Carbon

Reducing Carbon Demand From Federal Lands: A Modest Proposal

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There seems to be a full-court press by NGOs with the concept that President Biden should show his support for climate action (related to COP26) by shutting down oil and gas leasing on federal lands (without regard to its legality, apparently).  As we’ve seen with forest products, though, that actually doesn’t stop demand and use, and simply moves the environmental costs and social benefits of production to other countries.  What I’d like is to open up the question of ways we could instead reduce consumption, preferably while not affecting poor/working class/people of color disparately, using federal land policies, that is legally viable.

To start the discussion, I’ll start with a likely to be highly unpopular idea.. but hopefully this will trigger other, more likely to be popular, ideas.

Discouraging High Carbon Tourism

Having recently returned from visiting three National Parks in Alaska, with thousands of other folks who flew in, used boats, cars and RVs. I propose analyzing the carbon footprints of visitors and workers in heavily used National Parks and closing, or greatly restricting, visitation to the ones with the highest footprints (tourists from farthest away; air travel, non-resident seasonal employees).  Here are my arguments.

1. Heating, transportation of necessities, combines and snowplows, travel to work are necessities; “airplane level” tourism not so much. One view might be that If we as a country want to keep our footprint small, we should prioritize necessities, not luxuries. Many folks like this recent piece in the WaPo, recommend tourism close to home to reduce carbon footprints.

The farther from home you go, the more fuel you need to get there (unless you’re going by bike, on foot or via renewable energy, of course), says Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist, professor, director of the Climate Center at Texas Tech University and author of the forthcoming book “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.” Her advice for travelers is to explore your own backyard and opt for more domestic trips.

2. At Denali, I asked why their Visitor Center was closed (I assumed it was due to Covid). The Park employee told me that it was because the Park was not funded or staffed well enough to keep it open. By closing or reducing access, perhaps Parks could better match their finances with their services.

3.  Concessionaire employees are interacting with tourists (although Park employees, thankfully, are not).  There are mask mandates but, if employees would not be safe with these same restrictions, then concessionaire employees would equally not be safe. For example, at Denali, the visitor center was closed, and the store was open. Fewer or no visitors would mean less chances for Covid transmission.

4. People say that National Parks are the “highest level of protection”. Seems like they would be even more “protected” without thousands of visitors, or with many fewer.

5. Tourism is seasonal and often workers are not permanent residents of the state. Even more travel could be reduced by having no concessionaires’ employees, and those workers especially now, would be likely to find similar (relatively low-paying) jobs in their own communities.

6. For gateway communities, less traffic would also mean less congestion in their communities, saving even more fuel.

In this Wall Street Journal article, they talk about local businesses pushing back to efforts to restrict/manage entry. On the other hand, there may be local people who would support the idea fewer tourists.

Awhile back during both the government shutdown, and because of Covid, many folks were arguing that Parks should be shut down to protect the resource Maybe this would be a win/win for the Park environment and reducing carbon impacts.

Other ideas?

Comments on USDA Climate-Smart Forestry and Wish This Was a Two-Stage Process

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I was trying to help some groups with their comments on this USDA request, and perhaps someone more familiar with Regulations.gov can help.  I was trying to find other comments of interest to round up ideas, both for my own comments and also for future TSW posts.  What an opportunity for people from all over the country and working in all different areas to weigh in!

However, I ran into a couple of problems.  First, they don’t separate out form letters, and you have to download any that are letters to read them.   So it’s really not designed for reading comments. I also looked at posted comments to a scoping notice for a tiny Forest Service project, and it was easier to read them!  The other thing I thought is that it would be interesting for something like this, which doesn’t have legal requirements, for some analysis group to pick out ideas (say, change EQIP to do ….) and then have people vote on them, in another “round” of comment.

I also had a flashback to when I worked at CSREES, now NIFA.  Most of the form letters were about National Forests and how the best thing for climate was to not do anything.  I’ve attached the two most common I found USDA-2021-0003-0381_attachment_1 2. It’s no wonder the rest of USDA can get tired of the FS. There they go doing all kinds of good and non-controversial work, and then there’s the FS.

