Community Sourced, Shared and Supported
The Partnership for Public Service and Boston Consulting Group has released data and rankings for their annual “Best Places to Work” report on the federal government.
US Forest Service: 406th out of 432 agencies and divisions. USDA: 12th out of 17 major agencies.
BLM: 348th. Interior: 9th of 17 major agencies.
EPA: 7 out of 27 midsize agencies.
New lawsuit: Western Watershed Project v. U.S.D.I (D. Nev.)
On March 23, Western Watershed Project and the Center for Biological Diversity sued the BLM to stop a vegetation removal plan for over 380,000 acres near Great Basin National Park in the eastern part of Nevada near the Utah border. The South Spring Valley and Hamlin Valley Watershed Restoration Plan would remove “invasive” pinyon pine and juniper trees. The lawsuit says the EA failed to adequately analyze harm from the project, partly because it did specify where the activities will occur nor provide site- or species-specific information about the affected environment, and the project failed to comply with land use plans. (The article has a link to the complaint.)
Court decision in North Cascades Conservation Council v. U. S. Forest Service (9th Cir.)
On March 27, the circuit court issued a memorandum opinion affirming a district court decision upholding the South Fork Stillaguamish Vegetation Project on the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. It will harvest trees younger than 80 years, but in areas designated as late successional and riparian reserves. The court held that the Project will not violate the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan’s prohibition against a “net increase in the amount of roads” in the Project area. It also held that the forest plan required habitat to be evaluated for the forest as a whole rather than within a project area, and it upheld the Biological Evaluation for the Project. The project also did not violate a plan amendment requiring pre-disturbance surveys because the Puget Oregonian snail is not documented to occur in the Project Area. The Project complied with NEPA requirements for effects on wildlife and for a range of alternatives. (However, the court also strangely faulted the plaintiffs for offering “no explanation of how their alternatives would be funded.”) This article provides more details.
Court decision in North Dakota v. U. S. D. I. (D. N.D.)
On March 27, the district court ordered the BLM to resume quarterly sales of oil and gas leases on public lands in North Dakota after holding that the agency “very likely violated their mandatory statutory duties to plan and timely complete mandatory analyses of individual parcels in North Dakota.” It had made no ‘determinations of availability’ in North Dakota during Q4 2022, following President Biden’s executive order in 2021 “pausing” the quarterly lease sales required by the Mineral Leasing Act.” (The article has a link to the opinion.)
Court decision in Cascadia Wildlands v. Bureau of Land Management (D. Or.)
On March 27, the district court granted summary judgement in favor of the BLM and upheld a 2020 rule eliminating the agency’s protest process. Intervenor American Forest Resources Council stated, “Even without the BLM’s process, the agency’s level of public engagement during project planning is consistent with the procedures of other agencies, like the U.S. Forest Service, and continues to provide for an administrative appeals process to the Interior Board of Land Appeals.” (The article includes a link to the opinion.)
On March 27, the Center for Biological Diversity notified the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service of its intent to sue the agency for failure to respond within a reasonable time to the “Petition for Rulemaking to Protect Endangered Species from Pesticides by Restricting Pesticide Use in Critical Habitat” (Petition), dated January 7, 2019. It mentioned the California spotted owl as one of the species affected by pesticides, and cited 40 “highly imperiled, narrowly endemic species that would receive the greatest benefit from a prohibition on the use of pesticides within critical habitat.”
Supreme Court decision Wilkins v. United States
On March 28, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision allowing a Quiet Title Act lawsuit to proceed by two landowners attempting to close off public access to Bitterroot National Forest lands. The court found that the statute of limitations on a 1962 easement with the Forest Service did not deny the landowners standing to pursue their claim that the Forest Service allegedly altered the terms of the easement to allow public use of the Robbins Gulch road.
Preliminary injunction in Monroe County Board of Commissioners v. U. S. Forest Service (S.D. Ind.)
On March 29, the district court issued a preliminary injunction against the Houston South Vegetation Management and Restoration Project on the Hoosier National Forest, in particular against an imminent prescribed burn. The project is expected to last between 12 and 20 years, during which time approximately 13,500 acres of forest will be burned, 4,000 acres will be logged and herbicide will be applied to 2,000 acres. Plaintiffs are concerned about effects on Lake Monroe, a drinking water source, and claim that the Supplemental Information Report does not comply with the court’s earlier reversal of this project. The court agreed that plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits, but also ordered the plaintiffs to pay an $11,596 bond, 10% of the amount Forest Service said it was losing due to the delay. (The article includes a link to the opinion.)
