The Smokey Wire : National Forest News and Views
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It appears that rumors of ‘natural and beneficial’ wildfires in the southern Sierra Nevada have been ‘greatly exaggerated’. Even the Alder Creek grove, which was recently bought by Save the Redwoods, was decimated. Of course, this eventuality has been long-predicted.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-11-16/sierra-nevada-giant-sequoias-killed-castle-fire
We’ve heard wildfires are “caused by” “exacerbated by” “primarily” “significantly” by climate change in various stories and op-eds. So let’s trace these back to the studies.
The Society of Environmental Journalism sent me a link to these Science Facts put out by our friends at AAAS. Scientists reading this.. please register with Sciline here.
Top Line
Human-caused climate change is a significant contributor to the increasing size and intensity of, and damage from, western U.S. wildfires.The Essentials
In the western United States human-caused climate change caused more than half the increase in forest fuel aridity (how dry and flammable vegetation is) since the 1970s and has approximately doubled the cumulative area burned in forest fires since 1984.
Now many of us might ask, how could you know that “across the western US?” Could there have been more vegetation due to lack of fire suppression, that led to less water for each plant and hence dryness of vegetation? Haven’t suppression tactics changed over that period? If logging is bad for fires, as some claim, then there’s been much logging since 1984, how does that factor in? How could these estimates possibly be considered “facts?”
But first let’s take an aside to point out two concepts that may get lost in stories.
1. Not everything about climate is AGW or anthropogenic climate change. As we’ve seen via Matthew’s graphs of PDO, there is much climate variability that occurs naturally. E.g., in my own part of the country about 100 years ago there was a serious drought that led to the Dust Bowl. So just because I’m experiencing heat, it’s not necessarily AGW.
2. And not all climate change is about carbon, nor even all greenhouse gases (GHGs). Land use changes such as albedo, irrigation, urban heat islands and so on can also affect climate, in complex and interactive ways we don’t yet understand. So we can’t go directly to “reducing carbon (alone) will solve the problem.”
To find the contribution of AGW, we have to look at attribution studies. These studies run climate models and try to find the fingerprint of AGW by what sounds like comparing the model results to real world observations of some kind. I recommend taking the time to read this one. Sure I don’t get all the details of CMIPs and so on, but we can all understand what data goes in, what comes out, and we can read the caveats, and the conclusions. We can also examine the almost magical transitions between the paper (careful), the interviews (not quite as careful) and the headlines e.g. “caused by.”
Here’s a typical exchange of scientists:
Swain with UCLA and other scientists earlier this year published a study that said climate change has doubled the number of extreme-risk days for California wildfires.
It said temperatures statewide rose 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since 1980, while precipitation dropped 30%. That doubled the number of autumn days that offer extreme conditions for the ignition of wildfires (Climatewire, April 3).
The heat is expected to get worse with time. Climate models estimate that average state temperatures will climb 3 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050 unless the world makes sharp cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, said Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Even with emissions cuts, average temperatures would rise 2 degrees by midcentury, he said.
Jon Keeley, a senior scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey Western Ecological Research Center, argued that the study from Swain and others failed to show that hotter temperatures are driving wildfires.
“Show us data that shows that level of temperature increase is actually associated with increased fire activity,” Keeley said. “They don’t show that.”
Keeley added, “We ought to be much more concerned with ignition sources than a 1- to 2-degree change in temperature.”
A big contributor to large California fires is that the state has focused on extinguishing blazes for about a century rather than allowing for controlled burns, he said. That has caused dead vegetation to accumulate.
Trump has accused California of failing to “sweep” its forests, which he has linked to fires in the state.
Keeley said that “we don’t sweep forests here in the U.S., but what we do is prescription burning. … It’s potentially the same thing. It’s modifying the fuels prior to a fire.”
Swain, the UCLA climate scientist, said global warming is affecting how big fires get and how fast they move.
“What happens when they start burning, what is the character of those fires, and is it changing?” Swain asked. “The answer is yes.”
