“Thinking Differently and Acting Alike” from Roger Pielke, Jr.

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Here’s a link to a Roger Pielke, Jr., piece in Foreign Policy. Here’s a link to yesterday’s post on his blog about it. The comments are fairly interesting also.

Of course, climate issues are of interest to people on this blog, but I especially liked this quote:

The vast complexity of the climate issue offers many avenues for action across a range of different issues. What we need is the wisdom to have a constructive debate on climate policy options without all the vitriolic proxy battles. The anger and destructiveness seen from both sides of this debate will not be going away, of course, but constructive debate will move on to focus on goals that can actually be accomplished. To paraphrase the great columnist Walter Lippmann, politics is not about getting people to think alike, but about getting people who think differently to act alike. The climate issue will never be solved completely, but it’s still possible for us to make things better or worse.

I wonder what would be the equivalent in our public lands debates for “results that can actually be accomplished”?

Below is an excerpt of the Foreign Policy piece that focuses on “what should we do next?”

So what’s the next step? For years — decades, even — science has shown convincingly that human activities have an impact on the planet. That impact includes but is not limited to carbon dioxide. We are indeed running risks with the future climate through the unmitigated release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and none of the schemes attempted so far has made even a dent in the problem. While the climate wars will go on, characterized by a poisonous mix dodgy science, personal attacks, and partisan warfare, the good news is that progress can yet be made outside of this battle.

The key to securing action on climate change may be to break the problem into more manageable parts. This should involve recognizing that human-caused climate change involves more than just carbon dioxide. This is already happening. A coalition of activists and politicians, including numerous prominent scientists, have argued that there are practical reasons to focus attention on “non-carbon forcings” — human influences on the climate system other than carbon dioxide emissions. The U.N. Environment Program argues that actions like reducing soot and methane could “save close to 2.5 million lives a year; avoid crop losses amounting to 32 million tons annually and deliver near-term climate protection of about half a degree Celsius by 2040.”

Some of these opportunities are political. For instance, in the United States, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), a loud and theatrical opponent to most action related to climate, supports action on non-carbon forcings, particularly efforts to reduce the amount of particulates in the air. As he explained to the Guardian “Al Gore probably would be against automobile accidents and I am too. This has nothing to do with the CO2 issue.” The lesson here is that if Gore and Inhofe can find common political ground on one important aspect of the issue, then there is plenty of hope for progress.

Other human influences on climate, such as those caused by chlorofluorocarbons, which are also known to impact the ozone layer, offer other tantalizing opportunities for progress while circumventing the most gridlocked parts of the debate. Similarly, the global demand for huge amounts of energy in coming decades provides a compelling rationale for energy technology innovation independent of the climate issue.

Of course, we can’t ignore carbon dioxide. Carbon emissions will remain a vexing problem because they are so tightly bound to the production of most of the world’s energy, which in turn supports the functioning of the global economy. But even here the situation may not be hopeless. America’s recent boom in the production of shale gas illustrates the virtuousness of innovation: In the United States, shale gas has become widely available and inexpensive due to technologies developed by the government and private sector over decades and has displaced large amounts of coal in a remarkably short time, dramatically reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the process. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, carbon dioxide emissions in 2011 were lower than those of 1996, even though GDP increased by more than 40 percent after inflation.

Natural gas is not a long-term solution to the challenge of stabilizing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, because it is still carbon intensive, but the rapidly declining U.S. emissions prove an essential policy point: Make clean(er) energy cheap, and dirty energy will be quickly displaced. To secure cheap energy alternatives requires innovation — technological, but also institutional and social. Nuclear power offers the promise of large scale carbon-free energy, but is currently expensive and controversial. Carbon capture from coal and gas, large-scale wind, and solar each offer tantalizing possibilities, but remain technologically immature and expensive, especially when compared to gas. The innovation challenge is enormous, but so is the scale of the problem. A focus on innovation — not on debates over climate science or a mythical high carbon price — is where we’ll make process.

The vast complexity of the climate issue offers many avenues for action across a range of different issues. What we need is the wisdom to have a constructive debate on climate policy options without all the vitriolic proxy battles. The anger and destructiveness seen from both sides of this debate will not be going away, of course, but constructive debate will move on to focus on goals that can actually be accomplished. To paraphrase the great columnist Walter Lippmann, politics is not about getting people to think alike, but about getting people who think differently to act alike. The climate issue will never be solved completely, but it’s still possible for us to make things better or worse.

I’m all for doing better.