Court decision in Ohio Environmental Council v. U. S. Forest Service (S.D. Ohio)
On March 30, the district court ruled that the Forest Service violated NEPA with its decision to log 2,700 acres, including 1,600 acres of clearcutting, in the Wayne National Forest’s Sunny Oaks Project. The judge wrote, “The Forest Service has not provided any quantifiable criteria for assessing oak regeneration, either before or after a harvest. Instead, the Project relies on vague quantitative triggers, like “enough” oak regeneration or a “need” for more.” The court ordered additional briefing on remedies. (The article includes a link to the complaint.)
The court dismissed a claim related to the mycorrhizal network associated with oak trees because plaintiffs did not properly raise it in their administrative objection. The court also found no violation of a forest plan standard “to retain a minimum of 12 live trees per acre (averaged over the cutting unit) of any species that are six inches or more dbh with large areas of loose bark…” The Forest Service had found that there were currently only six live trees per acre meeting these requirements, that oak trees did not provide the desired bark condition, and the current majority of live trees with more than six inches dbh and large areas of live bark are shagbark and shellbark hickory trees, which are already required to be retained under another forest guideline. The court accepted the survey data over arguments offered by plaintiffs that oak trees should be protected because they provide the desired bark conditions, and accepted that protecting these other trees would meet the intent of the standard where the specified conditions could not be met.
(I’ve mentioned a concern about this issue in the case before. I would have to interpret this opinion to mean that in this case the forest plan standard prohibits them from logging any oak trees that have the requisite bark conditions (but there aren’t any). This would be similar to site-specificity issues involving large trees – the project analysis for NEPA and forest plan consistency needs to look at individual trees that would be logged to determine plan compliance and effects.)
Court decision in Sierra Club v. West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (4th Cir.)
On April 3, the circuit court found several defects in the review the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection conducted before issuing a Clean Water Act permit for the Mountain Valley Pipeline that would cross the Jefferson National Forest. The court found that 139 prior state stormwater permit violations and dozens of state water quality standards violations warranted closer scrutiny, and, “In the face of such a history, it is arbitrary and capricious for an agency to predict compliance without a rational explanation.” (The article has a link to the opinion.) (The history of this litigation is long, including here, and here. But wait, there’s more …)
New lawsuit Appalachian Voices v. U. S. DI. (4th Cir.)
On April 10, lots of environmental organizations filed another petition in the circuit court (pursuant to the Natural Gas Act) challenging a recently issued new biological opinion and incidental take statement under the Endangered Species Act for the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The BO addressed six threatened or endangered species and critical habitat for one of them. (Previous consultation was reversed twice.) (The article has a link to the petition.)
On April 3, the Idaho federal district court sentenced an Idaho man to one month in federal prison, payment of $8,000 in restitution and banned him from entering all National Forest System lands for a period of three years. He had been removing more trees than his permit allowed to sell as firewood, and creating unauthorized roads and campsites in the Payette, Nez Perce and Boise National Forests.
New lawsuit: Orutsararmiut Native Council v. U. S. Corp of Engineers (D. Alaska)
On April 5, three Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta tribes challenged the EIS used to support the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ 2018 wetlands (404) permit for the proposed Donlin open-pit gold mine on BLM lands. Specifically, tribes are asking that the federal agencies be required to study impacts to downstream waters and villages from a potentially catastrophic tailings dam failure. If developed, Donlin, located in the headwaters of the Kuskokwim River system, would be the largest open pit gold mine in North America. (The article includes a link to the complaint.)
The Pueblo of San Felipe is suing the BLM for allegedly violating a federal land patent from 1864 by changing the boundary with the Pueblo to remove 695 acres of their patented land in New Mexico.
