Sabelow Series in the Sacramento Bee. I. ‘We can’t just walk away.’ California’s wild places are under siege and dying:

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A sunrise over a flooded wheat field at Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge, the nation’s first federal sanctuary for waterfowl. RYAN SABALOW [email protected]
For those who aren’t familiar with NE California and Tulelake.

From Emily Dohlansky (many thanks!):

“The Sacramento Bee recently published a five-part series on Northeastern California that challenges the concept of “wild” places in the state. I found all of the articles fascinating and well-balanced. The one on wild horses garnered a lot of negative feedback from advocates, and wild horse management isn’t something that I see mentioned here often. I thought it would be interesting to have a discussion about the articles, their shortcomings, and a path forward in this “post-wild” world.”

I think each one is interesting enough to deserve a separate post, so let’s start with the first one:

WE’RE NOT GOING BACK TO THE STATE OF NATURE’
State and federal regulators and scientists, meanwhile, are largely paralyzed to do anything about any of it, thanks to a constantly growing array of regulatory demands that suck up their budgets and staff time. There is very little innovation in the public’s lands and wildlife management these days.

The threat of lawsuits from the competing interest groups makes restoring even a few acres of habitat a years-long process of expensive studies, planning and lawyering. Deviate one inch from a “management plan” that’s already been hashed out in the courts, the agency will almost certainly get sued again, or some politician loyal to a faction will come in and pass a law or change a rule to make the agency’s job even harder.

And the places I love are worse for it.

To try to save some of what’s left of these habitats, it will require a clear-eyed look at how we think about, fund and manage our lands and wildlife. It also will need to come with an acknowledgment from those living in major cities that these places aren’t truly “wild,” and they haven’t been for more than a century.

“We can’t just walk away,” former California Gov. Jerry Brown told me. “We’re not going back to the state of nature, but we should try to advance environmental goals, and at the same time we have to respect people, their livelihoods and their traditions. It’s a messy process.”

At their heart, these stories are about how the land-use decisions of the past have collided with divisive partisan politics, lack of funding, inattention and bureaucratic paralysis to create crises that are only going to get worse for both the ecosystems and the impoverished rural towns that make up my favorite corner of the state.

Merry Christmas from The Smokey Wire

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Members of the Colorado delegation watch as the lights are turned on the Capitol Christmas tree. “I thank the Colorado delegation and the people of Colorado for blessing our Capitol’s Christmas celebration with this magnificent Engelmann Spruse from the GMUG Forest,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Crowds greeted the Capitol Christmas Tree when it made a stop in Paonia.

I’d like to highlight this Colorado Public Radio story about the Capitol Christmas Tree which in 2020 is from the Grand Mesa Uncompahgre Gunnison (known as the GMUG) in western Colorado.

People’s attachment to the tree doesn’t at all surprise former Colorado Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell. The last two times the Capitol Christmas Tree came from his state, in 2000 and 2012, he was the one who drove it all the way to Washington.

“It’s quite an adventure,” Nighthorse Campbell said. When he first volunteered, he was the only senator with a commercial driver’s license.

Decades before, he drove trucks to pay for college, but he said it was still a challenge to navigate the small mountain roads and back up the giant vehicle “all the time.”

For the trip, everything was donated, from his own time to the fuel. On his first chauffeuring trip, the Forest Service even gave him and his crew fresh roadkill to grill, which he thought was delicious.

“How often can you eat elk steaks every night?” he recalled, with a laugh.

The thing that really sticks with Nighthorse Campbell were the crowds, and not just in the towns. Sometimes, far between communities, flocks of people were waiting, eager to get a glimpse of the tree.

“There would be 15 or 20 cars with a whole bunch of kids standing by the crossroads,” he said fondly.

For the GMUG Forest Service employees with the job of keeping the tree healthy during the trip to Washington, D.C., seeing people wave from highway overpasses was one of the highlights of the trip.

“Everything this nation has gone through in the last nine months, I think people are just looking for some positive things. And I think they came out and really wanted to enjoy the tree,” said Forest Service employee Clay Speas.

