climate change

Wood Products, Bioenergy and Climate: Lippke et al. Study

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Here’s a link to the new paper Sustainable Biofuel Contributions to Carbon Mitigation and Energy Independence

Here’s the UW news release.

Proposals to remove the carbon dioxide caused by burning fossil fuel from the atmosphere include letting commercially managed forests grow longer between harvests or not cutting them at all.

An article (http://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/2/4/861/) published in the journal Forests says, however, that Pacific Northwest trees grown and harvested sustainably, such as every 45 years, can both remove existing carbon dioxide from the air and help keep the gas from entering the atmosphere in the first place. That’s provided wood is used primarily for such things as building materials instead of cement and steel – which require more fossil fuels in their manufacture – and secondarily that wood wastes are used for biofuels to displace the use of fossil fuels.

“When it comes to keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, it makes more sense to use trees to recycle as much carbon as we can and offset the burning of fossil fuel than it does to store carbon in standing forests and continuing burning fossil fuels,” said Bruce Lippke (http://www.cfr.washington.edu/SFRPublic/People/FacultyProfile.aspx?PID=11), University of Washington professor emeritus of forest resources. (http://www.cfr.washington.edu/)

Lippke is one of eight co-authors of the article in Forests. It is the first to comprehensively calculate using woody biomass for bioenergy in addition to using wood for long-lived products. The article focuses on the extra carbon savings that can be squeezed from harvesting trees if bioenergy is generated using wood not suitable for long-term building materials. Such wood can come from the branches and other debris left after harvesting, materials thinned from stands or from plantations of fast-growing trees like willow.

For the article, the co-authors looked at selected bioenergy scenarios using wood from the U.S. Pacific Northwest, Southeast and Northeast.

They considered two ways of producing ethanol from woody biomass – gasification and fermentation – and used what’s called life cycle analysis to tally all the environmental effects of gathering, processing and using the resulting fuels. Considering everything that goes into it and how it burns when used as fuel, the researchers found ethanol from woody biomass emits 70 percent to slightly more than 100 percent less greenhouse gases than producing and using the equivalent energy from gasoline.

Achieving slightly more than a 100 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is possible using fermentation during which ethanol is produced and enough electricity is generated to offset the fossil fuel used in the fermentation process.

In contrast, producing and using corn ethanol to displace gasoline reduces greenhouse gas emissions 22 percent on average, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s fact sheet (http://tinyurl.com/EPAFactSheetAltFuels) “Greenhouse Gas Impacts of Expanded Renewable and Alternative Fuels Use.”

While biofuels from woody biomass are carbon friendly, Lippke cautions that the U.S. should not use tax breaks or other incentives that inadvertently divert wood to bioenergy that is better used for long-lived building materials and furniture.

“Substituting wood for non-wood building materials can displace far more carbon emissions than using the wood for biofuel,” the article says. “This fact creates a hierarchy of wood uses that can provide the greatest carbon mitigation for each source of supply.”

Lippke said using wood for products and bioenergy can be considered carbon neutral because the carbon dioxide trees absorb while growing eventually goes back to the atmosphere when, for instance, wood rots after building demolition or cars burn ethanol made from woody debris. With sustainably managed forests, that carbon dioxide is then absorbed by the growing trees awaiting the next harvest.

The co-authors aren’t advocating that all forests be harvested, just the ones designated to help counter carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Older forests, for instance, provide ecological values even though they absorb less carbon dioxide as they age.

In the article the authors also urge policymakers and citizens to consider not just carbon mitigation but to also find ways to weigh the importance of energy independence from fossil fuels when considering how to use woody biomass for bioenergy.

“Simply burning woody biomass to generate heat or electricity makes sense for carbon mitigation, he says, but there’s no energy independence gained,” Lippke said.

Carbon efficiency is however only one part of the equation, the authors wrote. Transportation fuels depend heavily on imported oil and therefore biofuels that replace them make additional contributions to the domestic economy, including energy independence and rural economic development, the authors said.

Other co-authors are Richard Gustafson and Elaine Oneil with the UW, Richard Venditti with North Carolina State University, Timothy Volk with the State University of New York, Leonard Johnson with the University of Idaho, Maureen Puettmann of WoodLife Environmental Consultants and Phillip Steele with Mississippi State University.