Scientists recognize that forests sequester more carbon when they are protected than when forests are logged. For public land, the USDA can have a direct, positive impact by supporting proforestation in our national forests. “Proforestation” means purposefully growing the public’s existing forests intact for maximal carbon storage and sequestration. On the ground, proforestation means protecting older, larger trees and drastically reducing logging national forests.

Science suggests that we need the largest trees now because they sequester more carbon than seedlings. We don’t have much old growth, ancient trees, mature trees, and roadless areas remaining on our public forests. These areas provide the trees that can most efficiently sequester carbon now. They also provide refuge for animals and plants in this warming climate, so they serve both as areas of climate refugia and biodiversity. Please protect these areas from all tree cutting and road work. That will protect larger trees, more intact ecosystems, and consequently sequester more carbon.

Reduce logging. Activities such as reconstructing roads or building new ones (even temporary) to access trees, cutting those trees down and hauling them off public land are all activities that burn fossil fuels. Hammering ecosystems with logging and roadbuilding does not create resiliency to climate change—such activities exacerbate carbon emissions.

I did like this idea letter state conservation agencies which argued against a tendency to initiate new programs every time a problem shows up.. kind of “more programs, more administration and less money to do work.”

An increased focus on climate and resiliency issues is admirable, but USDA should avoid attempting to “reshuffle” its program delivery in the name of change. USDA already has a number of climate-smart conservation programs that are not only effective but over-subscribed. Several examples are the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), the Agricultural Management Assistance (AMA) Program, and the Small Watershed Program. During past administrations, there has been an unwritten rule that authorizing additional funding to any of these programs can only come at the expense of other USDA conservation programs. We are optimistic that this administration, with a supportive Congress, can move beyond this antiquated thinking and fund conservation programs at the levels needed by our country’s landowners and cooperators. Conversely, developing new programs in the name of climate will certainly slow our progress toward climate goals by increasing administrative requirements to get these programs up and running. There is no need to recreate this wheel, but there is an immediate need to better fund the programs that our delivery system can effectively use without delay.

Comments are due tonight, but we can still discuss ideas after they close, so please link to your organization’s letter in the comments below. And if you have an easier way to read comments on regulations.gov, please let me know.

More on the Carbon Capture and Storage Horse Race: California Efforts

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The Climeworks direct air capture plant in Hinwil, Switzerland, binds carbon dioxide to water and pumps it far underground.(Climeworks)

Matthew commented yesterday and included this quote from Jeremy Nichols: that he’s “incredibly skeptical” that the project will ever be built due to costs and “the commercially unproven nature of carbon capture and sequestration.”

I was about to go through the points that despite being currently unproven (economically, at scale), many people, including scientists, say we need it to stay below desired climate targets. Conveniently, Evan Halper of the LA Times had a nice summary as part of a recent article on “what California is doing about CCS.” I’ve bolded the parts that might be of interest to federal lands and forest watchers.

Here’s the link to the whole story..

It is no small undertaking. Installing sci-fi-type machinery to pull carbon from the air — or divert it from refineries, power plants and industrial operations — and bottle it up deep underground is a monumentally expensive and logistically daunting challenge. It is one climate leaders now have no choice but to try to meet as they race to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the central commitment of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, which aims to avert cataclysmic effects.

“To have any chance of holding warming below that level, you can’t do it simply by limiting emissions,” said Ken Alex, a senior policy advisor to former California Gov. Jerry Brown who now directs Project Climate at the UC Berkeley School of Law. “You have to sequester significant amounts of carbon.”

The recognition has pushed state regulators to start drafting blueprints for what could be one of the larger infrastructure undertakings in California history. Millions of tons of carbon dioxide would need to be captured and compressed into liquid form, at which point it would be either buried throughout the state or converted into materials for industrial uses such as manufacturing plastic and cement.

The state is essentially starting from zero. There are no large-scale carbon-removal projects operating in California.

…

Carbon Engineering is promising that oil extraction is not in its long-term future. The oil revenues, the company says, make it possible to get early plants built. The hope is the costs of the plants will get much cheaper as the technology is put to widespread use, making it economical to just bury the carbon dioxide in the ground.

The European company Climeworks has taken a different route, using modular units to build smaller operations across the continent. Its biggest, in Iceland, will go online soon, collecting 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. That would be dwarfed by what Carbon Engineering is projecting in Texas. But there is no fossil fuel component to the Climeworks projects.