If we look at the statements in the study, though..we get a “fingerprint for meteorological preconditions.” Not exactly “fires caused by climate change.”
Collectively, this analysis offers strong evidence for a human fingerprint on the observed increase in meteorological preconditions necessary for extreme wildfires in California.
In the present study, we do not quantify the relative role of increased urban and suburban incursion into the high-risk wildland-urban interface, nor the contribution of historical land/vegetation management practices to increasing wildfire risk or possible future climate-fire feedbacks
And sounding rather like Keeley..or any of the rest of us..
In the long-term, reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions is the most direct path to reducing this risk, though the near-term impacts of these reductions may be limited given the many sources of inertia in the climate system [78]. Fortunately, a broad portfolio of options already exists, including the use of prescribed burning to reduce fuel loads and improve ecosystem health [79], upgrades to emergency communications and response systems, community-level development of protective fire breaks and defensible space, and the adoption of new zoning rules and building codes to promote fire-resilient construction
I recommend reading the conclusions for yourself.
I thought we could look back at our old posts about wildfires and see if there is anything new given this Fire year 2020. Of course, firefighters and people evacuating have all been impacted by Covid, but this is looking at the way we think about wildfire.
Here’s one from a year ago, an op-ed from the LA Times:
“We do fuel breaks because the premise is we’ve got a wildfire containment problem” when in fact, Cohen argues, we have a home ignition problem.
I’ve pointed out before that scientists don’t have any more authority to frame problems than anyone else. Here is a old post about framing the “living with fire” issue.
Just in the past few weeks, we can see other problems from fires besides home ignitions. You might be a truckdriver who couldn’t use I70 when it was closed due to wildfire. You might have had to evacuate a recreation site due to wildfire. As I’ve said before, evacuations can be difficult and unsafe.
But I also think that we have a bit of a philosophical conundrum here with these two current views.
View 1: Wildfires are natural and necessary for “the ecosystem”.
View 2: Wildfires are much worse (frequency, difficulty of fighting, acreage) due to anthropogenic global warming (AGW) (therefore unnatural).
It seems to me that the only way to incorporate these two perspectives is to use the concept of resilience (to disturbances, including AGW) (view 1), and be specific in what you are talking about- necessary for what part of the ecosystem? (View 2) To reproduce lodgepole pines? To provide habitat for black-backed woodpeckers? How much, where, and how intense do fires need to be to meet those “necessary” goals? Is it possible to achieve those specific ecosystem goals via PB (prescribed burning) or WFU (wildland fire use)?
If you subscribe to View 2, though, that climate is changing everything, then attempting to manage for the past (and leaving things alone as a solution) will not bring back the past (time’s arrow only works one way, but without AGW this argument hasn’t been successful with Historic Range of Variation aficionados) and we as a society are faced with deciding what it is we want, what we can change, and how much we are willing to pay to achieve those goals.
Meanwhile people who live in fire-prone areas (most of the western US) go about their business working on protecting their communities, improving notifications, and so on, as the more academic/media discussions about AGW seem irrelevant. Because most of us know there were fires before, and there will be fires again, even if everyone on the planet changed course immediately with regards to carbon, other GHG (greenhouse gases) land-use practices and other climate-changing activities. Then there’s the question of whether the climate would “change back” and how long that would take. Which we have, as with how much of what about wildfire is due to what aspect of climate change, really, no clue. How to proceed, acknowledging that we don’t and won’t know these things?
So what ideas should guide us forward? Here are some I’d put forward for us to discuss.
1. We’re all in this together. Everyone has a role to play. Let’s not get distracted by folks trying to divide us, e.g. “we can’t log our way out of wildfires” or Trump talking about raking.
2. Local people and governments have responsibility for maximizing firefighters’ chances of protecting infrastructure, through zoning, fuel management around homes, and access requirements.
3. Suppression people should play a key role in telling us what they need to succeed. Somehow I think we need to amplify their voices in the discussion.