The publication integrates findings across many previous reports generated by a consortium of 17 research institutions that have been involved in life cycle analysis of wood products for more than 15 years through the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials (http://www.corrim.org/), based at the UW. The recent biofuel life cycle research was funded with a grant from the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Products Laboratory.

Managing Forests Because Carbon Matters: Journal of Forestry Supplement

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Thanks to Terry Seyden for finding this; I’ve been carrying this special section around trying to find time to read it.

New Analysis of Carbon Accounting, Biomass Use, and Climate Benefits
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111109093852.htm

ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2011) — A recent report provides new ideas surrounding carbon and energy benefits forests and forest products provide. The report, Managing Forests Because Carbon Matters: Integrating Energy, Products, and Land Management Policy, summarizes and analyzes the most recent science regarding forests and carbon accounting, biomass use, and forest carbon offsets.
A team of researchers from the U.S. Forest Service, several universities, and natural resource and environmental organizations coauthored the report, which appears as a supplement to the October/November 2011 issue of the Society of American Forester’s Journal of Forestry.
” This work should help policymakers reconsider the critical impact forests have on our daily lives and the potential they have to solve problems that confront our Nation,” says Bob Malmsheimer, lead author of the report and a professor at State University of New York (Syracuse) College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “We believe our science-based findings should lead toward positive reforms that encourage investment in this vital renewable resource.”

The report suggests that U.S. environment and energy policies should be based on the following science findings:

Sustainably managed forests can provide carbon storage and substitution advantages while delivering a wide range of environmental and social benefits including timber and biomass resources, jobs, economic opportunities, clean water, wildlife habitat, and recreation.
Energy produced from forest biomass returns to the atmosphere carbon that plants absorbed in the relatively recent past; it essentially results in no net release of carbon as long as overall forest inventories are stable or increasing (as with U.S. forests).
Forest products used in place of energy-intensive materials such as metals, concrete, and plastics reduce carbon emissions (because forest products require less fossil fuel-based energy to produce and they also store carbon for a length of time based on their use and disposal), and they provide biomass residuals (i.e., waste wood) that can be substituted for fossil fuels to produce energy.
Fossil fuel-produced energy releases carbon into the atmosphere that has resided in the Earth for millions of years; forest biomass-based energy uses far less of the carbon stored in the Earth, thereby reducing the flow of fossil fuel-based carbon emissions to the atmosphere.

“Perhaps this report will inspire fresh efforts to find management strategies that folks can agree on,” says coauthor and Forest Service scientist Jeremy Fried. “The forest inventory and analysis data collected by the Forest Service on all forested lands in the U.S. provided the data necessary to explore how forests can be managed to provide climate benefits. Full life-cycle analyses of U.S. forests show that the best opportunity for these forests to provide even more climate benefits requires a combination of factors. Those factors are: sustainably managed forests, a healthy market for long-lived forest products, and renewable energy generated from forest and mill residues.”

The report emerged from the Society of American Foresters Task Force on Forest Climate Change Offsets and Use of Forest Biomass for Energy. Authors include Robert Malmsheimer, State University of New York (Syracuse) College of Environmental Science and Forestry; James Bowyer, Professor Emeritus of University of Minnesota; Jeremy Fried, U.S. Forest Service; Edmund Gee, U.S. Forest Service; Robert Izlar, University of Georgia; Reid Miner, National Council for Air and Stream Improvement; Ian Munn, Mississippi State University; Elaine Oneil, University of Washington; and William Stewart, University of California-Berkeley.

Read the paper online here.

Sarewitz on “Consensus Science”

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This piece is reposted from Roger Pielke’s blog here. Note from Sharon: we have been discussing collaborating in terms of developing agreements about what action to take; I see a clear distinction between their use in policy (getting groups together to decide or recommend an approach or action) and in science (getting groups together to determine the current scientific thinking).

The below post by Roger, describing some of the ideas in Dan Sarewitz’s piece in Nature, deals with the latter. I don’t think we do much in terms of this in the world of public land management, which may be a good thing. Also note a comment here on Roger’s blog by Andy Stahl about consensus policy; some think that committees are places where good ideas go to die.

Writing in Nature this week, Dan Sarewitz reflects on his recent participation on the BPC Geoengineering Climate Remediation task force and why efforts to achieve consensus in science may leave out some of the most important aspects of science. Here is an excerpt:

The very idea that science best expresses its authority through consensus statements is at odds with a vibrant scientific enterprise. Consensus is for textbooks; real science depends for its progress on continual challenges to the current state of always-imperfect knowledge. Science would provide better value to politics if it articulated the broadest set of plausible interpretations, options and perspectives, imagined by the best experts, rather than forcing convergence to an allegedly unified voice.

