Democratic Primary Candidates (2020) on Federal Lands Issues

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This post is intended to start an information source and discussion on where Democratic primary candidates stand on federal lands issues. The WaPo has a very useful section called “Where Democrats Stand”. Most of the time, federal lands issues would probably not show up, but the WaPo did ask a question “would you end leasing for fossil fuel extraction on federal lands?” Here’s the link. If others can find a handy place where candidates’ other federal lands policy positions can be found, or add to the WaPo findings, please post in the comments. Note: I believe that we can talk about candidates’ positions without saying mean things abouot them or each other.

BACKGROUND A significant amount of the nation’s fossil fuel production happens on federal lands and waters — 42 percent of coal, 24 percent of crude oil and 13 percent of natural gas in 2017. The extraction and combustion of these fuels accounted for nearly a quarter of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions between 2005 and 2014, according to a study from the U.S. Geological Survey study. The Keep It In the Ground Act by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) would end new federal leases for fossil fuel extraction on federal lands and waters. The Obama administration issued a moratorium on coal leasing in 2016, but it was reversed by the Trump administration, an action that has led to an ongoing legal battle.

Note that Senator Bennet, the only candidate from a state with substantial federal lands, did not respond. I did not check the WaPo’s figures, but they seem consistent with this CRS report.

The argument seems to be that if we didn’t produce that coal, oil, and gas on federal land, the GHG’s would not be emitted. It seems to me that experience has shown that we would substitute from private land or import. Perhaps that would lead to increased prices (reduced supply) and therefore the amount of GHG’s emitted would thereby be reduced. However, the need to raise prices for essential heat, electricity and transportation fuel (having the pain felt by those with least discretionary income) to reduce demand doesn’t seem like big vote-getter, so it’s not clear to me exactly what the logic path is.

Biden says “banning new oil and gas permitting” but perhaps not coal? Not clear.
Bloomberg says “I will immediately end all new fossil fuel leases on federal land.”
Buttigieg “supports” ending new leases for fossil fuel extraction. Perhaps this is more realistic than “immediately ending” an activity that is provided for in statute.
Gabbard says “end the leasing of fossil fuel extraction on federal lands and watere.”
Klobuchar and Patrick also “support ending new leases.”
Sanders wants to keep everything in the ground, which includes federal lands.
Tom Steyer says “Keep publicly-owned oil, coal, and gas in the ground by stopping the expansion of fossil fuel leases and establishing a careful process to wind down federal onshore and offshore fossil fuel production.” This sounds a little different than just having new leases, but not sure. Also not sure you need a “careful process” to wind it down if you stop issuing leases.
Warren says “As president, I would issue an executive order on day one banning all new fossil fuel leases, including for drilling or fracking offshore and on public lands.”
Yang supports ending leasing for fossil fuel extraction on federal lands, his campaign told The Post.

Two candidates responded with specific goals for federal lands and renewable energy:
Bloomberg includes “expedite clean energy development in federal lands along with offshore wind.”
Warren pledges “to generate 10% of our overall electricity needs from renewable sources offshore or on public lands.”

Of course, ramping up clean energy on federal lands comes with environmental concerns as well.

There’s also a link to a fracking ban here. Here the candidates are more diverse. Perhaps Bennet has the most nuanced “I believe natural gas has a role to play” in transitioning to net-zero emissions “as long as it is developed in a way that protects the health of our communities” and Klobuchar, perhaps, the oddest “So as president in my first 100 days, I will review every fracking permit there is and decide which ones should be allowed to be continued and which ones are too dangerous.”

Climate Science Voyage of Discovery IV: Post Normal Science- An Introduction

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Post-normal science is an idea that we seldom talk about in the forest-related sciences.

The graph above shows the basic concepts, and there is a fairly explanatory Wikipedia review here. There is also a very active PNS academic community. Sometimes it’s hard to wade through the academic-ese, but if you can look through that, there are some ideas that may be helpful in the interface between science and policy.