“This is scalable,” said Christoph Beuttler, a manager at Climeworks. “We can get the costs down. Just imagine we were talking about solar panels in the 1990s and how far the prices have dropped. We think the same thing can be achieved here. “

California officials say direct-air-capture developers are eyeing where in the state they can build. Some are looking toward remote areas in Northern California where they could tap into geothermal energy, as Climeworks will do to power its Icelandic plant. Others are more focused on the deep underground basins of the Central Valley, suitable for storing billions of tons of carbon dioxide.

The vacuums are just one of many technologies California and other states are investigating in their sprint toward carbon removal. Back in Washington, there is a bipartisan push to allocate billions of dollars to the construction of pipelines and storage facilities for all the carbon dioxide lawmakers envision will be diverted underground in the coming years.

One of the first projects moving forward in California targets agriculture and wood waste that would otherwise be burned, resulting in greenhouse gas emissions. It aims to convert the waste into zero emissions power using a pioneering gasification process. The emissions created during production would be trapped and buried underground.

Other efforts are focused on the potential to trap greenhouse gases at factories for such things as cement and steel. Their production is emissions intensive due to the high heat temperatures needed and chemical reactions involved, and the only option for canceling out those emissions is diverting and burying the carbon dioxide.

“Some of these facilities cannot or will not be shut down, replaced or switched to carbon-free fuels quickly enough … to contain climate change at manageable levels,” said a recent report from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory urging California to become a carbon removal leader.

The race to bring carbon removal technologies to market is getting a boost from billionaire Elon Musk. On Thursday, Earth Day, his XPrize will launch a $100-million contest aimed at inspiring teams of innovators to develop carbon removal projects capable of being scaled “massively to gigaton levels, locking away CO2 permanently in an environmentally benign way.”

Groups of scientists have meanwhile been drafting blueprints for California’s transition into the new technologies. An exhaustive study by Stanford and the Energy Futures Initiative identified 76 existing factories, power plants and other facilities in the state where carbon capture technology could be used to remove 59 million metric tons of greenhouse gas annually by 2030.

Ringside Seats at the Decarbonizing Energy Horserace

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It’s interesting to me that as a group, the technology prediction community appears to be much more humble about predicting the future than the climate modelling community.  We discussed that here.

Decision-makers and investors would benefit from learning more about why they were caught unawares by the shale revolution, and how they can be better prepared the next time such a surprise occurs. The answer to that second question is not immediately apparent. Tautologically, if we were prepared for them, surprises would cease to be surprises. But perhaps a start is for decision-makers to adapt to an increasingly uncertain and dynamic world by creating a more imaginative discourse, one that welcomes nuance and doubt as spaces for opportunity and transformative change, and sees forecasts as the beginning of a policy or investment discussion rather than the end, and forecasters not as Delphic oracles of outcome, but as the people who know best why attempts at prediction must fall short.

 

And of course, climate modelling itself depends on assumptions about technologies (and land use, and so on).  But even in our own relatively tiny world with questions like “is using wood better than concrete for the environment, including climate”?  And “what is the impact of using natural gas (and the relationship of environmental concerns to extraction and use) on Federal lands”, we need to keep track of the horses in the horserace.

X Prize winners were announced, using carbon from a natural gas and a coal plant.

Selected by a panel of independent judges, both winning teams developed solutions aimed at reducing CO2 emissions associated with traditional concrete, which is currently the world’s most abundant human-made material and accounts for seven percent of all global CO2 emissions. The two team’s award-winning technologies will be, and already are, game-changers for global decarbonization and the fight against climate change.

Launched in 2015, the NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE was a five-year global competition developed to address rising CO2 emissions by challenging innovators around the world to develop breakthrough technologies that convert the most CO2 into products with the highest net value.

The competition included two tracks, the Wyoming track that focused on the conversion of emissions from a nearby coal-fired power plant, the Wyoming Integrated Test Center in Gillette, WY, and the Alberta track which used emissions from an adjacent natural gas-fired plant, the Alberta Carbon Conversion Technology Centre in Calgary, AB. The winning teams, one from each track, converted the most CO2 into products with the highest value, while minimizing their overall CO2 footprint, land use, water use, and energy use.