Yet, as anyone who has served on a consensus committee knows, much of what is most interesting about a subject gets left out of the final report. For months, our geoengineering group argued about almost every issue conceivably related to establishing a research programme. Many ideas failed to make the report — not because they were wrong or unimportant, but because they didn’t attract a political constituency in the group that was strong enough to keep them in. The commitment to consensus therefore comes at a high price: the elimination of proposals and alternatives that might be valuable for decision-makers dealing with complex problems.

Some consensus reports do include dissenting views, but these are usually relegated to a section at the back of the report, as if regretfully announcing the marginalized views of one or two malcontents. Science might instead borrow a lesson from the legal system. When the US Supreme Court issues a split decision, it presents dissenting opinions with as much force and rigour as the majority position. Judges vote openly and sign their opinions, so it is clear who believes what, and why — a transparency absent from expert consensus documents. Unlike a pallid consensus, a vigorous disagreement between experts would provide decision-makers with well-reasoned alternatives that inform and enrich discussions as a controversy evolves, keeping ideas in play and options open.

Not surprisingly, Dan and I have come to similar conclusions on this subject. Back in 2001 in Nature I wrote (PDF):

[E]fforts to reduce uncertainty via ‘consensus science’ — such as scientific assessments — are misplaced. Consensus science can provide only an illusion of certainty. When consensus is substituted for a diversity of perspectives, it may in fact unnecessarily constrain decision-makers’ options. Take for example weather forecasters, who are learning that the value to society of their forecasts is enhanced when decision-makers are provided with predictions in probabilistic rather than categorical fashion and decisions are made in full view of uncertainty.

As a general principle, science and technology will contribute more effectively to society’ needs when decision-makers base their expectations on a full distribution of outcomes, and then make choices in the face of the resulting — perhaps considerable — uncertainty.

In addition to leaving behind much of the interesting aspects of science, in my experience, the purpose of developing a “consensus” is to to quash dissent and end debate. Is it any wonder that policy discussions in the face of such a perspective are a dialogue of the like minded? In contrast, as Sarewitz writes, “a vigorous disagreement between experts would provide decision-makers with well-reasoned alternatives that inform and enrich discussions as a controversy evolves, keeping ideas in play and options open.”

NY Times on “Forests are Dying” and Carbon

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Thanks to Marek Smith for this piece on carbon and forests.
Here’s more on “forests are dying”.
It’s worth reading the whole thing, plus some of the sidebars. I just quoted the part here on our favorite topic, fires’n’bugs.

Wildfires and Bugs

Stripping the bark of a tree with a hatchet, Diana L. Six, a University of Montana insect scientist, pointed out the telltale signs of infestation by pine beetles: channels drilled by the creatures as they chewed their way through the juicy part of the tree.

The tree she was pointing out was already dead. Its needles, which should have been deep green, displayed the sickly red that has become so commonplace in the mountainous West. Because the beetles had cut off the tree’s nutrients, the chlorophyll that made the needles green was breaking down, leaving only reddish compounds.

Pine beetles are a natural part of the life cycle in Western forests, but this outbreak, under way for more than a decade in some areas, is by far the most extensive ever recorded. Scientists say winter temperatures used to fall to 40 degrees below zero in the mountains every few years, killing off many beetles. “It just doesn’t happen anymore,” said a leading climate scientist from the University of Montana, Steven W. Running, who was surveying the scene with Dr. Six one recent day.

As the climate has warmed, various beetle species have marauded across the landscape, from Arizona to Alaska. The situation is worst in British Columbia, which has lost millions of trees across an area the size of Wisconsin.

The species Dr. Six was pointing out, the mountain pine beetle, has pushed farther north into Canada than ever recorded. The beetles have jumped the Rocky Mountains into Alberta, and fears are rising that they could spread across the continent as temperatures rise in coming decades. Standing on a mountain plateau south of Missoula, Dr. Six and Dr. Running pointed to the devastation the beetles had wrought in the forest around them, consisting of a high-elevation species called whitebark pine.

“We were going to try to do like an eight-year study up here. But within three years, all this has happened,” Dr. Six said sadly.

“It’s game over,” Dr. Running said.