When I worked at the Forest Service in Research and Development, I remember many discussions with the person in my group assigned to “science and management.” His model was basically what I call the “briefcase under the bridge” model..scientists come up with what the problems are, what disciplines are involved, and how the research is to be done. They get answers for what (in this case, National Forest folks) should do, and leave it under the bridge. If National Forest folks pick up the briefcase and don’t use everything, perhaps because they disagree with what the problems are or any of the other decisions, they are accused of “not following the science.” In retrospect, perhaps I should have invited some PNS experts to give seminars.

A summary of papers from the 2014 and 2015 PNS meetings can be found here.
In fact, there is a conference (PNS5) this year in Florence, Italy, for those interested in getting a taste for current research in the area. Registration is only 50 Euros for non-academics and other interested people.

The below is from a description of a paper in that collection by Konig, Borsen and Emmeche.

The ethos of Post-normal science”, gives an overview of important concepts of PNS, and investigates the norms and values of PNS through a structured literature review. The authors refer to Funtowicz and Ravetz’s (1993, 2008) development of PNS from the mid-1980s onwards, and describe the conditions characterizing a post-normal situation: Irreducible complexity, deep uncertainties, multiple legitimate perspectives, value dissent, high stakes, and urgency of decision-making. PNS seeks to cope with such situations through extended peer communities encompassing broader notions of knowledge, uncertainty management, and acknowledgement and management of multiple valid perspectives. Unlike normal science, the goal is not to attain certain knowledge. The goal of PNS is quality, a more robust ‘science for policy’. Inspired by the legacy of the Mertonian norms of CUDOS (Communalism, Universalism, Disinterestedness, and Organized Skepticism), the authors point to how politicization of science renders Merton’s norms invalid. Through their analysis of 33 norms and values found in 397 PNS-related documents, they identify an ethos for PNS which they denominate TRUST (Transparency, Robustness, Uncertainty management, Sustainability, and Transdisciplinarity), considered as a nexus for reflexivity practices. They propose that the public trust in science advice can be restored through the PNS ethos.

And a paper by Scott Bremer “Have we given up too much? On yielding climate representation to experts.” Here’s the abstract:

Our representations of climate are changing, and with them the ways we claim to know our local climates, and live according to them. Amidst this destabilising change in natural and social orders, scientific representations of climate are emerging as dominant. In this perspective piece I start from post-normal science and offer two arguments against completely yielding climate representation to experts, illustrated by my experiences in northeast Bangladesh. Descriptively, abandoning non-scientific representations and knowledge of climate results in a smaller and more fragile knowledge base for adaptation. Normatively, it is our common enterprise to rediscover the places we inhabit; it is not the responsibility of the expert community alone to reinterpret our places under a changing climate. Looking at the co-existence of modern and pre-modern representations of climate in Bangladesh, I suggest that post-normal science approaches may help bridge these different representations, with equal attention to their quality for adaptation, and the values and meanings underpinning them

(my bold).

Perhaps The Smokey Wire sometimes behaves like the “extended peer community” envisioned in the PNS literature. I’m bringing up this literature because many folks claim that climate change is the poster child of a problem that requires PNS concepts and practices, and we’ll be looking more deeply into that as the Voyage continues.

Trump Administration takes on BLM planning

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An internal BLM document (linked below) may be the first step in revising the agency’s planning regulations (Planning 3.0?).  The proposal to remove NEPA requirements for land management plans is getting some attention.

The BLM may propose a land use planning rule that will “remove NEPA requirements from the planning regulations,” referring to the National Environmental Policy Act, according to the document on possible changes to such rules that was shared with states and former BLM officials.

The U.S. Forest Service similarly attempted to exempt national forest plans from NEPA during the George W. Bush administration, but a federal court struck down that effort in Citizens for Better Forestry v. USDA in 2007 because it violated NEPA and other federal laws.

“If the BLM proceed with this proposal, it will certainly be challenged, and I suspect that, like the FS [Forest Service], the BLM will lose,” Mark Squillace, a natural resources law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said.

But it looks good to try, I guess. Current BLM regulations require an EIS for its plans, and the Forest Service explicitly required an EIS for forest plan revisions in its 2012 Planning Rule after its earlier rules were struck down for trying to avoid NEPA compliance.  This effort by BLM is in addition to the recent proposed changes in the CEQ NEPA regulations discussed here.