4. PB should be increased, and should be guided by needs to protect (through strategic placement) human infrastructure and desired ecological conditions, e.g., endangered species habitat, and to foster resilience in a mix best derived at the local level (because they know what’s where).
5. Resilience should replace HRV and/or “ecological integrity” as a goal (even if it requires a (horrors!) new planning rule); and hopefully be easily integrated with the goals of other landowners.
6. If plant material needs to be reduced for fuels reduction, using it in some way is to be encouraged, rather than burning it onsite.
Sure, there are many moving parts. But as Michael Webber said about decarbonization, “Rather than finding someone to blame, let’s look for who can help.”
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?
Drone technology is being used for tree-planting in response to afforestation and carbon sequestration needs, including use after wildfires. How might this change national forest management?
To quickly plant around a trillion trees—a goal that some researchers have estimated could store more than 200 gigatons of carbon—Flash Forest argues that new technology is needed. In North America, trees need to grow 10-20 years before they efficiently store carbon, so to address climate change by midcentury, trees need to begin growing as quickly as possible now. “I think that drones are absolutely necessary to hit the kind of targets that we’re saying are necessary to achieve some of our carbon sequestration goals as a global society,” she says.
But to restore forests that have already been lost, the drones can work more quickly and cheaply than humans planting with shovels. Flash Forest’s tech can currently plant 10,000 to 20,000 seed pods a day; as the technology advances, a pair of pilots will be able to plant 100,000 trees in a day (by hand, someone might typically be able to plant around 1,500 trees in a day, Ahlstrom says.) The company aims to bring the cost down to 50 cents per tree, or around a fourth of the cost of some other tree restoration efforts.
This has obvious implications for tree-planting crews, but how about something like salvage logging? Other issues?
I think it’s always interesting when you find yourself agreeing with someone whose background seems quite different from your own. I ran across this piece from a law professor at U.C Berkeley named Ethan Elkind (it was posted to an information source called Legal Planet, which I intermittently read) . What’s interesting to me is that he raises some of the same points on phasing out oil and gas production in California that are similar to phasing out on federal lands, as per Candidate Biden.
What I think is interesting about Elkind’s piece is that it echoes similar complexities of stopping production of anything, anywhere as long as the demand continues. This isn’t really rocket science to anyone who remembers the Timber Wars. Have we stopped using wood.. well…er.. no. We just get it from somewhere else. Which in the case of wood, appears to be working out just fine. Thank you, Canadians!
So here’s that argument from him (1) You’ ll Get it from somewhere if you have demand:
The challenge is that demand for fossil fuels in the state will remain for the foreseeable future, even if local production ceases. If we stop producing oil here, we’ll start importing more from elsewhere.
While California’s oil demand is already decreasing due to market and policy factors, until consumers completely transition to zero-emission vehicles and find alternatives to petroleum-based products like plastic and asphalt — and until refineries in the state stop exporting to markets around the Pacific — the supply will still find its way to the state. If that oil comes from out-of-state sources, the carbon footprint may even be higher than if California produced it domestically, due to shipping emissions.
(2) Here’s the economic argument:
However, economic theory indicates that a decrease in California production will mean some decrease in consumption, as global prices will rise slightly from reduced overall supply. One study indicated it could lead to global emission reductions of 8 to 24 million tons of CO2 per year. And any oil left in the ground is oil not burned in the long run, meeting one of the highest priorities of climate activists. So a California phase-out could help avoid some emissions, though the rate is unclear.
How is demand reduced in this case? Via higher prices. Since buying gasoline, heating oil, and natural gas is necessary for folks, it seems like this price rise could have unintended consequences of falling unfairly on poorer people who can’t afford to buy new electric cars and appliances, and who have to drive to work and heat their homes.