Court decision in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U. S. Food and Drug Administration (N.D. Texas)
On April 7, the district court for Northern District of Texas reversed the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, concluding the agency ignored safety concerns due to political pressure. This is a high profile case involving the Administrative Procedure Act, which will likely get Supreme Court review of the amount of deference courts should give to administrative agencies. The relevant holding from this court:
But the agency “must cogently explain why it has exercised its discretion in a given manner,” and that explanation must be “sufficient to enable [the Court] to conclude that the [agency’s action] was the product of reasoned decisionmaking.” A.L. Pharma, 62 F.3d at 1491 (quoting State Farm, 463 U.S. at 52). Defendants have not done so here. FDA’s 2016 Actions were not the product of reasoned decision-making.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists lambasted the decision as “inflammatory” and “brazenly” substituting “the court’s judgment for that of trained professionals.” Other agencies may find that the outcome of this case affects their discretion as well.
So the current fire retardant issue is interesting, not least because the current and past fire retardant lawsuits have been brought by one of our very own TSW contributors, Andy Stahl. Who may or may not be able or want to talk about it much. It doesn’t seem like the agency “cone of silence” around litigation applies to plaintiffs.
Anyway, I’ve spoken to current wildland firefighters, retired fire folks, and Andy, and as usual tried to fit all the points of view into a whole zone of agreement. I was listening to, of all things, a podcast called “The Witch Trials of J.K Rowling” developed by The Free Press. On one episode (Chapter 6), a teenager named Noah spoke about (on a completely different subject) encouraging the good things that can happen and discouraging the bad things that can happen. And of course, isn’t that applicable to many policy issues?
What makes fire retardant more interesting than many of our TSW debates, I think, is that we agree on what good things and bad things are.. or do we? Good things would be helping fire suppression folks save valuable human and ecosystem assets, and for human health and safety- of firefighters and residents. Bad things would be dumping in streams or on firefighters. So first TSW discussion question… Do we agree on good things and bad things? Are there more good things or bad things I haven’t considered?
But the meta-dialogue is “how best to increase the good things and decrease the bad things?” Who should be in the room to decide? Should there be carrots or sticks or some combination? How are wildfire practitioners and the air resource industry involved?
If I had to guess about Andy’s motivations, it would be to put pressure on the USG to work harder to decrease the bad things. But the danger with this approach is that involving another federal agency- in this case the EPA-may not be actually all that helpful in terms of adding value to the work- the ultimate work of trying things and doing lessons learned that the fire community is generally better at than most.
So let’s think about some other examples. For some reason, I thought of healthcare-associated infections. The below is from the Florida state website.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has shown that the implementation of recommendations for HAI prevention from the CDC Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC) can reduce HAI by 70% overall and virtually eliminate some specific types of infections. Broad implementation of the CDC guidelines saves lives, reduces suffering, and decreases health care costs. Through partnerships and the commitment of stakeholders, the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) HAI Prevention Program supports health care facilities implementing best practices for preventing the spread of health care-associated infections. Health care facilities are asked to conduct surveillance or track HAI infections, ensure health care workers perform hand hygiene before and after patient contact and when they come in contact with body fluids, use personal protective equipment such as gowns and gloves, minimize use of devices (i.e. catheters), and ensure the patient care environment has been cleaned including the proper cleaning of shared medical equipment such as blood pressure cuffs and glucometers.
So suppose a similar approach was taken for fire retardant. Maybe we would disagree on who would be the best people to put on the advisory committee (HICPAC) Or would we?
It seems as if in this health case, it is assumed that everyone wants HAIs to be reduced and the academics and practitioners work together to figure out ways to do that. On the other hand, what might make the fire retardant issue is that big bucks are involved and specialized technologies in extreme and dangerous conditions. Not exactly handwashing or antiseptics.
An Advisory Committee of knowledgeable and experienced people could help add to knowledge and dive into the weeds of specific practices, jointly look at accidents or errors, different formulations, new technologies and lessons learned. And actually with the big bucks out there for new technologies (drones, AI, and so on) maybe an advisory committee should tackle all that? And no, I don’t think the current Wildland Fire Commission has the right folks to take that on.
With open meetings, public comment and all that. Because it seems like trust is super-important. As in the classic difference between the chicken and the pig at breakfast- the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. Similarly, communities in wildfire areas (which can be much of the US) may not want to be guinea pigs for new technologies- nor may wildland firefighters. So it seems to me in this case, the more involvement and trust-building the better.
To me, this would seem like a more useful approach than asking the (in their words) overburdened and (in my words) currently non-expert EPA to do a rule and then apply for a permit.
Do you have other examples of mechanisms for how agencies work to increase the good, and reduce the bad, of practices?