Smoke from the NW Visits Denver- It’s a Small World

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good photos included in the CBS story here.

Have you noticed the hazy skies we have had around the Mile High City the last few days?

The current wind patterns are to blame.

At the moment there are over a dozen wildfires burning in the Pacific Northwest. There’s also a fire that has put out a bit of smoke in Western Colorado — the Wolf Fire.

The high pressure ridge over Colorado and a Jet Stream passing over the northern Rockies is pumping smoke right into our state from the northwest.

This along with the higher ozone levels has made for poor air quality that has created unhealthy conditions for people with breathing difficulty, according to Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

Draft Objection Process in Federal Register- Beginning of 30 Day Comment Period

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Here’s a link from the FS website.

US Forest Service proposes to streamline land management plan review process
Provides for public comment opportunity for some land management plans

WASHINGTON, Aug. 8, 2012 — The U.S. Forest Service today published in the Federal Register a proposed regulation that will improve the administrative review process for proposed projects and activities implementing land management plans. The proposed rule is posted here.

The proposed rule for an objections process will be applied to all projects and activities that implement land management plans requiring an environmental analysis or environmental impact statement. The publication of the proposed rule will provide a 30-day public comment opportunity. All comments received will be considered before a final rule is published.

“This proposal will result in better, more informed project decisions, better documentation of environmental effects of agency proposals, and reduced regulation for administrative reviews,” said US Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell.

The Forest Service has used a predecisional objection process for hazardous fuel reduction projects since 2004. This year Congress directed the Forest Service to also establish a predecisional objection process for other projects in lieu of the post-decisional appeal procedures in use with those projects since 1993.

Note from Sharon: there was some talk of developing an interim final rule so that it could be used during the comment period and as the final rule would be developed. Since Congress specifically directed this in the Approps bill last year, this seemed to me like an appropriate approach. I wonder why it was decided to go with a rule that won’t be effective until after the public comment period, analysis of comments, and further development internally, added on to the unpredictably slow process of clearance. For something Congress directed fairly straightforwarldy, IMHO.

I heard through the grapevine it had something to do with lawyers and potential confusion with, and linkage to, the court order around notice and comment for CE’s. However, to me it seems that these can go down separate tracks. If I were in Congress, I would be wondering…and maybe attempt clarify Congressional thoughts on notice and comment for CE’s, if that is really the hold-up ;).

In looking around on the FS website for a “plain English” version of what’s in the proposed rule, I found this website of existing objections, which is also interesting. You can look up if there are any projects around you that use objections (HFRA projects can use them not, without the proposed rule going into effect).

If anyone knows of such a document (what I call a “plain English” version, or summary of requirements) put out by the FS, or other groups, please comment and show a link or send to my email ([email protected]) if it’s a document.

Firefighting Policy Time Out or “Reversal”.. You Read the Memo and Decide

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I’ve seen a couple of articles about a new fire policy with regard to “letting it burn”. Haven’t seen the text of the actual policy.

Here’s a link to a fairly long piece about it, including an interview with Jim Hubbard, excerpted below.
Here’s a link to the memo.

In fact, Hubbard and everyone else agree that allowing wildfire in wilderness makes long-term financial sense. “It does. It absolutely does,” said Hubbard. “This is not a good position to be in.”

Niel Lawrence, director of the forestry project at the Natural Resources Defense Council (which publishes OnEarth), argues that the agency is suppressing wilderness fires today as a way of generating future revenue for itself. He said the agency has been deprived of the income it once drew from timber sales (because of greatly decreased demand for lumber and pulp), and so has learned to maximize its income in the fire suppression business. When forests and homes are burning, and the images of slurry bombers are dominating cable news, it’s an opportune moment to pry money loose from Congress. Fire suppression today guarantees there will be more fire in the future to make that gambit sustainable, Lawrence argues.

Regardless of motives, the whole situation takes on an added urgency in light of global warming. Given the prospect of more hot, dry weather and more catastrophic fires in the future, it seems prudent to burn what is burnable now, Lawrence says, again to defuse the future bomb. “We’ve got a window here that’s closing,” he says. “If we don’t get fire back in now, it’s going to be impossible to control it later.”

There’s been overwhelming agreement with that idea in the past from Forest Service fire managers, but sticking to that principle means the bureaucracy needs to accept some short-term risk — including some political risks — for long-term gains. Hubbard made it clear in his conversation with me that the agency, at least at this point, is not willing to do that.