Here’s a little background on BLM planning requirements:

Dec. 12, 2016 BLM publishes its Planning 2.0 Rule, which updates land use planning procedures.

Feb. 7, 2017 The House of Representatives passes a resolution to repeal the rule under the Congressional Review Act (CRA).

March 7, 2017 The Senate passes a resolution to repeal the rule under the CRA.

March 28, 2017 President Trump signs the resolution disapproving the rule. Under the CRA, BLM may not promulgate a rule that is “substantially the same.”

(Maybe we’ll get to see lawsuits about what “substantially the same” means.)

January 2020 Litigation, Part 1

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Court decision:  The 9th Circuit held that the Olympic National Forest decision to grant a special use permit to the Navy for electronic warfare training was consistent with the forest plan, after allowing documents outside of the administrative record that showed they had considered the availability of private land.

Court decision:  The 9th Circuit upheld the Lostine Project on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest.  The use of a categorical exclusion was proper under HFRA, the project met its requirements for collaboration, and it was consistent with the forest plan.  (The court did not review the facts of the case, but they were discussed here.)

  • Oil & gas fracking

New lawsuit:  The State of California and several environmental groups have filed lawsuits against a BLM decision that removed a moratorium on fracking on lands in central California, including some adjacent to national forests.  (The second link includes a map.)

New lawsuit:  Environmental groups have challenged  EPA’s failure to complete plans to address smog related to fracking in 11 states.  “Sensitive tree species at risk from ozone pollution include black cherry, quaking aspen, cottonwood and ponderosa pine, which provides critical habitat for threatened species such as the Mexican spotted owl and Pawnee montane skipper.”

Settlement implementation:  The U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service has formally announced a 5-year review of the status of grizzly bears, as agreed to in a partial settlement of litigation mentioned here.  This is part of a lawsuit which “ultimately aims to build a plan to eventually bring grizzly bears to more places, including the Sierra Nevada” according to this article.

Notice of Intent:  The Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Yellowstone to Uintas Connection sent a required 60-day notice to sue to the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  They argue that 18 miles of pipeline on national forest land may affect grizzly bears and other listed species.  The application of the Idaho Roadless Rule is also involved.

Update:  The D. C. Court of Appeals heard arguments in a lawsuit filed by Solenex LLC to reverse its lease cancellation on the Lewis and Clark National Forest.  Environmental groups and the Blackfeet Nation have appealed on the side of the government.

Update:  The Quiet Title Act claim was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction because there is insufficient evidence that the Forest Service has asserted ownership in plaintiff’s land adjacent to the Sawtooth National Recreation Area as part of constructing a trail on an easement across plaintiff’s land.  (Other claims remain pending.)

 

 

Yale: Can Wood Construction Transform Cities From Carbon Source to Carbon Vault?

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From Yale University:

Can Wood Construction Transform Cities From Carbon Source to Carbon Vault?

A new Yale study predicts that a transition to timber-based wood products in the construction of new housing, buildings, and infrastructure would not only offset enormous amounts of carbon emissions related to concrete and steel production — it could turn the world’s cities into a vast carbon sink.

Excerpt:

Writing in the journal Nature Sustainability, a multidisciplinary team of researchers and architects predicts that designing mid-rise urban buildings with engineered timber — rather than relying mainly on carbon-intensive materials — has the potential to create a vast “bank vault” that can store within these buildings 10 to 68 million tons of carbon annually that might otherwise be released into the atmosphere. 
 
Simultaneously, society would drastically reduce carbon emissions associated with the construction sector, said Galina Churkina, who led the collaborative research while she was a visiting fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES). 
 
“Since the beginning of the industrial revolution we have been releasing into the atmosphere all of this carbon that had been stored in forests and in the ground,” said Churkina, who is a senior scientist at PIK. “We wanted to show that there can be a vision for returning much of this carbon back into the land.”
 
Beyond that, achieving a large-scale wood-based construction sector has the potential to create a new “symbiotic relationship” between natural systems and cities, said Alan Organschi, another author, from the Yale School of Architecture and Gray Organschi Architecture in New Haven.
 