And people have studied aerial firefighting.. I think if you read Bill Gabbert’s post here you’ll get some idea. What I got from it was that you need to actually know the business to know what needs to be improved and how. Which most of us do not.
Bridgeport Ranger District Fire Control Officer Marion Hysell welcomed Smokey Bear to the Bridgeport Ranger Station on July 4, 1964. (Note: The 1960s-1970s era U.S. Forest Service shoulder insignia did not arrive in this corner of the Intermountain Region until 1966.)
As fire prevention guard on the Bridgeport Ranger District, Toiyabe National Forest, from 1963 through 1966, I continued the district’s practice of having Smokey Bear appear in Bridgeport’s famous Fourth of July parade. This small town of less than 400, nestled in a verdant valley of the same name at the foot of the eastern Sierra Nevada 85 miles south of Carson City, Nevada, and 85 miles north of Bishop, California, is county seat of Mono County, California, and a popular outdoor recreation center.
One of the larger guys on the fire crew or trail crew was cajoled into wearing the Smokey costume shipped our way from the regional office in Ogden, Utah, for this annual walk or ride down Main Street—U.S. Highway 395—lined by hundreds of local residents and summer visitors.
Smokey sometimes rode on a float accompanied by ranger station kids. On this occasion, as coordinated with the local 4-H Club and led by two of its members, he marched and waved to the parade’s appreciative onlookers.
After the parade, a properly-escorted Smokey always mingled with the crowd in town and then visited with kids in the Toiyabe National Forest’s large Twin Lakes area campgrounds.
Note from Sharon.. Based on the earlier discussion Jon started here of DxP, I asked Eli Jensen of Ironwood Forestry to add his two cents and also talk about some of his cool technologies. I wanted the technologies highlighted, so am putting this up as a guest post.
On DxP
Great discussion so far. I own one of the contract marking crews in N-AZ. Inexperienced crew technicians marking trees definitely is a problem, on both contract crews and district crews. It boggles my mind that TSP technicians are not given even one day of operations training. We go out with the loggers any chance we get.. And yes, tracer paint is very expensive, and is perishable, meaning the sale is only really good for 5-7 years. That makes it problematic to prep the massive acres needed for industry. If something goes awry (again), the cost to remark is the same as the initial remark.
That being said, I am an open critic of DxP. I won’t say that it’s never appropriate, but it is not the magic bullet for forest restoration. There are some key shortcomings.
1) As alluded to above, it shifts the cost from sale prep to sale admin. I don’t know the numbers on the district side, but for the rates I charge for daily harvest inspection and the frequency the USFS wants me out there, I think it would math out the same to just mark it.
2) Uncertainty. This is the biggest shortcoming in my opinion. You don’t know the outcome. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes its not. If its not, there’s nothing you can do. To me, the cost savings to not mark a sale pales in comparison to botching a sale. It feels too much like gambling, except we’re gambling with something that belongs to the public, not us.
3) Accountability. The USFS can claim all day long that the contracts have teeth. The truth as I know it, aside from basal area and eyeballing the spacing, the USFS has almost no way to tell the logger they messed up. The logger can take all the nice trees and leave all the crap, and there won’t be any way of knowing. The evidence is gone. The USFS barely knows whats out there when it’s marked. They don’t map the mark in any way. No drones. No mobile LiDAR. Low frequency point sampling to inspect the contractor and low frequency cruise plots and that’s it.
4) Tree quality. And how do you determine what’s “crap”? When I’m marking, I spend A LOT of time looking at tree tops. I train my crew to incorporate win/win scenarios in their decision making. If there’s a crooked tree with a vigorous top and a straight tree with a trash top, we leave the healthy top and give the logger the straight log. I’ve talked to a lot of loggers and they all do their best. There’s not a single one that I think poorly of. However, the idea that they’re going to have the same awareness as someone on foot, while also paying attention to cutting, and trying to be productive while burning fuel, and with an obstructed view? That would take some convincing.
