe wildfire.

How It Works
The Root and Stem Project Authorization Act establishes a formal process for a project sponsor to provide the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management upfront funding to hire an approved contractor to conduct the NEPA analysis for a collaboratively designed restoration project. It also adds the requirement that receipts generated by the project can be used to repay the sponsor instead of being deposited into the general fund of the treasury. Building on the success of the “A to Z” project, this approach could substantially speed up needed activities while freeing up agency resources and personnel for other projects.  The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management can currently contract with non-federal parties for environmental analysis and accept outside funds to pay for that review, as demonstrated by the “A to Z” project.

The significant reform that the Root and Stem Project Authorization Act would make is to allow a project’s timber revenues to reimburse the party who funds the environmental review. This improvement would create more opportunity and motivation for forest collaboratives, conservation organizations, timber companies, and other entities who would benefit from the restoration project to provide the initial funding.
Under this proposal, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management would maintain an approved list of non-federal, third-party contractors in each state that the agency can hire to complete NEPA analyses and any consultations required under the Endangered Species Act. For forest restoration projects that have been collaboratively developed on federal lands, a project sponsor could propose a stewardship contract and provide the federal land management agency with the funding to hire one of the approved contractors to conduct the necessary project analysis. Once the project was approved, the federal land manager would have to solicit bids to carry out the project and use any available receipts generated by the project to repay the sponsor.
Though outside parties would be providing upfront funding and completing the environmental review documents, the federal land management agency would still retain authority over the environmental review and the project. Additionally, the relevant secretary would still be required to determine the sufficiency of any documents and authorize the project to proceed.

Improving Forest Restoration
At a time of great need for more forest restoration activities, the Root and Stem Project Authorization Act would bring more resources to the table to get important work done. Bringing in outside funding will not only benefit the collaborative projects reviewed under the Root and Stem authority but will also allow limited Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management resources to be spent on other priorities. Ultimately, more needed forest restoration projects—both ones that do and do not generate revenues—will make it through the environmental review process so that work can begin on the ground to reduce fuel-loading and protect our forest ecosystems from catastrophic wildfires.

 

Flowers Grow in Openings in Ponderosa Pine Forests: Bees Like Flowers; Thinning Good for Biodiversity

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This is an interesting and pretty comprehensive story from the Colorado Sun. Kind of a bee-centric take on desirable vegetation structures. Ecology is a funny thing in that there are all kinds of ecologists interested in all kinds of critters who may not prefer the same kinds of vegetation. So what is the “ecological work” that needs to be done- and what variety of ecologist decides?

The more-than-decadelong effort to thin Front Range forests to reduce fire danger has brought more bees, more flowers and increased resilience to climate change, new research shows.

The raw number and the diversity of bees and plants exploded a few years after ponderosa pine forests were restored to a “pre-European” state, researchers from Colorado State and Utah State universities found.

“We found that if you cut trees and open up the canopy, between three and 10 years later, you see a pretty good response,” said Seth Davis, associate professor of forest and rangeland stewardship at Colorado State University and co-author of a study recently published in “Ecological Applications.”

“Forest restoration and forest thinning is one of the ways that we can conserve our native communities.”

I like that reporter William Allstetter provided the historical context for how these particular forests came to be.

For thousands of years, natural fires have been an integral part of healthy forest ecosystems in the West. Small fires that clear out underbrush every five to 30 years as well as more devastating fires that can raze the forest to the ground every 50 to 100 or more years clear the way for new growth. Native Americans were known to set small fires to clear out undergrowth for better hunting and regeneration of valuable plants, but did not cause major changes in the ecosystem. Then, beginning in 1859, Euro-Americans flooded into Colorado seeking gold and silver.

I’m not sure that’s accurate; not sure that we can know whether larger pre-European fires were set intentionally. Larger fires did occur.

“Suddenly, in a span of decades, the Colorado Rockies were engulfed by this new, highly unpredictable world of commodity capitalism, of smelters and railroad investment, of boomtowns and sudden busts, of landscape changes so fundamental that they dwarfed the modest human impacts made over the prior 10 centuries,” historical geographer William Wyckoff wrote in his book “Creating Colorado.”

Vast swaths of the Front Range forests were cleared to obtain wood for mining, construction and railroads. Extensive fires also surged across the landscape, fueled by accidental and intentional fires.

To combat the rampant and unregulated logging of these forests, the federal government in the early years of the 20th century created the White River, Pike, and Arapaho and Roosevelt national forests along the Front Range and high into the Rockies. At about the same time, firefighters began trying to suppress all fires.

As a result, over the past century, dense forests with thick undergrowth have grown up across the Front Range and the entire West. Many of the plants that thrived in the pre-European forests disappeared from the now shady forest floor. And with them went many of the animals that ate and pollinated them. You end up with a rather homogeneous landscape that doesn’t have a lot of flowers in it,” Davis said. “You end up with a situation where you can’t have a lot of native bees there.”

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They found an impressively richer, more dense and resilient web of life. While the bee population roughly doubled, the number of interactions between bees and plants rose eightfold and there were five times as many unique connections between specific bee species and plant species.

The researchers illustrated the interactions in a diagram, which visually depicts a richer, more complex web of life.

“Yeah, it’s kind of mind-blowing,” Davis said. “You just see there’s just far more diversity or more complexity.

“You get the idea that if you lost one or two of the flowers or one or two of the bees out of this system, the whole network doesn’t just collapse and fall apart. Whereas on these control plots, if you remove one or two things, you just got a lot more vulnerable ecosystem.”

“This paper is a strong piece of evidence for the ecosystem benefits of forest thinning in areas where fire has been suppressed and the canopy is overgrown,” said Amy Yarger, director of horticulture at the Butterfly Pavilion. She was not involved in the research. “With climate change and biodiversity loss posing existential threats, mindful forest management is key for conservation and for preserving our way of life in Colorado.”

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“Here are some really key species for supporting a lot of biodiversity of pollinators, which in turn supports biodiversity of plants,” said Julian Resasco, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado. “Things that maintain the integrity and the diversity of these ecosystems make them more robust to other threats, like climate change.”

The researchers recommended that forest managers seed ponderosa pine forests with these plants to promote a robust pollinator network. They also could be good plants for people to plant in their gardens. “These are good choices for planting because they’re going to support the bee-flower interaction network,” Davis said.

He believes the environmental benefits extend beyond bees and plants. “We’re sort of measuring one little component of the overall food web here,” Davis said. “By bolstering their abundances, you’re also bolstering the abundances of things which prey upon them, like predators, which could be birds and other animals.” Another study from 2020 suggests that the thinned forests also benefited bird populations.

Not every scientific paper reminds me of an old pop song.. birds, bees, flowers, trees, this paper has it all.