Here’s another one about a zero emissions gas plant:

For the other plant, 8 Rivers is working with the Southern Ute Indian Tribe Growth Fund in Colorado. Both projects will be designed and developed this year, which 8 Rivers says requires spending tens of millions of dollars. A final decision on whether to go ahead with the facilities is due in 2022.

Net Power’s technology uses a new kind of turbine to burn natural gas in oxygen, rather than the air. As a result, the plant only produces carbon dioxide and water as a byproduct. The water can be frozen out of the mixture and the pure stream of CO₂ can be buried in depleted oil and gas wells or similar geological structures.

What’s interesting about the latter is this quote:

Though the power plant won’t produce any pollution, environmentalists are concerned about the continued use of natural gas. The production and transportation of the fossil fuel does lead to emissions, which companies that rely on natural gas will have to mitigate.

Doesn’t it seem like the question would be “what are alternate sources of energy, now, in the short term and the long term, and what are their pros and cons vis a vis the environment?  Is a pipeline or trucking worse for the environment (including, say, sage grouse) than new solar and wind installations with new powerlines? How do you balance land impacts with carbon impacts?
Does every industry “have to” mitigate its transportation emissions (say agriculture)?  Who decides which industries “have to” and which don’t? Is this rational, or is there an underlying desire to have a “scape-industry”?  Which leads back to the interview with Michael Webber here.

Forest management in the climate context

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I thought the graphics from this research article did a good job of illustrating the role of forests and forestry in climate change mitigation.

Even if there is a lot of uncertainty in the assumptions and modeling, forest management is likely where the greatest opportunities are for land management to contribute to climate mitigation.  (Note that fire management is a relatively minor contributor.)  (AFOLU – the new acronym of the day – is Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use.)

Thus, ecosystems have the potential for large additional climate mitigation by combining enhanced land sinks with reduced emissions…  We describe and quantify 20 discrete mitigation options (referred to hereafter as “pathways”) within the AFOLU sector …  We refer to these terrestrial conservation, restoration, and improved practices pathways, which include safeguards for food, fiber, and habitat, as “natural climate solutions” (NCS).

Improved forest management (i.e., Natural Forest Management and Improved Plantations pathways) offers large and cost-effective mitigation opportunities, many of which could be implemented rapidly without changes in land use or tenure. While some activities can be implemented without reducing wood yield (e.g., reduced-impact logging), other activities (e.g., extended harvest cycles) would result in reduced near-term yields. This shortfall can be met by implementing the Reforestation pathway, which includes new commercial plantations. The Improved Plantations pathway ultimately increases wood yields by extending rotation lengths from the optimum for economic profits to the optimum for wood yield.

Work remains to better constrain uncertainty of NCS mitigation estimates. Nevertheless, existing knowledge reported here provides a robust basis for immediate global action to improve ecosystem stewardship as a major solution to climate change.

Unfortunately, the major role of forests in NCS mitigation strategies is pretty minor with regard to overall climate change mitigation needs.  (I.e. planting a trillion trees won’t do the trick; we need significant emissions reductions.)

 

Climate tipping point for forests

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www.e-education.psu.edu

Add to this diagram – “Respiration (when overheated).”

We’ve talked about how older forests may sequester less carbon and dead forests release carbon (for example, here).  New research indicates that forests also sequester less carbon and start to release carbon (while they are still alive) if the temperature gets too high.  As reported here:

‘We’re in Bigger Trouble Than We Thought’

The data show a clear temperature limit, above which trees start to exhale more CO2 than they can take in through photosynthesis, said co-author Christopher Schwalm, an ecologist and earth system modeler at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. The findings mark a tipping point, of sorts, at which “the land system will act to accelerate climate change rather than slow it down,” Schwalm said.

“Seeing such a strong temperature signal globally did not surprise me,” he said. “What I was surprised by is that it would happen so soon, maybe in 15 to 25 years, and not at the end of the century.”

Other researchers commented on management implications of drought-stressed dying trees:” 

It may come down to looking at options for saving valuable, individual stands of trees,  and protecting genetically distinct and more resilient species. It could also be important to conserve corridors and patches of woodland to reduce the distance seeds must travel to enable forests of the future to spread or reconnect under more favorable climate conditions, he explained.