“The city would become a carbon sink rather than a carbon source,” he said. “We would essentially be storing the carbon that would otherwise be combusted for energy or aerobically digested on the forest floor and allowing the forest to ‘continue’ in this restorative, carbon-absorbing system.” 
 
Other authors include Barbara Reck, a senior research scientist and industrial ecologist at F&ES, Thomas Graedel, professor emeritus of industrial ecology at F&ES, as well as researchers from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Tsinghua University’s Department of Earth Systems Science, and Gray Organschi Architecture’s Timber City Research Initiative.

The abstract to the paper ($) summarized in the Yale article:

Abstract
The anticipated growth and urbanization of the global population over the next several decades will create a vast demand for the construction of new housing, commercial buildings and accompanying infrastructure. The production of cement, steel and other building materials associated with this wave of construction will become a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Might it be possible to transform this potential threat to the global climate system into a powerful means to mitigate climate change? To answer this provocative question, we explore the potential of mid-rise urban buildings designed with engineered timber to provide long-term storage of carbon and to avoid the carbon-intensive production of mineral-based construction materials.

 

Mid-Rise Urban Buildings and CLT_ Carbon “Bank Vault”? New Yale/PIK Study

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mjostarnet building in Norway
Here’s a link to a new study by some folks at Yale and PIK on the potential for mass timber to sequester carbon.

The steady rise of the world’s urban population will drive an immense demand for new housing, commercial buildings, and other infrastructure across the planet by midcentury. This building boom will likely escalate global carbon emissions to dangerous levels and intensify climate change — particularly if it relies on traditional materials such as concrete and steel.

But if society is able to use more wood-based products to meet this building demand, this urban growth might actually present an opportunity to mitigate climate change, according to a new paper led by researchers at Yale and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Writing in the journal Nature Sustainability, a multidisciplinary team of researchers and architects predicts that designing mid-rise urban buildings with engineered timber — rather than relying mainly on carbon-intensive materials — has the potential to create a vast “bank vault” that can store within these buildings 10 to 68 million tons of carbon annually that might otherwise be released into the atmosphere.

Simultaneously, society would drastically reduce carbon emissions associated with the construction sector, said Galina Churkina, who led the collaborative research while she was a visiting fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES).

“Since the beginning of the industrial revolution we have been releasing into the atmosphere all of this carbon that had been stored in forests and in the ground,” said Churkina, who is a senior scientist at PIK. “We wanted to show that there can be a vision for returning much of this carbon back into the land.”

Beyond that, achieving a large-scale wood-based construction sector has the potential to create a new “symbiotic relationship” between natural systems and cities, said Alan Organschi, another author, from the Yale School of Architecture and Gray Organschi Architecture in New Haven.

This article from last year also in Yale Environment, looks at some concerns of people in Oregon.

The forestry part is what has some skeptical of how ecologically sound mass timber is and, if and when it’s scaled up, whether it will truly provide a planetary climate solution. In a letter to the city of Portland last year, representatives of Oregon environmental groups — including the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, and Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility — raised serious doubts about mass timber as a green climate solution and questioned the city’s plan to use it.

First and foremost, they said, is the need to certify that wood is logged sustainably and certified as such. “Without such a requirement,” the letter stated, the city “may be encouraging the already rampant clear-cutting of Oregon’s forests… In fact, because it can utilize smaller material than traditional timber construction, it may provide a perverse incentive to shorten logging rotations and more aggressively clear-cut.”

Such industrial-type forestry — large-scale plantings of trees selected to grow fast — creates a “biological desert,” said Talberth, of the Center for Sustainable Economy. “And it’s driving the extinction of thousands of species. Mass timber is mass extinction.”

“We must ensure that mass timber drives sustainable forestry management, otherwise all of these benefits are lost,” agreed Mark Wishnie, director of forestry and wood products at The Nature Conservancy. “To really understand the potential impact of the increased use of mass timber on climate we need to conduct a much more detailed set of analyses.”

Wishnie said The Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Forest Service, and a dozen universities and other research institutions are launching a new analysis of mass timber.

At the same time, he said. “there is enough data to say the [CO2] savings are significant.” He said the substitution of concrete and steel with wood and the long-term carbon storage in mass timber buildings make up about 75 percent of the total benefit, and the forestry end, if executed sustainably, about 25 percent.