The two other major federal agencies charged with managing public lands — the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service — have not followed the Forest Service’s lead. After Hubbard’s memo, they restated that they will continue to follow the 1995 policy. In the mountainous West, however, the Forest Service carries the most weight on this issue; it manages about 60 percent of the total designated wilderness acreage in the 11 contiguous Western states.

Hubbard’s letter containing the new directive cites “unique circumstances,” and in our conversation, he acknowledged that those circumstances are global warming. But in terms of the future, those circumstances are not at all unique — hotter, drier, more fire-prone conditions across the West are the new normal. So does this mean, I asked him, that the keystone of wildfire science and policy for nearly two decades is a first casualty of global warming?

“I would agree with that,” Hubbard said. “And this is not a policy shift because we thought we were headed in the wrong direction. It is a financial shift.”

But tight budgets and a hot climate aren’t going away anytime soon. So the Forest Service’s new policy continues to shift the burden of global warming to future generations: their forest fires will be bigger and more costly because we refused to confront the new realities facing us now.

Note from Sharon:
Oh, for heaven’s sake! Does Mr. Laurence really think this is a conscious effort to get more money for the FS in the future? And why would that matter to a current employee such as Mr. Hubbard?

Another hypothesis might be (and I have no reason to think that that is the case), that this is an election year and the Executive Branch folks told the FS to be conservative on fires that might get out of control and provide campaign fodder.

Or maybe Congress or even OMB told the FS to pick the lowest cost solution, if they want to get funding.

Just sayin’ FS fire folks don’t work in a vacuum.

I also thought that it was entertaining that someone wrote by the side of the memo:

James E. Hubbard, deputy chief for state and private forestry, orders an “aggressive initial attack” on fires sparked in wilderness area managed by the U.S. Forest Service — even though he acknowledges that this reverses a long-standing federal policy designed to create healthier forest ecosystems is undesirable from both a scientific and long-term financial standpoint

Hubbard never said it was undesirable from “a scientific standpoint”. Science doesn’t give us an endpoint, it gives us a path forward. Having “restoration” as an objective is no more scientific than having increased exports as an objective. IHMO.

Forest disturbances promote diversity, Mark Swanson, WSU

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Mt. St. Helens, 25 years later, from Wikipedia via WSU

Mark Swanson of WSU on biological diversity. Thanks to Bob Berwyn for his post which led me to the WSU press release here. Since it’s a press release, I posted the whole thing below.

Forest disturbances promote diversity
Researcher sees how forests thrive after fires and volcanoes
Monday, Aug. 6, 2012

PULLMAN, Wash.—Forests hammered by windstorms, avalanches and wildfires may appear blighted, but a Washington State University researcher says such disturbances can be key to maximizing an area’s biological diversity.

In fact, says Mark Swanson, land managers can alter their practices to enhance such diversity, creating areas with a wide variety of species, including rare and endangered plants and animals.

“The 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, for example, has created very diverse post-eruption conditions, and has some of the highest plant and animal diversity in the western Cascades range,” says Mark Swanson, an assistant professor of landscape ecology and silviculture in Washington State University’s School of the Environment.

Swanson, who has studied disturbed areas on Mount St. Helens and around western North America, presents his findings this week at the national convention of the Ecological Society of America in Portland.

His findings run counter to a widely held perception that most, if not all rare species tend to require older forests, not younger. In fact, he says, a substantial proportion of Washington’s state-protected forest plants and animals spend some or all of their life cycle in areas rebounding from a major disturbance. That’s because such habitats often include woody debris and snags, varied landscape patterns, and a rich diversity of plants that can be exploited for food and shelter.

“Severe fire in the northern Rockies creates conditions for some rare birds that depend on abundant dead trees, like the black-backed woodpecker,” says Swanson. “It can benefit a host of other organisms, too, like elk, deer, bighorn sheep, some frog species, and many more.”

Forest disturbances can be natural events, says Swanson, but they can also be the product of carefully designed forest harvests. In either case, he says, forest managers can help maximize biological diversity with practices that extend the time it takes the forest to return to a climax state with a closed canopy.

Clearcutting often leaves too little behind to provide habitat for a diversity of species, Swanson says. Also, clearcut areas are often reforested too quickly to allow open conditions and a diverse herb and shrub community to persist. By the same token, post-disturbance logging can hurt diversity by removing structures favored by plants and animals.

However, where maintaining biodiversity is an objective, like on federal lands, timber harvests can be designed to mimic natural disturbance and create habitat for some species that depend on a forest’s recovery, or succession, says Swanson. Afterwards, he says, managers should avoid dense “recovery” plantings that can so shorten a forest’s succession that they give short shrift to the ecological role its early stages.