“We think a lot of these areas are going to go down, so where can we save some of it?” he asked.

There are obviously implications here for national forest planning.  It seems like it should be the role of the national headquarters to review and interpret the implications of new research for forest management, and to advise national forests regarding its implications for their plans and whether they should consider making changes.

Substituting for Fossil Fuels: The Bio-Chemical Side of Wood Products

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From the Forest2Market Article

As far as I have been able to ascertain, N-95 masks are made from propylene, which is a currently a byproduct of oil or gas. I’m not a psychologist, but it must be difficult to feel as angry at the “fossil fuel industry” as many are (or claim to be), and yet be dependent on so many of their products. It’s interesting that people can blame workers involved in production (often with blue-collar jobs) for the bad parts (environmental negatives), and enjoy the good parts (the products) seemingly without moral qualms.

Oil and gas folks are probably just as befuddled by this as forest industry folks were during the Timber Wars by folks against logging. Of course, I’m not saying that people don’t have a right to question practices and regulations of any industry, but, at least the rhetoric, sometimes goes beyond that to something that may feel like “industry hate.”

Anyway, if we want to keep fossil fuels in the ground, as some do, we would have to come up with substitutes for uses in addition to electricity and liquid or gas fuels. These folks in British Columbia are apparently doing that with western red cedar, and folks in Nova Scotia are doing research on spruce-fir pulp.

In early December, reporter Doris de Guzman of Forest Industry News did a nice roundup of EU efforts in using lignin products.

Lignin is expected to play a significant role as a new chemical feedstock particularly in the formation of supramolecular materials and aromatic chemicals. Lignin is a complex plant-derived macromolecule found in the cell walls of almost all dry plants. It makes up 20-30% of the composition of wood.

According to a European Commission (EC) report “Top emerging bio-based Products, their properties and industrial applications” published by Germany-based Ecologic Institute on June 2018, lignin – among the most relevant large-volume biomass components – was found to generate the highest number of innovative products together with terpenes and urban wastes. Its natural abundance and global availability represent the main drivers for the persistent attempts at its exploitation beyond its actual relevant role as a bioenergy source, although its chemical versatility and uniqueness as a source of aromatic building blocks also play a role.

Innovative products derived from lignin range from fundamental chemical building blocks such as BTX aromatics to material for advanced applications in technical fields like construction engineering, where for instance both carbon fibres and thermoset resins play a major role but are currently not available from renewable sources.

As with our chart yesterday, we would need to consider all the environmental impacts of substitutions, such as these..

Environmental impacts depend on the energy demand for cracking the lignin as well as on the catalysts and solvents needed in the production process. Bio-derived methoxylated alkylphenols are promising alternatives to traditional alkylphenols as their toxicity is significantly lower. Furthermore, methoxylated alkylphenols from lignin can possess unsaturated alkyl chain (i.e. eugenol). The unsaturation is also proposed to benefit the biodegradability of the alkylphenol, as unsaturated compounds often degrade faster in various environments than their saturated counterparts.

There’s a great deal of chemistry in the article that for me required frequent side-trips to look up words. I’d guess we don’t hear much about these new uses as they tend to be using products from pulp and paper plants, and we don’t have many of those in the Western US.

Talking Past Each Other on Forest Carbon: Differing Questions Asked and Alternatives Considered?

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For many years, folks have been disagreeing about different aspects of forest carbon. First, there’s using different abstractions, which aren’t necessarily clearly defined, as we saw yesterday. Then there’s the temporal and spatial scale, and location and level of any site-specificity. So ideas, scope, and assumptions have been all tangled up.

I thought it might be helpful to develop a taxonomy of analyses to clarify what different studies are analyzing and how the pieces might fit together. My original idea was a diagram, and for each study, we could highlight where it fit, or not.

So here’s a first stab at a diagram. I’m hoping fellow TSW folks will help me improve it. Note that none of these framings are in themselves “scientific.”

What came to me is that sometimes when folks talk about bioenergy, they mean it as a primary purpose, while others mean it as an alternative way of disposing of waste, say from logging slash, fuel treatment projects, urban wood waste. Some mean thermal and small scale (putting up a fuels project for firewood collection) and others mean electric and large scale (building a plant).