5) Conflict of interest. I get a lot of flack for this, but the USFS needs to face this one head on. Anytime you mention this in a meeting, they change the subject or brush it off. Having a financial interest in which trees are being cut, and being able to decide which trees are cut IS A FINANCIAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST. I am NOT saying the logger will high grade it. I am NOT saying the logger will try and pull a fast one. I am NOT saying the outcome will be poor. That’s not what that means. And it doesn’t matter if the trees are high value or low value. It simple means a conflict of interest exists, and its a BIG liability to ignore that. My main concern is one day some environmental group will cause up some ruckus about something or another, as they do, on a DxP sale. Look at the Jacob Ryan sale on the North Kaibab. A pretty decent sized controversy on the regional scale. CBD was upset too many big trees were being cut. Luckily it was a marked sale so the USFS ultimately was responsible. If it had been DxP, the logger could easily have been blamed, and who knows how widespread that smear campaign could be. If I were a logger, I wouldn’t want the liability.
For these reasons and others, DxP has fallen out of favor with some districts in N-AZ. We’re actually submitting a bid on Monday to mark DxP stands in a sale we remarked last year, before they re-offer.
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New Technologies for Better Quality Marking at Lower Cost
This sets me up for what I really came here to share with you all. I have been working very hard for a very long time to present alternative options to the USFS and stakeholders. In the last 3 seasons, we have saved the USFS almost a HALF A MILLION DOLLARS on paint. I developed and built my own paint sprayer that saves 75% on paint, and it looks way nicer too. That’s about $30+ an acre. I have presented this to every level of the forest service, from district to the national modernization board. I have not found anyone that cares about saving money on paint, even though it would be just about enough to fund all of the road packages that everyone was so concerned about.
Furthermore, I’ve been introducing increasingly advanced digital tools. In 2020, we started GPSing every tree we marked, with DBH, at no extra cost. That means we can map the planned post harvest stand and know the basal area to the foot. Then I linked it with aerial LiDAR, so you can see a canopy cover map of the planned future stand. Last year, I upgraded that to mobile LiDAR, giving you a high resolution 3D map of the post harvest stand, with census level data (dbh, height, crown height, width, volume) on ALL leave and cut trees. We can turn +-40% cruise data to nearly 100% accurate. We plan to throw a camera module on the scanner to colorize the point cloud for increased realism. It will look like a 3D photograph because it literally IS a 3D photograph.
The neat thing is, the paint savings is less than the cost of the additional remote sensing. It sounds too good to be true, but its not, its just been a lot of hard work and risk taking.
We finally have a project planned for this summer to deliver all of this on a 3500 acre pilot sale. In addition to the above mentioned, we’re testing out a new marking designation, which we are calling Hybrid Flex (HF). It basically a combination of CTM and DxP+ (tablet marking). We expect additional paint savings, now approaching ~93% (97% if we can use commercial paint), significantly increased technician productivity (shooting for 100 acres/day per person), and it comes with all the digital mapping.
We cannot meet the needs of 4FRI with the old methods, but we can with the new. I’m starting to sound like Billy Mays, but there’s more! We’re working towards abandoning paint all together. Augmented reality individual tree marking. No paint. Doesn’t fade. Census level data. 3D photographs of current and FUTURE stands. We could have introduced this over a year ago if we had the buy-in. We’ve got two partners that can do it – one that will do it for free if the USFS will buy the end result, and another that will develop it for a fee and the USFS owns it. Either way, the development would pay for itself in less than a year from the paint savings, just from AZ timber sales.
If you’ve gotten this far, I appreciate your patience in reading all of that. We’re a small company and we’re looking to serve the needs of the USFS and forest restoration in the southwest, but its been phenomenally difficult despite the technical successes we’ve had.
Here is a link to a video we produced after our Dec 2021 demo.
I may have posted this on a previous Passover, but this video about the schools of Hillel and Shammai and arguments “for the sake of heaven” is one of my favorites. It’s done by the Pardes Center for Judaism and Conflict Resolution.
According to a source cited in Wikipedia (who knows?) Hillel worked as a woodcutter while studying the Torah.
For Christians, some people see that Jesus’ teachings were reflective of the Hillel school. There’s actually a spendy book from 1997 on this topic called “Hillel and Jesus: Comparisons of Two Major Religious Leaders“.
In another part of the New Testament (Acts 22:3) Paul claimed that he had been a student of Gamaliel, who was Hillel’s grandson.
Anyway, wisdom is wisdom and Hillel and Shammai both had it. Plus humility. Virtues still needed today. And this reminds me a bit of TSW discussions.
Mordcha: Why should I break my head about the outside world? Let them break their own heads.