Note from Sharon… shortening forest succession by growing trees faster can sequester carbon faster, but slower is better for biodiversity. Clearly we won’t find a nirvana-esque state that is good for everything. Guess we’ll have to consciously choose.

Sharon Crosses Over and Goes Toward the Light.. Errr.. Retires

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At my retirement party, lovely photo by Jeff Burch.

My last day at the Forest Service August 3 and I am now formally a retiree. Blogwise, this is most important because no more can anyone blame the Forest Service for my misdeeds, mis-thoughts and mis-writings. FS folks have been very patient (some more than others..) about the idea of doing this blog in my spare time, and touching upon topics that could tick people off, either internally or externally. I expect that a result of my retirement is that I will ask questions that might tick people off, and perhaps also say (more?) things that will tick people off.

Attached here is the retirement speech for me written by the ever-popular and gifted writer DeAnn Zwight. It cracked me up, and hopefully the humor is not too inside.. All I can tell you is that it’s all true.

For those who like the photo, here is a link to Jeff Burch’s website.

What Are the Europeans Up To and Should We Emulate Them? EDF and Pinchot on European Biomass; Also Bob Berwyn’s Observations in Europe

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You may not have looked at the comments on the Bye-Bye Biomass post; but thankfully Alex knew of a study by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Pinchot Institute so I thought I would post it directly below. Here is the link.

Also I provided a link to a Bob Berwyn piece on the scale of wind in Germany. I noticed that a few years back in driving around Thuringia. It makes me wonder about the question of scale and what drives that. Perhaps because we have so much public land, it could be a barrier in certain parts of the country. For example in Vermont, a 15 turbine facility raised controversy.. certainly that is the same size as in Germany, yet it appears that it is being litigated.. Here’s one story about it.

New Approach Promotes Pathways to Forest Sustainability
As Demand for U.S. Wood Pellet Production Grows

Image from Pathways to SustainabilityEuropean utilities are using trees grown in the United States to make electricity. Well, not the whole tree. But lots of the tree is used to make the little wood pellets that are then shipped across the ocean, mostly to the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Denmark, and Belgium. It is these wood pellets that are burned with coal or in stand alone biomass boilers to produce energy.

Why is Europe able to make electricity from U.S. trees when domestic utilities are cancelling wood biomass projects? Answer: Europe has a strong renewable energy policy.

Watch the video: Wood Biomass Goes to Europe

The EU Renewable Energy Directive passed in 2009 sets a target for EU member countries to collectively achieve 20% of energy from renewable sources by 2020. Many utilities are increasing the use of biomass as a low-cost means of producing renewable energy. But Europe doesn’t have enough forest or agricultural land to meet the increasing demand. To fill that gap, European utilities are importing wood pellets (a form of chipped and compressed wood) from North America and increasingly from the Southern United States — European imports are projected to increase to as much as 60 million tonnes annually by 2020. The growing demand for U.S. wood biomass is raising questions about the sustainability of the country’s forest resources.

Two reports from Environmental Defense Fund, in conjunction with colleagues at the Pinchot Institute for Conservation and the University of Toronto, examine economic, environmental, and public health impacts from the expanding wood pellet market. European Power from U.S. Forests (download report PDF) documents how the EU policy is shaping the transatlantic trade in wood biomass. For the U.S. export market to benefit from the large potential capacity for pellet production, producers in the U.S. will need to meet or exceed sustainability standards of the EU and individual European countries. Some type of forest management or pellet supply chain management system (e.g. forest management certification and/or chain-of-custody certification) is likely to be required.

Image from Pathways to SustainabilityPathways to Sustainability (download report PDF ) evaluates the programs and practices available to U.S. pellet producers to meet European buyers’ sustainability expectations and policy requirements, concluding that few of the pathways completely meet the standards.

Specifically Pathways to Sustainability: (1) explains the uncertainties of existing import requirements and the options that can help this sector avoid controversial sourcing; and (2), presents the ways companies can reduce actual or perceived risks that sourcing may have on biodiversity, water resources, and other natural resource values.

Sustainability will remain a pivotal issue as EU member countries, the European Commission and various stakeholders seek to harmonize sustainability requirements. European bioenergy companies often view biomass sustainability as the largest unquantified risk in their supply chains. The supply chains for wood pellets are being formed now. Developing Pathways to Sustainability for biomass supply chains now will reduce economic risk and encourage market development both here in the U.S. and for use of wood pellets abroad.