So I came up with three boxes of environmental impacts to consider:

I. What is the primary purpose and are there other ways of fulfilling this purpose, if so what are those alternative’s carbon as well as other environmental, social and economic impacts?
Under this you would include:
a) adding or decreasing total acres of forest (alternative land uses)
b) management practices on the land (alternative silvicultural practices)
c) tree removal: live vs. dead, species/size removed, harvest method (alternative methods)

II. If you have woody material left over from a primary purpose use, what are the alternative ways of disposing of it? Say for fuel treatments, this could be burning in piles- which of course has some operational problems and risks, as well as environmental effects.

Just based on this diagram, it seems that we can talk past each other because some people are talking about primary purpose and others are talking about waste. They are definitely connected, and those connections are worthy of more examination. The questions are, for a landowner “What are we going to do with this forest?” vs. “What are we going to do with all this extra woody material?” On the other hand, when the EPA Scientific Advisory Board debated “is biomass carbon neutral?” that’s another way of looking at it, around how using it should be regulated.

Here’s an EESI 2018 piece that shows some of the complexity of which question in which place..in this case for regulators:

However, while the determination helps clear the path towards greater use of woody biomass for energy, it remains unclear what net effect this will have on the U.S. energy mix. Solutions from the Land, an agriculture, forestry and conservation group, cheered the decision but note that there are numerous conflicts in no fewer than 14 different federal regulations pertaining to biomass utilization.

State level policies, to a large extent, decide the level of biomass utilization domestically. For example, Massachusetts’ Renewable Portfolio Standard largely forbids the use of biomass as renewable energy, while Oregon promotes it as a renewable source of energy. In California, the biomass power industry has largely shut-down due to expiring Power Purchase Agreements, despite a great need to address vast amounts of wildfire and agricultural wastes. Currently, the only other method of disposal of these materials is open burning.

The Clean Power Plan had offered hope to the biomass industry. Under the now defunct Clean Power Plan, states and the EPA had been charting a pathway for states to use biomass as a way to ratchet down emissions. However, with the administration’s reversal on the rule, along with larger market forces, such as low natural gas prices, biomass power is a less attractive energy option than even a few years ago.

But for forest land owners and managers, the question can be quite different. It might be “how best can this forest sequester and store carbon?” or “how best can this forest help with climate change given other needs and values not climate-related?” or “given future uncertainties,how should we balance s&s with the need to develop resilience? while at the same time providing important ecosystem services?”.

Talking Past Each Other: Language on Carbon Forestry and Offsets

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James Bailey mentioned how hard it is to describe anything in a meaningful way in 300 words. I’ve found Twitter to be an extreme extension of that (280 characters?), though many times you can dig down and ask researcher Tweeters questions and they will respond.. so I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Twitter (I tweet as ForestMaven). Too often, though, in my experience, it’s where people say mean things to and about other people and ideas. Perhaps scarier is the way complex ideas can get reduced to snarky one liners.

One of my pet projects is to try to explain to people the concept that I don’t think you can really understand land use and practices without understanding people who make the decisions, their views, and the physical and technological possibilities. But nowadays so many people project land use changes based on satellite data and assumptions about what people might do. For some reason, these quantified assumptions seem to be cooler science than say, social science studies of what farmers do, or understanding the physical and technological envelopes in which they operate.

Anyway, to that end, I follow Ted Nordhaus (and other folks) of The Breakthrough Institute. The other day Nordhaus retweeted 

“Protecting trees, as habitat, shade, and a source of life, is a good thing; a very good thing. Carbon forestry, conversely, is a con game, and a cynical one even bad standards of the best corporate grifters.” from a fellow named Paul Robbins.

What, might you ask, is “carbon forestry”? It’s undefined so it’s easy to question it, as no one really knows what it is. If he really meant “offsets”, why not just say that?  And who is Paul Robbins? Apparently he’s the Director of the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin.

In 2011, a bunch of knowledgeable folks (Malmsheimer et al.)  wrote a paper called “Managing Forests because Carbon Matters: Integrating Energy, Products, and Land Management Policy” and published it in the Journal of Forestry. Here’s a link.

