Carbon

We’ve been talking about carbon tax credits for forest land as part of the Forest-Climate Working Group policy platform. This story is about offsets and talks about some of the difficulties determining what is really changed due to the payments. It seems to me like a government run program could have the same difficulties..

Another thing of interest about this story is that it is supposed to be “news” but comes across as not particularly unbiased. (FWIW, I’ve never been a fan of offsets). It reads more like an op-ed.
“The blistering urgency of the planet’s climate crisis is almost impossible to overstate.”
“But a review of hundreds of pages of documents underpinning those projects and interviews with a half-dozen participating landowners indicate that the Conservancy is often preserving forested lands that don’t need defending.” A half-dozen? Often? What is the total number of projects?

“The offset controversy has not deterred the Conservancy, which for years ruffled the feathers of other environmental groups for its businesslike approach and close ties to corporate partners.”

“With the window to address climate change slamming shut, many observers say the scarce resources to tackle this problem should be funneled into projects that actually result in concrete emissions reductions.”

There are also good things in the story about TNC:

The approach has produced some enormous victories. In 1998 the Nature Conservancy spent $35 million to buy pristine forests surrounding much of the 130-mile upper St. John River in Maine. A decade later it acquired 320,000 acres of forested land in Montana from a timber company before developers could get their hands on it. Each year, the Conservancy spends around $150 million purchasing land or paying for easements that shield it.

The story gives a history of offsets and talks about some of the difficulties figuring out landowners’ intentions in the short and long term. It seems so simple- paying to keep trees in the ground. You can measure the trees. Are they there or not? More difficult are questions about whether they would have been cut without the carbon payments. On the other hand, if we think about payments for ecosystem services, would we care whether the landowner intended to provide deer habitat without the payment? Or would we just say, “if you’re going to do it, we’ll pay you.” To reimburse people with original wildlife intentions, and to reward those who change. It seems fairer and more straightforward than having to prove you were not otherwise going to manage for wildlife habitat.

So perhaps the problem is with the idea of the “offset” itself- having to change behavior before it is counted, and perhaps the marketing thereof. And I don’t know whose idea that was. What if instead Disney said “we are paying landowners for carbon services” it’s still a good thing- but just not comparing tons of carbon that the company uses.

But if you get away from the ton for ton equivalence, the you might as well give up on specific solutions and do whatever floats your corporate boat. If the window is indeed “slamming shut” then we need transformative technological solutions, and if I were those corporations, the bucks should go to technology development, say, for CCS. Or perhaps for Delta, for alternative jet fuels. But I suspect their jet fuel footprint has already decreased greatly this year due to Covid.

There doesn’t appear to be much of a literature on how science funding streams can influence how we think about problems and the approaches we use. I’ve told the story of having dinner with a Station Director (boss of one of the FS research units) at which he told me that now that the Station had tapped into climate change research funds, they wouldn’t be doing the relatively mundane studies that stakeholders such as the National Forests might want. That was in 1988.

Flash forward to close to the end of my time with the Forest Service in 2011 or so. I received a phone call from a nice researcher at University of Montana who asked about what problems we might need help with dealing with climate change and the social sciences. I pointed out that we had lots of issues that needed attention that didn’t have to do with climate change. She said that my position was fairly common among stakeholders, but that’s what the funding was for..climate change research.. so that’s what was on the list for scientists to do.

I’ve been thinking about how those continuing big chunks of funding have affected how we can respond to issues biting land managers. For example, the growing problems of too many people in the woods, with some of them doing Bad Things. Our recent Covid round-up shows that more people are out there on our federal lands behaving badly, and we still don’t know why or how best to stop it. That’s what happens when there is a mismatch between research funding streams and real-world needs.

I came across this interesting discussion from the Yale Forest Forum about the Crowther Lab and their claims about planting a trillion trees.

Perhaps due to my experience in real-world reforestation, I’ve not as sanguine about tree planting as a solution for climate change. At its simplest, if we plant trees we don’t know if they will live. Because of competition, herbivores, old and new invasive or native pathogens and insects, drought, or frost, or other possible climate or weather factors and the interactions. How about having mycorrhyzae? How to grow them in the nursery so they survive? And so on..

We would be sinking much funding upfront into unknown outcomes- plus not using the land for the purposes we use it today, which also may have associated costs. Now, there might be places where reforestation makes a lot of sense (like after a large fire where there is no natural regeneration coming back, or replacing shelterbelts in the Great Plains, and just generally trees and woods are nice to have for wildlife and people), but I’d argue that modelling tree planting around the planet based on assumptions only does one thing..start an endless academic discussion about assumptions. Again, research under the Satellite Gaze tends to be funded well (uses satellites! applies to the Whole World!), but by its very nature is not informative to specific people in specific places, and of course, those people may not be involved nor their views considered.

The nice thing about the discussion is that because it’s among scientists, everyone is civil to each other and relatively respectful of opinions. But the Satellite Gaze seems to almost naturally invoke continued controversy because 1) it proposes something so big it attracts much fame/attention and 2) at the same time depends on hordes of assumptions that are easily questioned.