Tevye: He’s right. As the Good Book says, “If you spit in the air, it lands in your face.”
Perchik: That’s nonsense. You can’t close your eyes to what’s happening in the world.
Tevye: He’s right.
Avram: He’s right and he’s right? How can they both be right?
Tevye: You know, you’re also right.
Chag Pesach Sameach! and Happy Easter!
One of the threads of this discussion went off on a topic of how much discretion loggers should have in deciding what trees to cut down. “Tricky Dick” offered that, “The USFS in its office attired lazyness doesn’t want to have to cruise the forest landscape piece by piece and thru honest Forestry discretion , uninhibited by profit motives, mark the bigger trees as ” leave or cut…” Larry replied with regard to marked trees, but what if they are not marked? I think there’s a name for that – “designation by prescription,” or DxP. Here is how the Colville National Forest explains it (2020):
The Colville National Forest in Washington began using Designation by Prescription (DxP) in 2009 in order to become more efficient in timber sale preparation. Marking individual trees with paint in a sale area can be a time-consuming and costly process. DxP saves time preparing a timber sale and money spent on paint by allowing the logger to select which trees to harvest based on a timber stand prescription, which defines the desired condition after harvest.
With DxP, the operator may need to know tree species, how to measure tree diameters, forest health indicators, or how to achieve desired stocking level. This has the potential to initially slow operations. However, the flexibility that DxP provides (the contractor needs only to meet the prescription and that outcome can be accomplished in different ways) can create efficiencies for both the USDA Forest Service and the contractor
Is Tricky right? But wouldn’t “allowing a logger to select which trees to harvest” allow them to do whatever they want within the broad confines of a “desired condition” in the “timber stand prescription?” I have lots of questions about this. How common is this? Is the “timber stand prescription” part of the NEPA disclosure process in a way that all possible effects of the loggers’ decisions are accounted for? If they only have to achieve the desired condition, could they do that in a way that is inconsistent with standards or guidelines in a forest plan? Those aren’t included in the Colville’s “need to know” list above.
Asking for a friend. Thanks.
There are several different lenses I’ve been looking at news stories through. One is a regional lens- so let’s take a look at this story about the Willow Project in Alaska. This project has had major ENGO forces arrayed against it, and the State folks united for it. Apparently it had bipartisan support in Alaska, plus support of many Alaska Native groups.
As per this quote from Rep. Peltola (D-AK)
“I am grateful that the court has recognized the fact that Willow is a well-planned and beneficial project for Alaska and the nation, and that this most recent lawsuit should not be allowed to overrule the wishes of Alaskans and the President while it is being litigated,” said Rep. Peltola. “With this decision, the court acknowledges the years that the Willow Project has already spent under extensive litigation and environmental review, the approval of multiple levels of government, and the strong support for the project from the majority of affected Alaska Native groups. It’s finally time for Alaskans to get to work, and I look forward to seeing construction begin as we await the final resolution of this case.”
Anyway, the NYT story leads off with (in the tagline):
“Scientists say nations must stop new oil and gas projects to avoid climate catastrophe.”
Which scientists? There’s a link to the new IPCC report.
While scientists have warned that nations must stop approving new oil and gas drilling or face a perilous future on a dangerously heated planet, the people involved in the Willow project are eager to get going.
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At the earliest, the crude would begin flowing in about six years. By that time, the Biden administration hopes that demand for oil will have plummeted because of federal investments to encourage use of renewable energy and to encourage a transition to electric vehicles.
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Of course, that’s not what the Energy Secretary is saying..
The world will need fossil fuels for decades but they must be paired with technologies that capture their greenhouse gas emissions, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Wednesday.
The Biden administration wants the U.S. to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 to help limit global warming. It is seeking to displace oil, gas, and coal with renewable energy and electric technologies, but forecasts, including those by the Energy Information Administration, indicate prolonged demand for traditional energy sources.
“We know that even the boldest projections for clean energy deployment suggest that, in the middle of this century, we’ll be using abated fossil fuels,” Granholm said during remarks at CERAWeek by S&P Global, an annual industry conference in Houston.
“Abated” refers to fossil fuel combustion linked with carbon management technologies, which capture emissions so they can be kept from entering the atmosphere.
“We need both traditional and new energy,” added Granholm, who, along with President Joe Biden, has asked the oil and gas sector to increase production to alleviate high energy prices at home and in the larger global energy marketplace.