Thank you to the GMUG folks and a Merry Christmas to all!

Should Scientists be on Tap or on Top?: Financial Times Story on Covid Science

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Interior Secretary nominee Deb Haaland Tweeted this a few days ago

Let it be known:

Our Interior Department will fight to address climate change and environmental injustice.

We will empower communities who have shouldered the burdens of environmental negligence.

And we will ensure that our decisions will once again be driven by science. pic.twitter.com/bAY6LEykYg

— Deb Haaland (@DebHaalandNM) December 20, 2020

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There’s been discussion about Covid and the practical problems associated with deferring to scientists for policy decisions. In this piece in in the Financial Times by Jemima Kelly, we see some common themes from our forest policy world.

The Conditional and Contested Nature of Scientific Information

But scientists aren’t robots, every one of whose utterances must be treated as an absolute dispassionate truth; they are complicated, messy, biased humans like the rest of us.

The phrase “following the science” would perhaps be better expressed as “following the scientists”. Or, maybe (given that they don’t all agree) “following some scientists — particularly the ones whose views align with my own”. 

Even if its practitioners were able to leave their personal opinions, ambitions and prejudices aside, “the science” shouldn’t be thought of as static or complete — particularly when it comes to something as new and rapidly evolving as Covid-19. “Science works as an extremely human process of incremental and argumentative development,” says David Spiegelhalter, professor of public understanding of risk at Cambridge university. “All areas of science are contested, and that’s quite right, because there’s so much uncertainty.” 

*****
The Silverback Scientist Effect

It’s easy to see how this state of play has come about; we live in a society that rewards certainty, where whoever shouts their opinion loudest seems to get the most traction. “The ability to state strong opinions with total conviction is more highly valued than typical characteristics of scientists — the ability to study, think, and reach less certain but more useful conclusions,” says Martin Walker, a director at the Center for Evidence-Based Management. 

Many epidemiologists and other scientists have built up impressive social media followings during the pandemic, putting them firmly in “celebrity” territory. The more they opine self-assuredly on what government should be doing, the more their voices are amplified with likes, retweets and media coverage. 

When it turns out that confident statements of fact are actually just opinions, and when other scientists respond with opposing ones, it all starts to get rather confusing. Government messaging suddenly changes and the general public is expected to pretend we haven’t noticed. Trust in both politicians and scientists ebbs, leading to a situation in which potentially harmful conspiracy theories can thrive. 

“It is quite reasonable that scientists might have opinions, but . . . as soon as a scientist is recommending a particular action to be taken, they are stepping outside their scientific knowledge,” says Prof Spiegelhalter. “That should be . . . clearly distinguished from when they’re communicating their science.”

(This reminds me of a possibly apocryphal story about (Dr.) Tom Mills, former PNW Station Director at the Forest Service, who supposedly asked scientist authors to remove all the “shoulds” from an assessment document).

If You Ask Scientists From Different Disciplines, They May Have Different Perspectives

These acronyms seem fitting somehow — the sagacious epidemiological modellers telling us to remain shut up indoors, and the angry economists and psychologists shouting back: “You will cripple British businesses! You will cause misery!” 

Lord Blunkett is quite serious. “There needs to be a recovery group that is trying to take a much broader view than just a scientific and health perspective, critical as that is, incorporating advice on alternative damage to both people and societal well being,” he says, quoting a phrase often attributed to Britain’s wartime prime minister Winston Churchill: “‘Scientists should be on tap, but not on top’ — I agree with that.”

I too am with Churchill, and I wonder whether Haaland over-simplified the message (the medium of Tweeting is not great for complexity) or whether her beliefs are more nuanced. Hopefully, that will come up in the nomination hearings.

Here’s one of a similar, although more ideological, bent from Ross Douthat in the New York Times on Sunday.

Is There a Current Complete Forest Service Categorical Exclusion Crosswalk Somewhere?