(3) The “leadership” argument:
What about the political implications of phasing out oil and gas consumption for climate policy? One argument is that a phase-out here might inspire other jurisdictions to follow suit. As most climate models indicate that some percentage of fossil fuels will have to remain untapped as an imperative for avoiding the worst impacts of climate change, why not start in California, a state committed to climate action? It might be hard to imagine that top oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran (or other U.S. states) would be so inspired, but perhaps places like Norway or Colorado might be more politically open to it. And if the oil industry in California phased out, its lobbying power might also wane, allowing the state to pursue more aggressive policies on the demand side.
I don’t think this applies to federal lands. And FWIW, I’m not a political writer, but from where I sit, wanting to be “more like California” is not likely to be a winning slogan in Colorado.
(4) Reducing supply: potentially enriching the “bad guys”. These include corporations and countries of questionable dependability or friendliness. This is generally thought of as an international security issue. Gas lines from the 70’s are fading from public memory, but older people remember.
The economic impacts of a phase-out for climate policy are also complicated. As Severin Borenstein at UC Berkeley Energy Institute at Haas blogged in 2018, a phase-out in California would mean slightly higher worldwide oil prices, which would in turn enrich the major oil producing companies and countries who are still providing supply. As he summarized:
One could think of this as similar to a very small worldwide carbon tax, except in this case the revenue is not rebated to the population as a whole or used to reduce other taxes, but rather handed to those who own and control the world’s oil production.
(5) Oil and gas wells don’t belong in close proximity to communities.
But there is one clear benefit from phasing out in-state oil and gas production in California: improved health and safety of surrounding communities. Scientists have linked drilling for oil and gas to numerous public health challenges, including increased rates of asthma, cancer, and other health threats. And much of the drilling in California occurs in or near residents of disadvantaged communities, adding to the urgency.Also
(Note: in Colorado this has been studied extensively, and the health impacts are not that straightforward. It’s also not clear how much in Colorado is near residents of disadvantaged communities. Also, if you switch from oil and gas rigs to wind turbines, there can be health impacts on neighbors as well, but more than likely, they are not the same neighbors.)
So if we read through all this, a person could come to the conclusion that oil and gas drilling should be kept away from communities. What place better, then, than federal lands?
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What I think Elkind may have missed.
(6) this piece doesn’t mention the impacts of California losing direct and indirect taxes and royalties from O&G production. Perhaps they are such a big, rich state it doesn’t matter. For example, New Mexico is the 50th poorest state (according to Wikipedia). The state gets half of federal O&G royalties. According to this handy BLM website that shows disbursements, New Mexico received $1,165,963,636 in 2019.
(7) Jobs I’m agnostic on how this will work out. The idea is for O&G workers to transition neatly into renewable energy jobs, but we don’t have any idea how that would work in practice. I’m willing to think it could be done (have the same number of the same-paying jobs), but it seems to me that this would depend on the job market and economy as a whole. On the other hand, O&G has always been a volatile industry, and in fact people are getting laid off now due to prices. In fact that’s how former Governor Hickenlooper (currently a Senate candidate) started out, as a petroleum geologist and the craft beer industry and Colorado would be poorer if he hadn’t transitioned. On the third hand, different people and different social classes may have different levels of resilience.
(8) Environmental pros and cons of getting it from elsewhere (as in, is their production more environmentally friendly, with regard to methane emissions or ??) other than the transportation-related emissions, which he did mention.
These are all very thoughtful arguments, so thank you Professor Elkind for rounding these up!
Colorado Senator Gardner (R) and Senator Manchin of WVA (D) were responsible for shepherding the recent LWCF bill through Congress and getting it signed by the President. Their efforts were greatly supported by the conservation community in general.
Here’s a link to the Forest Service LWCF page. I couldn’t get the map to work, and I’d be interested in whether others can.
Currently the push from organizations like the Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition is to get Congress to use all the funds (you can sign on to a letter).
It was a simple idea: use revenues from the depletion of one natural resource – offshore oil and gas – to support the conservation of another precious resource – our land and water. Every year, $900 million in royalties paid by energy companies drilling for oil and gas on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) are put into this fund. The money is intended to protect national parks, areas around rivers and lakes, national forests, and national wildlife refuges from development, and to provide matching grants for state and local parks and recreation projects. Over the years, LWCF has also grown and evolved to include grants to protect working forests, wildlife habitat, critical drinking water supplies and disappearing battlefields, as well as increased use of easements.