Wondering if this seems all too simple? Too straightforward? Perhaps too good to be true for forest lovers? Forty-six scientists certainly thought so in their “Comment on: ‘The global tree restoration potential”(link is external) (Veldman et. al, 2019) published in Science as a response to the Crowther Lab’s study (Bastin et al., 2019). Veldman et al. (2019) responded to Bastin et al. (2019) that the potential of one trillion trees is an overestimation. Veldman et al. (2019) argue that Bastin et al. (2019) overestimated three key areas of data: 1) overestimated soil organic carbon gains from increased tree cover, 2) modeled increased tree cover at high latitudes and elevations where new tree cover would reduce albedo and increase warming, and 3) included savannas, grasslands, and shrublands as areas for afforestation that have been maintained in their current states by fire and herbivores for millions of years. In all, Velman et al. (2019) claim that Bastin et al. overestimated the carbon intake of reforestation by a factor of 5.

…..

Mark Ashton, Senior Associate Dean of the Forest School at Yale School of the Environment, who was a contributor to Crowther’s first landmark tree-counting study, is another skeptic at Yale. In a Grist article(link is external), Ashton doubts efforts to plant trees as carbon sinks are feasible if not done with security of land tenure and under ecologically appropriate conditions, as there is more economic incentive to cut these trees than to leave them standing. He goes on to say: “When you plant a tree, you have to invest in its security for the future. So I think it’s a bit of a red herring. The most important thing to do in terms of climate is to try and reduce emissions.” Ashton considers more nuanced forestry, such as providing incentives on private land for growing Douglas fir on longer rotations in the Pacific Northwest for long lasting timber products that would lock carbon into new construction to be an industrial ecology strategy for mitigation.

But people do show up in this quote from a social scientist:

Regarding the identified land for potential restoration, Dove says: “Trees are absent from these lands in most cases because of local, often varying and contested, preferences for other land uses. The billion-acre and trillion-tree campaigns only ignore these local politics in late-developing parts of the world, and they divert attention from the politics behind the real culprits of climate change, the oil and gas industries in the developed countries.”

But it’s not just late-developing parts of the world, I think it is true in the US as well- trees were felled for farms in the Midwest and they’re still growing crops. I’m not so sure, though, that people shouldn’t publish studies of ways of sequestering carbon because such studies “divert attention” from someone’s preferred way. It’s handy to paint one group as “the enemy”, but the world is more complicated than that. For example, about 44% of Connecticut households use fuel oil or other petroleum products for home heating and 36% rely on natural gas according to EIA.

Some have argued that decarbonizing is basically an engineering problem. But there are also folks who frame it around human sinfulness. And others, an opportunity to bash other politicians and actors in the energy industry, and thereby gain political power (albeit with the intent of doing Good Things). I’ve written that investigator-initiated research, as random as it is, is not the way to go- that we need something more organized. The fellow who wrote this piece is Professor Michael Kelly, Emeritus Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge.

Every scientific discipline wants to get its hands into the climate change science pot, which inevitably leads to a multitude of potential solutions. Then as each one is introduced, we conduct research about where or if it will work. In our world, biomass, biochar, leaving forests alone, managing forests, concrete vs. wood as a building material, and so on. And each industry is trying to reduce its carbon impact. New technologies (batteries, CCS, and so on) are developed and are in a horse race with unknown outcomes to see which will work best and be economically feasible.

I didn’t realize that other industries had gotten together and coordinated their work. I wonder what keeps the US from doing something like it for decarbonizing, other than the political downside of picking winners instead of funding everyone.

The world of superfast computing and miraculous hand-held devices that most of us now take for granted did not appear by accident. It was the product of a very clear roadmap, agreed across the electronics industry from 1970 to 2015. An equally clear and widely agreed roadmap will be essential to achieving the target of a net-zero emission global economy in 2050.

Intel founder Gordon Moore’s empirical observation that the transistor count on chips was doubling every two years, while the chips stayed the same size, morphed into an industry-wide target that held for nearly 50 years. By the mid-1980s, a Technology Roadmap became a feature of the whole industry.

Technical people from all parts of the industry – chip manufacture, the fabrication facilities, the circuit design teams, the power constraint teams and so on – met, debated and produced a substantial report every 24 months that looked out ten years in detail and 20 years and more in overview. These reports described, in great detail for the short term and lesser detail for the longer term, what needed to be ready (researched, developed and available for use in production) by when and by whom. Thanks to this approach, Moore’s Law went from being a description of the industry to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The formal ‘International Technology Roadmap for Silicon’ was the bible of the industry and a clear statement of where the industry as a whole, and every part of every supply chain would need to be, in five and more years’ time, and what needed to be invested by whom and when. It is fair to say that the progress across the electronics sector would have been much less smooth and relentless in the absence of the agreed Roadmap.

The target of a net-zero global economy by 2050 is every bit as complex, and on a much greater scale than the silicon chip industry. But as yet, there are no detailed technology roadmaps for this project. In contrast to the electronics sector, we have a positive tower of Babel – many people are doing their own little thing, but with no sense that what others are doing will be coordinated to make an overall successful whole. One cannot even get a national standard, let alone an international one, for the plug for recharging car batteries!

and

What we need now is a set of interlocking targets for each five-year interval from 2020-2050, along with indicative budgets and who-does-what for each interval. The key issue is knitting all the sub-projects into a united and coherent overall project. Piecemeal activities are certain to fail.

Calling it an engineering problem and funding coordinated groups to solve it would certainly take some of the drama out of it. And how many more studies do we need of what plant might not be living in the same location in 2080 based on a set of a thousand linked conjectures?