I’m not sure about the logic that industry folks would more aggressively clearcut or shorten rotations.. it would be interesting to sit down with them and see how their management might or might not change. Since a great deal of Oregon is public lands anyway, that management would be unlikely to change. Perhaps if federal lands were certified? Oh, but the Sierra Club doesn’t support commercial harvesting there. Seems like CLT is between a rock and hard place with them.. on federal lands they don’t want trees sold, and we can’t trust the people on private lands.

Or there could be a separate new kind of “waste wood certification” where folks certify that otherwise the material would be left or burned.

Question to TSW Community.. Keystone Ski Area and Nitrous Oxide Pollution?

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Bruce Finley had an interesting article in the Denver Post in January, that covers all sources of various greenhouse and other polluting gases. Interesting graphs if you happen to live in Colorado. What was curious to me was this:

“The biggest nitrogen oxides polluters include power plants, topped by the Tri-State facility in Craig (6,677 tons) and Colorado Springs’ Martin Drake plant (1,293 tons), along with multiple oil and gas industry polluters and others, including Vail Resorts’ Keystone ski area.”

Naturally, I wondered, “what’s this about?” and “why Keystone and not the other ski areas?”. I emailed Bruce and he said that Keystone made the top 20, and he was also curious and double-checked with the State. Apparently the use of generators and other equipment emits these gases.

Hopefully others more familiar with Colorado ski areas will know something about why Keystone is different. If not, I’ll do some more scratching around.

Australia and US Wildfire, Similarities and Differences: III. Coverage of Negative Impacts of Wildfires on Wildlife and Water

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A boom floats across a small bay near the dam wall at Warragamba Dam in Warragamba, Australia, on Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2020. Although there have been no major impacts on drinking water yet from the intense wildfires, authorities know from experience that the risks will be elevated for years while the damaged catchment areas, including pine and eucalyptus forests, recover. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)

In the last post in this series, we talked about “to what extent do models show that Australia and US wildfires are impacted by climate change?” Although that scientific work did not show Australia’s fires as necessarily having a big climate imprint, most of the stories I have read have focused on the climate angle. What is interesting to me is that that lens has led to many stories about the negative impacts of fires on wildlife and watershed.

In this AP story, the narrative is that bad/intense/hot fires lead to drinking water problems and flooding. The author even mentions the efforts of Denver Water to “clear trees and control vegetation” albeit perhaps not only in “populated areas” as the story says. There were also the stories (e.g., here in Scientific American) on wildlife deaths and burns. It’s true that Australia has many more unique species, so the loss in terms of biodiversity is different, but if you are a deer or elk or bear or raccoon, it would be equally unpleasant to be burned or killed by fire.

It seems that in the US there was a certain school of thought that fires were “natural” and so unpleasant effects to wildlife and water were just part of the deal, and in fact were particularly good for some species (while obviously not good for others, at least in the short term).

However, if you thought that the fires were “unnatural” due to previous fire suppression policies, then perhaps it might be more OK to intervene in terms of fuel treatments? Another question that perhaps was never discussed was how do you weigh making more habitat for one species compared to the deaths and injury to individuals of other species?

Looking back on the coverage, it looks to me like the narrative goes “climate change is bad and watershed and wildlife impacts from hot fires will be really bad” is a popular way to frame the Australian case. (If we don’t solve the international problem of climate change, the future looks worse and there are many negative impacts).

But in the US case, when the challenge was to do fuel treatments to help with suppression, (if we do prescribed burning and mechanical fuel treatments, it will help suppression folks deal with fires and lessen the likelihood of these negative impacts to wildlife and water) the same kinds of negative impacts to wildlife and water did not get as much press.

I’ve noticed in the press and in many climate science papers, as we shall see, predictions are made about bad things happening without acknowledging the efforts of other communities to dampen these effects. Some of these communities include fire suppression, plant breeding, water managers, and so on- each of whom have their own scientists who understand the mechanisms of responses and relevant uncertainties and unknowns. At the same time, other factors, such as fire suppression policies, or changes in prescribed burning practices, in the Australia example, may be overlooked in stories designed to attract attention in relatively small space. My concern is that it could make people more despairing and fearful about the future than they might be given what is known by all these scientific communities. Fear leads to anger at “the other” and the idea that the ends justify the means, and the accompanying unpleasant impacts to our society of that worldview.