Yet, nearly every year, Congress breaks its own promise to the American people and diverts much of this funding to uses other than conserving our most important lands and waters.
Now as part of Senator Biden’s campaign, he pledged to “ban new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters” (from the WaPo compendium of positions). I wasn’t sure (1) that the OCS counts as public lands or waters or (2) perhaps the OCS is all leased anyway. Of course, I’m also not sure that “public” is the right word, as I’m not sure the Prez can legally dictate what happens on the land of other government entities.
I couldn’t find any info on this anywhere, and finally a kindly E&E reporter gave me this link to a story by E&E News reporter Kellie Lunney. I hope you can read the whole thing, but I’m not sure about the E&E paywall. Some excerpts:
It’s not an entirely new argument. Members of Congress from energy-producing states, including Louisiana, have pointed out over the years that oil and gas drilling revenues pay for a wide range of conservation and coastal restoration projects, including LWCF.
But it’s an argument that could end up gaining more traction than some more gimmicky attempts — such as that the Green New Deal will eliminate hamburgers and milkshakes — that opponents have used to mock the framework as unrealistic and foolish (E&E Daily, Feb. 28).
“Yeah, I think it’s a Catch-22,” said House Natural Resources Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) about the dependence of programs like LWCF on oil and gas revenues.
“The more we become dependent on that, the more the push is going to be to expand that, and I think we need to mitigate that.”
Grijalva helped craft the public lands package and push permanent LWCF reauthorization along with the panel’s top Republican, Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah.
The chairman said that other than straight-up appropriations for LWCF, there are “not too many” other funding mechanisms he could envision for the program if the offshore drilling revenue stream were to dry up.
But that’s why it’s important now to allocate more money to the fund than it has traditionally received, to “maximize its use” and start making the transition from offshore revenue-dependent funding, Grijalva said.
The authorized funding level for LWCF is $900 million, but it has hardly ever been funded at that level; its annual appropriations in recent years have typically been about half that.
There’s also GOMESA
The 2006 Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act (GOMESA), passed shortly after Hurricane Katrina, allows four Gulf Coast states — Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — to share 37.5 percent of oil and gas revenues produced in federal waters off their coasts to assist them with coastal restoration and storm protection.
It’s a critical program for the area, and one the region’s lawmakers fiercely defend.
Louisiana Rep. Garret Graves (R) has referred to the state’s coastal region as being the “goose laying the golden egg” for the federal government when it comes to LWCF, and possibly a trust fund of unallocated revenues to pay for the massive public lands and national parks maintenance backlog (E&E Daily, Nov. 13, 2018).
A portion of GOMESA revenues also helps fund LWCF. Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas generated $200 billion in offshore oil and gas revenue last year for the federal government.
What I got from all this is (1) in the short run, with Biden’s promise (and assuming Congress goes along with it) money will keep flowing in from current leases, (2) in the medium term, that funding would dry up and need to be replaced by another source of funding (renewable energy on federal land?) or to the general taxpayers (but that requires budget battles that they may not win). So perhaps we ought to think about replacement in terms of payments to the feds (and the state portion) for future wind and solar leases on federal land. It’s probably not too soon to start thinking about it.
(2) folks in Congress are actually working across the aisle (even possibly unlikely ones like Grijalva and Bishop!)
Jon made a comment yesterday that I think is worth exploring in detail. He said:
If this is just a compilation of existing data, that’s one thing. If this will be their basis for future planning, and they are saying they are going to ignore future climate change, it might be hard to argue that’s the best available science.