Later, flying in a small plane over the Montana wilderness, Dr. Running said beetles were not the only problem confronting the forests of the West.

Warmer temperatures are causing mountain snowpack, on which so much of the life in the region depends, to melt earlier in most years, he said. That is causing more severe water deficits in the summer, just as the higher temperatures cause trees to need extra water to survive. The whole landscape dries out, creating the conditions for intense fires. Even if the landscape does not burn, the trees become so stressed they are easy prey for beetles.

From the plane, Dr. Running pointed out huge scars where fires had destroyed stands of trees in recent years. “Nothing can stop the wildfires when they get to this magnitude,” he said. Some of the fire scars stood adjacent to stands of lodgepole pine destroyed by beetles.

At the moment, the most severe problems in the nation’s forests are being seen in the Southwestern United States, in states like Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The region has been so dry that huge, explosive fires consumed millions of acres of vegetation and thousands of homes and other buildings this summer.

This year’s drought came against the background of an overall warming and drying of the Southwestern climate, which scientists say helps to explain the severe effects. But the role of climate change in causing the drought itself is unclear — the more immediate cause is an intermittent weather pattern called La Niña, and research is still under way on whether that cycle is being altered or intensified by global warming, as some researchers suspect. Because of the continuing climatic change, experts say some areas that are burning this year may never return as forest — they are more likely to grow back as heat-tolerant grass or shrub lands, storing far less carbon than the forests they replace.

“A lot of ecologists like me are starting to think all these agents, like insects and fires, are just the proximate cause, and the real culprit is water stress caused by climate change,” said Robert L. Crabtree, head of a center studying the Yellowstone region. “It doesn’t really matter what kills the trees — they’re on their way out. The big question is, Are they going to regrow? If they don’t, we could very well catastrophically lose our forests.”

A couple of thoughts..

It’s interesting to me that people are predicting that trees are “on their way out”. I wonder specifically what evidence is there for this? I wonder about what I call the “pontification to data ratio” of some of these observations.

It’s also interesting when people use the term “devastation” to describe mountain pine beetle killed forests. Because “natural” cycles vs. “climate change induced” cycles look exactly the same (acres of dead trees).

Unprecedented Change vs. Inferring From History: Bark Beetles and Fire

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Thanks to Matthew Koehler for sending this piece on one of our favorite topics, beetles and fire by Kulakowski and Jarvis. This is a great article to discuss, to talk about why different people might think this is or isn’t relevant to current policy issues (and which ones and why). Also bbs and fire is one of our favorite things to discuss on this blog.

Here’s the abstract with my comments in italics.

“Outbreaks of bark beetles and drought both lead to concerns about increased fire risk, but the relative importance of these two factors is the subject of much debate.

I would argue, not really in practice, only in academia. In reality, drought beetles and age of trees are hopelessly intertwined. And not to be pedantic but it’s not about risk of fires, it’s about “different fire behavior (due to dry trees) with more possible negative impacts to people and soil.”

We examined how mountain pine beetle (MPB) outbreaks and drought have contributed to the fire regime of lodgepole pine forests in northwestern Colorado and adjacent areas of southern Wyoming over the past century. We used dendroecological methods to reconstruct the pre-fire history of MPB outbreaks in twenty lodgepole pine stands that had burned between 1939 and 2006 and in 20 nearby lodgepole pine stands that were otherwise similar but that had not burned. Our data represent c. 80% of all large fires that had occurred in lodgepole pine forests in this study area over the past century. We also compared Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI)
and actual evapotranspiration (AET) values between fire years and non-fire years.

To me, you gotta pick a lane here. Either we are saying that current and future climate conditions are “unprecedented” and are affecting things (which I believe, whether caused by GHG’s or other factors), OR information from 1939 to 2006 can be used to make claims about what is true in nature today.

Burned stands were no more likely to have been affected by outbreak prior to fires than were nearby unburned stands. However, PDSI and AET values were both lower during fire years than during non-fire years. This work indicates that climate has been more important than outbreaks to the fire regime of lodgepole pine forests in this
region over the past century.

I will leave to the climate scientists if a particular drought is really “climate”- I always find that confusing. I don’t think anyone would be surprised to know that more fires occur under drought conditions, if that’s what this is saying.

Indeed, we found no detectable increase in the occurrence of high-severity fires following MPB outbreaks. Dry conditions, rather than changes in fuels associated with outbreaks,appear to be most limiting to the occurrence of severe fires in these forests.