Does anyone doubt that the western US and Australia would still need to deal with wildfires if there were no climate change? Hint: existence of fire-adapted plant and animal species.

Bats and bighorns and bears (oh my?)

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Two of these were originally posted as comments related to other posts and the third I would have, but Sharon intimated that they might not get noticed there, so here they are at the top end of a post.

BATS

We were discussing how the wolverine is most affected by climate change, and yet ESA requires mitigation of other less harmful activities that we have more control over. The effect of an introduced disease on bats also came up there.  A federal judge has just overturned a decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect northern long-eared bats as threatened rather than endangered under the Endangered Species Act.  Here’s the Center for Biodiversity’s read-out of the judge’s opinion (there’s a link to the opinion, but I haven’t read it):

The Service argued that since the species was primarily threatened by disease, there was no need to protect its habitat.  But the court rightly noted that, in combination with disease, habitat destruction and other threats can cumulatively affect the bats, and thus are cause for concern.

It’s a point of contention these days whether climate change should be a factor in listing decisions when there is little likelihood of reducing its effects, but the law says it’s important to address and potentially mitigate other actions that may harm the species.

BIGHORNS

The Bridger-Teton National Forest is considering a restocking request for returning domestic sheep to two vacated allotments in the Wyoming Range.  It hinges on changing the forest plan to deemphasize protections for the Darby Mountain bighorn sheep herd. This would purportedly be consistent with the State of Wyoming’s bighorn plans.  The Forest is proposing to do a “focused amendment” to their forest plan,  but …

Bighorn advocates and conservationists who have watchdogged the restocking conversations wanted the Forest Service to instead deal with the issue in its forest plan (revision). The years-long revision process was supposedly coming up, though O’Connor said it’s now indefinitely on hold. Wyoming Wild Sheep Foundation Director Steve Kilpatrick said the Darby Mountain Herd deserves the longer, closer look.

I’m not sure the Forest is going to be able to do a “focused amendment” for this issue, since bighorn sheep should be a species of conservation concern under the 2012 Planning Rule, which warrants greater attention. Maybe this is a case where the inability to revise a forest plan is going to cause some problems. Then there is the question of why these allotments were vacant. The permittees were “bought out” through the efforts of the National Wildlife Federation (to protect bighorns?). Would they need to be paid back?

GRIZZLY BEARS

The discussion of reintroducing wolves to Colorado brought up the experience with grizzly bears in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in Montana and Idaho.  A reintroduction proposal was rejected in 2001, but at least two bears have been documented there in recent years.  Here is the recent news about that.  The Fish and Wildlife Service has written to the Forest Service that bears that have made it there are fully protected by the Endangered Species Act (not an experimental population). All four of these forests are revising or will soon revise their forest plans and will have to provide conditions to support grizzly bear recovery.  The Nez Perce-Clearwater is farthest along but has been avoiding doing that.

Carbon pollution and solution

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I’ve said I try to stay out of climate change debates, but I’m trying to learn more.  I’m taking a retired-person class from a retired person well-known in climate change circles, Steven Running (google him), and I thought I’d share a couple of his many slides that I think say a lot about the role of forests in saving the planet from dangerously unpredictable climate changes.

For any doubters, the first slide shows the the role of human activities in raising the world’s temperature.  It’s basically all about us, and CO2 is the biggest problem.  The second slide shows the role of land  in CO2 emissions and sequestration.  The point is that when the atmosphere and the ocean must absorb the new emissions it causes the serious problems we are starting to see today.  That means we have to attack the three parts of this equation we have control over, the human sources of emissions and land-based carbon sequestration.  I suspect the answer is mostly “reduce the use of carbon fuels,” but maximizing the carbon content of land is going to be important, too.  Regarding forests, he has already said that planting trees can’t be done at the necessary scale, and cultivated biofuels are a net carbon source (though converting organic residue to energy would help).