Here’s a link to the story by Bob Berwyn about renewable energy in Germany.

Here’s a piece on the Interior solar siting plan and mixed reactions of green groups. (note the author admits he has a bit of a bias).

But as we’ve talked before, I think that one of the reasons driving “industrial scale” is the size of the renewable requirement to the large utilities. To have a plan to reach 30% or whatever by a certain date, you can’t depend on the “kindness of strangers, ” or “efforts by communities to have small scale” on land with mixed ownerships. Unintended policy consequences?

MT Groups Petition Montana to Halt Trapping of Rare Wolverine

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Photographer Chad Harder captured these images of a rare wolverine running across a snowfield on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest earlier this summer.

The Western Environmental Law Center, on behalf of eight local conservation groups and one individual, submitted a formal petition Tuesday to Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks Commission (“MFWP”) to halt the trapping of wolverine in Montana – the only state in the contiguous U.S. that still allows the imperiled animal to be trapped.

Wolverines resemble a small bear that is custom built for high-elevation, mountain living.  They have large, crampon-clawed feet designed for digging, climbing, and walking on snow, and an extremely high metabolic rate. Its double fur coat includes a dense inner layer of wool beneath a cover of frost-shedding guard hairs and is the reason trappers target the animal.

Once prolific across the West, the wolverine population in the Lower 48 is now down to no more than 250-300 individuals. Montana has the highest concentration of wolverine in the Lower 48, but still only about 100-175 individuals.  A substantial number of the remaining wolverines in Montana are likely unsuccessful breeders or non-breeding subadults.  This means Montana’s “effective population” of individuals who are able to breed is significantly smaller, perhaps less than 40.

So rare are these native carnivores that in December 2010, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (“Service”) designated the wolverine a species that warrants protection under the federal Endangered Species Act, but the level of protection has not yet been determined.  The Service determined that an already small and vulnerable population of wolverine in the lower 48 will continue to decline in the face of climate change, which is causing a reduction in suitable wolverine habitat in Montana (wolverine depend on late spring snow and cold temperatures) and increasing the speed by which isolated populations vanish. Warming temperatures are also increasing the distance, and thus fragmentation, between islands of suitable habitat.

“Authorizing the trapping of wolverines under these circumstances is making a bad situation worse,” said Matthew Bishop, a local attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center, who is representing the petitioners. “Wolverines are the polar bear of the Lower 48 and need all the help they can get right now in the face of a warming planet, shrinking habitat, and increased isolation. Montana shouldn’t be kicking them when they’re down,” added Bishop.

Trapping is a major source of wolverine mortality in Montana and has had significant negative effects on wolverine inhabiting Montana’s small, isolated island ranges. In one study, of the 14 wolverines tracked in the Pioneer Mountains during a three-year period, 6 were killed in traps, including 4 adult males and two pregnant females.  As a result of trapping, the wolverine population in the Pioneers was reduced by an estimated 50%.

In another study of wolverine on the Flathead National Forest, trapping killed five times more wolverine than natural causes in a population that can ill afford it, killing nearly two-thirds of the wolverines being studied in just five years.

“We’re lucky to see wolverine on rare occasions here in the Swan Range of Northwest Montana, where they were first studied back in the 1970s,” said Keith Hammer, Chair of petitioner Swan View Coalition. He asserted, “Trapping must stop if these rare and wonderful animals are to return from the brink of extinction.”

Arlene Montgomery, Program Director of petitioner Friends of the Wild Swan, stated, “Trapping adds insult to injury for the wolverine.” She added, “They are already teetering on the brink from climate change and other threats. Trapping them is unnecessary and not sport.”

The petitioners are asking MFWP to close the wolverine trapping season now, before the 2012 trapping season begins on December 1, 2012, and to not reopen it until wolverine populations have recovered enough to no longer need protection of the Endangered Species Act.

“This is the right thing to do – morally, scientifically, socially, and ecologically – for the future of wolverine and the future of trapping in Montana,” said Gary Ingman, a board member of the Helena Hunters and Anglers Association, a local sportsmen’s group and petitioner. “The biological models show that the current population levels simply are not self-sustaining,” concluded Ingman.

The following organizations and individual joined WELC’s petition: Friends of the Wild Swan, Helena Hunters and Anglers Association, Montana Ecosystem Defense, Native Ecosystems Council, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Swan View Coalition, WildEarth Guardians, Footloose Montana, and George Wuerthner.