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For us retired folks, it’s hard to keep up with new CE’s, and for the regulatory ones, litigation throwing them out. I ran across this handy table comparing the Farm Bill and Wildfire Resilience CEs. It says “draft” and didn’t come from the FS website. I know the Forest Service usually puts out good training material for NEPA practitioners, so I’m hoping that one that is complete for all vegetation-related CEs is out there somewhere.

Forest Service Enjoys Record Fire Year

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The Forest Service reports 2020 has been a record fire year, with more national forest acres burned (5 million) than at any time since 1910. This is 2.5 times the average of the last 10 years, a remarkable achievement given that fire ignitions in 2020 increased by only 5% compared to the 10-year average. 2020’s average size of 735 acres/fire dwarfs the decade’s second-highest at 422 acres/fire.

The Forest Service attributes its success to “prioritizing early suppression of wildfire ignitions.”

Climate Science Voyage of Discovery: Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage- From Pulpmill to IAMS to Saving the Planet

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A Kraft pulp mill in Sweden.

I’ve always been curious as to how forests are handled in climate modeling (to predict the future they have to assume many things, including land use). I wonder who is the “they” who decides what goes in, and what groups are consulted on these numbers. Here’s a history of the idea of BECCS from Carbon Brief that touches on one aspect of this- where BECCS came from and how it got included into the IAMS (integrated assessment models). The article also has sidebars for some of the technical terms which is handy.

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage – better known by the acronym “BECCS” – has come to be seen as one of the most viable and cost-effective negative emissions technologies.

Even though they have yet to be demonstrated at a commercial scale, negative emissions technologies – typically BECCS – are now included by climate scientists in the majority of modelled “pathways” showing how the world can avoid the internationally agreed limit of staying “well below” 2C of global warming since the pre-industrial era.

Put simply, without deploying BECCS at a global scale from mid-century onwards, most modellers think we will likely breach this limit by the end of this century.

But where did the idea for this “saviour” technology come from? Who came up with it? Who then developed and promoted the concept?

…

Möllersten says the first spark for the idea of BECCS came to him in 2000 when he was preparing to give a presentation at the 5th biannual Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies (GHGT) conference in Cairns, Australia. Working the idea through with Jinyue Yan, his PhD supervisor, Möllersten claims today that he “cannot remember the exact moment when we thought about this”, but he can recall the background:

“The way it started for me was when I started doing the work for my PhD. My focus was on looking at the pulp and paper industry as a very important industrial branch in the Swedish energy system. What measures could be taken to achieve cost effective emission reductions or CO2 emission reductions? Having worked on this topic for a while, looking at the most conventional measures, my professor and I noticed that there was a lot of work going on in this rather new and exciting area that was called “carbon capture and storage”. We also noticed that, as far as we could see, all that work was focused on emissions from fossil use. We simply decided to investigate what CCS could mean in the context of pulp and paper mills. When we did this work, we were looking at energy systems with a negative CO2 balance. For me, personally, it felt exciting to see that.”

And from the pulp mill study we get to..

But a key tipping point in the story of BECCS came when climate scientists started to increasingly include it in their modelling for sub-2C emissions pathway scenarios, often to the point that they grew reliant on it.

..

In little more than a decade, BECCS had gone from being a highly theoretical proposal for Sweden’s paper mills to earn carbon credits to being a key negative emissions technology underpinning the modelling, promoted by the IPCC, showing how the world could avoid dangerous climate change this century.

It’s interesting to me that an idea could become so important among modelers (whom we look to as experts on climate change) without ever having a stop for a reality check with folks who would have to carry it off.

BLM timber rule cuts protest time

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From Greenwire today:

BLM finalizes streamlined timber rule that cuts protest time

Excerpt:

The Trump administration continues to revise rules governing the management of forestlands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management in the name of reducing wildfire risks.

The latest is a finalized rule that will eliminate a 15-day protest period after decisions have been rendered for timber harvests, sales and other forest management projects.

“This discretionary protest process was largely duplicative of other opportunities for public involvement,” including opportunities for public comment mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act, according to an advance notice published in today’s Federal Register.

Appeals of BLM forest management decisions can still be filed with the Interior Board of Land Appeals.

 

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.