Her pronouncement comes as many environmental interest groups and some lawmakers in Congress push for policies to block new oil and gas development and related infrastructure to slow climate change.
The administration has supported increased oil and gas production in response to higher prices and the war in Ukraine.
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My bold, decades vs. six years. Maybe the difference is between “hopes” and “beliefs”.. but maybe different people in the Biden Admin have different views.. and it’s not speaking with one voice on this?
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Still, projected emissions from Willow would be a small fraction of the 5.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted annually by the United States, the second biggest polluter on the planet after China. ConocoPhillips and the Biden administration both say that if Willow were not permitted, supply to meet demand would just shift to oil drilling elsewhere.
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It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics, plus recent experience, to say that reducing supply without decreasing demand leads to higher prices. Which affect the poorest people the most. It would be interesting if the reporter found someone who would go on record as explaining the mechanics of how supply would not go elsewhere.
Burning all that oil could release nearly 254 million metric tons of carbon emissions. On an annual basis, that would translate into 8.4 million metric tons of carbon pollution, equal to adding nearly two million cars to the roads each year.
Again, it’s not clear to me why reporters continue to make these statements.. I guess anything “could” happen and there is a world in which folks wouldn’t have used those 600 million barrels if they hadn’t been produced in this project.
“When do you get off fossil fuels?” said Abigail Dillen, the president of Earthjustice, which is leading the lawsuit against the project. “After you destroy one of the most important and fragile ecosystems for wildlife in the world, or before?”
This seems like rhetoric, not an actual path to decarbonization. The “just say no” campaign directed at producers, not users.
I thought this was curious.. perhaps while the oil fields are “giant”, 500 acres to suck it out is.. not.
To drill profitably in the North Slope, the oil fields have to be “giant,” Mr. Marks said. Although the Biden administration reduced the size of ConocoPhillips’s original plan, Willow will have a footprint of almost 500 acres and at its peak could generate about 180,000 barrels of oil a day.
This was also curious..
The benefits to Alaska, which remains dependent on fossil fuel revenues because it has no statewide sales tax or personal income tax, will be somewhat limited. Willow is on federal land, which means that Washington will receive royalties but that Alaska will be able to collect only oil-production taxes, which would be offset by company tax deductions for expenses. For a few years, until the oil starts flowing, Willow could even have a small negative impact on state revenues.
I’m confused.. aren’t some of those royalties returned to the States? I looked at the BLM website and it says:
All Federal oil and gas royalty, rental fee, and bonus bid revenue is split about half between the U.S. Treasury and the states where development occurred. The amount of annual revenue that Federal mineral development provides to the U.S. Treasury is second only to that provided by the Internal Revenue Service.
In fact, it looks like New Mexico made 2.74 billion from the feds for oil and gas in 2022, and Alaska 45 mill. Thank you helpful DOI site!
What I like about this story is that Native Alaskans who support the project are interviewed in addition to those concerned about it (and the great photos).
Their attitude seems to be .. if we are going to be using it (oil and gas) why shouldn’t it come from here? And we get taxes and economic benefits and our own environmental regulations. This seems reasonable to me.
And why isn’t the Energy Secretary’s approach (or maybe it’s the entire Admin, who can tell?) good enough for Earthjustice?
Vail Mountain wants to Live Más
Vail Mountain, the largest ski area in Colorado and one of the most-visited in America, signed a 10-year, $100 million agreement with Taco Bell that will touch nearly every part of the resort.
What’s next? The Microsoft Old Faithful Inn?
This will take a deep dive, but it’ll be an interesting one. In “Countering Omitted Evidence of Variable Historical Forests and Fire Regime in Western USA Dry Forests: The Low-Severity-Fire Model Rejected,” by William L. Baker, Chad T. Hanson, Mark A. Williams, and Dominick A. DellaSala. In the journal Fire, April 3, 2023 (open access), the authors critique a 2021 study, “Evidence for widespread changes in the structure, composition, and fire regimes of western North American forests,” by a handful of noted scientists, such as Paul F. Hessburg, Susan J. Prichard, Scott Stephens, and several others, in Ecological Applications, August 2021 (open access).
Abstract of the first paper (emphasis added):
I’d like to hear the response of Hessburg et al to the charge of “falsification,” something some scientists have accused Hanson of.