But like I said, it’s not really about “occurrence in the past”. We can go out on the ground and see dried forests due to pine beetles or other reasons, and see that they have different fire behavior, and we can see impacts of high intensity fires with or without bark beetles. I just don’t get the link between this study and any policy issue today, and maybe the authors are not claiming that.

Association for Fire Ecology Paper on Carbon and Fire

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Foto submitted this as a comment, but I think it’s worth starting another post just on the report. What Foto said was …

“Here is the best, most balanced position paper on carbon sequestration and fire ecology I could find. While I don’t agree with every detail put forth in this position paper, I do see that site specificity is key to each micro-situation.

The paper seems to address all our forest issues without that annoying partisan politics so pervasive in other documents. Also, the paper doesn’t seem to be one of those “stand alone” write-ups that ignore other forest issues to ram home preservationist talking points. All too often, preservationist position papers make impossible comparisons while ignoring or discounting likely long term scenarios affecting public safety, natural resources and local ecosystem values.”

If you’d like to learn more about the AFE, here is a link to their website. Looks like they are having an interesting conference in November (info here).

When I read the paper, I thought something along the lines of “let’s not overthink this. We need to protect structures and communities, and fires will burn so we need to deal with different ways of managing vegetation in consideration of that fact. This is difficult (and expensive!) enough without thinking that concerns over carbon are somehow going to force us to do something drastically different. There is just not enough decision space to do much differently from a practical point of view.”

What do you think?

NEPA, Climate Change, and Science-Denial

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In 2009, The Forest Service issued guidance for “Climate Change Considerations in Project Level NEPA Analysis”. The document states that “As with any environmental impact, GHG emissions and carbon cycling should be considered in proportion to the nature and scope of the Federal action in question and its potential to either affect emissions or be affected by climate change impacts.”

This week the State Department issued the final environmental impact statement for the controversial Keystone tar sands oil pipeline project. According to Shawn Lawrence Otto of the Huffington Post The environmental impact statement doesn’t mention the words “climate change.” This despite the fact that the project taps North America’ biggest pool of carbon.

I’m looking forward to reading Otto’s new book “Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. A gripping analysis of America’s anti-science crisis.” It ought to be more interesting than the Keystone EIS and might help me understand why that document never mentions climate change.

Wildfires and Soil Carbon- Grasslands Study

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I had thought I had reposted this from Bob Berwyn’s blog here but couldn’t find it- the last two weeks have been a blur..

Climate-fire feedback loop likely to accelerate global warming

Wildfires can spur increased releases of nitrous oxide from the soil, adding significantly to greenhouse gas concentrations.

By Summit Voice

SUMMIT COUNTY — An accidental grassfire during a series of climate change experiments showed that increased nitrogen deposits in soils, combined with wildfires, can significantly increase the release of nitrous oxide from the soil, which in turn can accelerate global warming.

“Soils are the major source of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere,” said Jamie Brown, graduate student in biological sciences at Northern Arizona University and co-author of the study. “So increased soil emissions of nitrous oxide will accelerate global warming.”

Brown worked with colleagues from NAU, Stanford University, the University of Paris and the University of Lyon. The study used an experimental grassland at Stanford, where researchers exposed the grassland to simulated environmental changes — heat, extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, more rain, more nitrogen deposition, and, when part of the experiment accidentally burned, wildfire.

The study is significant because it measured the impact of several factors simultaneously, unlike previous studies that examined the impact of one element at a time.

“Alone, the treatments had little influence on nitrous oxide emissions, but what was really surprising was the interaction with wildfire, causing a huge burst of nitrous oxide production,” said NAU professor Bruce Hungate, Brown’s thesis adviser and co-author on the study.

Nitrous oxide is a potent greenhouse gas, Hungate explained. In some parts of the world, like the western United States, wildfires also are becoming more frequent and more intense.

“Increasing wildfire frequency and the changing climate could cause these soil micro-organisms to release more nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming,” Brown said.

The experiment examined the complexity to simulate a realistic situation, where all factors are changing together. “The design is complex, with each treatment by itself in every possible combination with the other treatments,” Brown said.

With such a complex design, researchers can see if the effects of two or more global changes together can be predicted from their effects in isolation.

Coal Mine Methane- Colorado Voices II

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A methane drainage well

There are many compelling public lands issues not related to vegetation treatments. This is a small contribution to increasing public knowledge of some of these.