In the abstract, they say

“The value of carbon credits generated by forest carbon offset projects differs dramatically, depending on the sets of carbon pools allowed by the protocol and baseline employed. The costs associated with establishing and maintaining offset projects depend largely on the protocols’ specifics. Measurement challenges and relatively high transaction costs needed for forest carbon offsets warrant consideration of other policies that promote climate benefits from forests and forest products but do not require project-specific accounting.”

So it seems like many agree that offsets (from forests) are not a good idea. In the humble world of doing our forest Climate Action Plans in the early 2010’s, we thought about integrating mitigation and adaptation concerns in various ways, planting trees, restoring riparian areas, and so on. I’m hoping that in the great debate of “think tank” climate change, where the titan opinion leaders clash, our efforts to manage forests considering carbon won’t be mooshed together with offsets and thereby dissed.

Trillion Trees and Natural Carbon Storage Act

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We’ve been talking about developing an actual carbon policy for forest management.  Republicans have been willing to concede that planting trees would be beneficial, but others say that is not enough.  We now have a more comprehensive bipartisan legislative proposal that is getting some attention – The Trillion Trees and Natural Carbon Storage Act.  According to the Washington Post, “The forestry proposal is the first to emerge from the Climate Solutions Caucus, which Coons and Braun launched a little more than a year ago.”  It “directs the U.S. Forest Service to set goals for how much carbon the forests, grasslands, wetlands and some coastal areas should sequester from the atmosphere.”

According to sponsor Senator Young (R-IN), among the things it would do is:

  • Requires that USDA establish objectives for increasing the net carbon stock of American forests, grasslands, wetlands, and coastal blue carbon habitats.

Young’s website provides a link to the bill.  The specific language applicable to the Forest Service is to establish within two years, “objectives for increased net carbon stock for the forest, grassland, wetland, and coastal blue carbon habitat ecosystems of the United States that are owned or managed by the Federal Government.” The objectives “shall be established at levels that assist in achieving (A) the optimally feasible and ecologically appropriate increase in the total net carbon stock.” Those objectives, “shall be based on information relating to the maintenance or restoration of the ecological integrity of the ecosystems described in subsection (a), including maintaining or restoring ecologically appropriate forest, grassland, wetland, and blue carbon habitat structure, function, composition, and connectivity…”  That sounds like it is straight out of the 2012 Planning Rule.  There is no mention of national forest planning per se in the bill, but it is hard to see any other vehicle for implementing this policy and these objectives on national forests.

Young’s website also states that, “This legislation is supported by The Nature Conservancy, National Wildlife Federation, Environmental Defense Fund, World Wildlife Fund, National Audubon Society, Bipartisan Policy Center, American Forest Foundation, American Conservation Coalition, National Association of State Foresters, Conservation International, and Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions.”

According the Environmental Defense Fund, it “follows recommendations from climate scientists and nonprofit organizations to focus on measuring climate impact instead of number of trees planted.”  EDF’s summary:

  • Expand existing U.S. Forest Service carbon accounting to include grasslands, wetlands and coastal ecosystems, in addition to forests.
  • Ensure that forests and other ecosystems will be valued not only for harvested materials, but also for important climate mitigation functions.
  • Measure progress using “net carbon stock,” a metric that reflects the dynamic nature of ecosystems and how carbon stores can grow or shrink over time.
  • Direct the Forest Service to share expertise, including technical capacity to increase carbon stored in urban forests, with states and recipients of U.S. foreign aid.
  • Provide funding to alleviate the nation’s 1.3-million-acre backlog of reforestation projects.

One section of the bill intends to provide financing “to facilitate the sale of credits in the voluntary carbon market or other recognized environmental market…”  However (as described in the same Washington Post article linked above), carbon offsets have become an issue in relation to the nomination of Mary Nichols, the longtime head of the California Air Resources Board, to be the new director of the Environmental Protection Agency.

One central point of contention is her achievement of California’s cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions. The program allows companies to offset harmful emissions by paying for forestation or other projects that decrease gases elsewhere. But opponents say it amounts to a license to pollute with poor and minority communities bearing the brunt of environmental harms.

Carbon has also come up in relation to the nomination of Tom Vilsack to be USDA Secretary.  The chance to work on Biden’s climate agenda may have made the job more attractive for Vilsack to return.  Carbon seems to offer an interesting opportunity for the USDA to actually unite its agricultural and forestry forces behind a common goal.