I’m sure that no one wants to “ignore climate science.” On the other hand, how exactly should specific pieces of climate science be applied to a decision? Who makes that call? In the past, when the topic was less adversarial (say reforestation practices), the National Forests hired experts who would make that determination and decide what Forests should do. Now, I’m sure it won’t surprise you that even with these less-charged kinds of decisions, there was sometimes disagreement between practitioners and researchers (as well as within each community). But most of the time these did not boil over into public spats as it was taken for granted that the authority to decide lay with the local technical expert. Researchers were content to publish, and practitioners were content to pick the best approaches based on experience. Many times FS researchers and National Forests worked closely together in what we might call today “co-design and coproduction”. Today, though, we have broader questions, with more disciplines involved, so that there may not be one “expert,” and the public wants to understand the scientific questions where they have policy relevance. Both of those changes present challenges.
As I’ve argued before, we don’t have a clue as to how microclimates perceived by trees will change due to climate change, and we also don’t know how those changes might affect living trees, nor do we know how those changes might affect their offspring. Remember, climate models as used for projecting future conditions have economics as an input. I think, reading the views of experts right now, they have no clue how much the Coronavirus may set back worldwide economies and emissions. If you run out this string of cumulative cluelessness about the future, it becomes a decision question for stakeholders and decisionmakers- we don’t know, so how should that uncertainty affect our decisions? We also don’t have a clue as to whether trade policies will let an invasive diseases or insects into the US which will decimate the ponderosa pines on the BH. The future, is indeed, unknown and uncertain. In fact, there are decision sciences that research how best to decide under conditions of uncertainty.
So, what to do about our cluelessness about future tree growth? I belong to what I might call the Pete Theisen school. He was the R-6 Regional Geneticist who said that additional growth due to tree improvement would come out in future measurements, so we shouldn’t try to model it in growth and yield models. Applying that to climate change, we would measure tree growth every ten years or so (or whatever the cycle is today) and incorporate that into future decisions. What we might call “monitoring the forest plan.” As we would then instances of insects, diseases, and fires.
But as Jon points out, we also have the question of what is the “best available science?”. We’d have to ask “who decides what is best? Based on what criteria?”. Peter Williams has spoken of the concept of “research utility.” I like that approach because it involves practitioners and stakeholders in determining whether a study is useful or relevant to the decisions that, at least on public lands, are essentially public decisions.
For me, the “best science” of tree growth in the Black Hills is what people have recently measured, knowing that it could change due to climate change or a variety of other factors, unknown, uncertain or unknowable.
This article summarizes some recent research on the topic:
Among Stevens-Rumann,’s work was a 2017 study of nearly 1,500 sites charred by 52 wildfires in the U.S. Rocky Mountains. Her research found that lower elevation trees had a tough time naturally regenerating in areas that burned between 2000 and 2015 compared with sites affected between 1985 and 1999, largely due to drier weather conditions.
More recently, a 2019 study written by her colleague Kerry Kemp found that both Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine seedlings in the Idaho’s Rocky Mountains — just south of B.C. — were also struggling in low-lying burned areas due to warmer temperatures, leading to lower tree densities.
Both studies attribute climate change to be the lead cause of why the trees are struggling to grow back in certain fire-scarred areas.
As a result, some ecosystems will no longer be able to support tree species. Instead they may convert to grasslands, she said.
We’ve talked about this before (for example, here). But I would like to know how this kind of information is being incorporated into long-term planning for timber harvest levels. In accordance with the requirement for sustainability on national forests, we should be assuming forest growth consistent with the natural range of variation, which should reflect the effects of climate change on future forests. What I would expect to be seeing based on this kind of research is reduced area suitable for timber production because it would become too dry, and reduced volume resulting from reduced density, slower growth rates and more frequent fires. “Sustained yield” means that projections of lower future timber yields may lead to reduced near-term volume. I’ve looked at the timber volume documentation for a few forest plan revisions, and I haven’t found anything there about climate change (there’s usually an unconnected section on the effects of climate change somewhere). (Projected timber harvest volumes are not tending to go down in revised forest plans.) Maybe that just requires digging deeper than the public-facing documents or maybe it’s not happening. Does anyone know more about this?