Remember Ed Quillen in his op-ed Maximum Trashing Utilization, here, described the coal mine methane issue this way…

here has been some progress on the regulatory front. Back in 2008, High Country News carried a story about methane escaping from Western coal mines. Methane is a flammable gas (it and its close chemical relative ethane are the major components of natural gas) that is given off by coal as it decomposes underground.
Since methane is flammable and sometimes explosive, mine safety requires venting it away from the working area.
Logically, this methane should be burned in a productive way. Unburned methane is more than 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as the carbon dioxide produced by combustion. Plus, there’s the energy from burning it, which could be used to heat homes or generate electricity.
But certain regulatory policies for coal mines on federal land prevented the methane from being put to public use. Essentially, the mining companies had the right to use the coal, but not the methane. For safety reasons, they have to vent it — but they couldn’t put it to work.
That’s changed recently, at least on a case-by-case basis. The Interior Department now allows the capture and sale of methane. But is it economical to do so when the methane is diffuse and the nearest pipeline might lie miles away?
“We’ve tried to look at it every way in the world. If it were economic to do, we would already be doing it. It would add to our income.” That’s what James Cooper, president of Oxbow Mining, which operates the Elk Creek Mine in western Colorado, told a Grand Junction business journal.

Cap-and-trade legislation might change the economics by paying the coal company to capture methane. It’s unlikely to be enacted in the current political climate, but again, if some subsidies are required to get MTU, there are certainly worse ways to spend public money.

Here’s Ted Zukoski from Earthjustice on flowers, coal and methane (“Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth, and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment.”).

With hot summers hitting the high country in the Rockies hard, one would wish the agencies that manage many of the mountain meadows – the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management – would be doing something about climate change.
To the contrary. BLM recently proudly approved a new coal mine expansion on Colorado’s West Slope, enabling the Elk Creek Mine to vent untreated more than 5-million-cubic-feet of methane pollution into the atmosphere every day. BLM refused to even take a hard look at alternatives to require the mine to capture the methane or reduce its climate change impact. This unnecessary methane pollution will have the warming impact of 1 million tons of carbon dioxide over a year – about the same as a small coal-fired power-plant.

Ted also makes some comments on Colorado roadless and coal, which I’ll discuss in a later post.

In my view, BLM did take a pretty good look, check it out for yourself here. But ultimately more pages of analysis are not going to change the fact that it’s not economic to do it, and that’s what the regulations are based on. The BLM regulations were designed for methane to be a gas that has economic value. If, instead, methane from coal mines were regulated as a pollutant, mines could simply be required to capture it. We don’t need cap and trade or any fancy mechanism to do this. It could be as simple as legislation to require capture of methane from coal mines on federal land.

But one thing I know is that many people could write paragraphs pages or books on the environmental impacts; virtual roomfuls of attorneys could have lengthy and expensive conversations (and have had) but that won’t solve the regulatory problem. In my opinion, joint efforts toward a surgical piece of legislation would probably be much more productive for the environment than more analysis and roomfuls of folks jawing or writing.

Ed Quillen brought up subsidies, I suggested legislation. A group of environmental lawyers are litigating (predictably). Would there be less methane in the air today if all had worked together on identifying and pushing one policy solution?

Guest Post from Foto

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Thanks to Foto for this post and these photos.

Two years after the Park Service burned up 16,000 acres (trying to burn only 95 acres during near-record heat) of Yosemite National Park and spending $17,000,000, this is what has grown back. What used to be majestic old growth pines that has survived countless pre-historic fires, is now lupines and deerbrush, with no conifers and few oaks. These pictures shows that deerbrush will dominate the next several decades, if not an entire century. There simply is no seed source for pines to get re-established. The Park Service fire folks still arrogantly cling to the idea that prescribed fires during the heat of the summer is the way to go.

The Forest Service fire folks seem to also think they can “re-introduce” fire into fuels-choked forests without pre-treating fuels with thinning and selective logging. The Yosemite picture shows the future of our ponderosa pine forests, if we exclude commercial fuels projects. How long can we continue to embrace whatever grows back from catastrophic wildfires?


Note from Sharon- I think most people agree that trees sequester more carbon that shrubs.. therefore conceivably the sooner you start ’em growing again, the better for the environment. Just another example of how climate change forces us to question that concept “”natural” is best.”