The Marshall Fire: To What Extent is the Climate Lens True or Helpful?

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By Tristantech – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113868246

Thanks for all the thoughtful comments on the last post.  Today I thought we might dive into a real-world example of the pros and cons of using the DCN (Dominant Climate Narrative) on a specific incident.  Note: I am not saying AGW did not contribute.. I don’t think anyone knows for sure. But let’s try to look at all the factors and think about solutions.  My proposition is that the DCN and other popular narratives overwhelmed other observations and conclusions which did not fit.

I’ll use the Marshall Fire as an example.

First, let me start off with a pre-DCN story, from probably forty years ago, and probably in south Central Oregon, where I was working at the time.  I noticed that every year was expected to be a bad fire year. Here are the two options. 1. It rained/snowed  a lot so a lot of vegetation will grow and dry out and there will be greater fuel loadings. 2. Winter was dry so everything will be drier so there will be fewer fuels, but they will be drier.  Either way, it was going to be a bad fire year.  That was then.

Then let me show how complicated this is in reality, especially in monsoon country.  I’d like to give a shout out to Dr. Matt Reeves of Rocky Mountain Station for modelling, getting feedback from people on the ground, and fixing their models based on real world observations.   Check out this video in terms of the complexity.. like he says, depending on when the monsoons come, warm or cool season grasses respond differently. Also note that in parts of the west, if it’s too dry, there is very little in terms of fuels; he’s got an excellent example of that.

Anyway, back to the Marshall Fire.  It was a grass fire in high winds that burned through several urban or suburban communities in the Front Range north of Denver last December.  I paid particular attention to it because where I live also has many grass fires in high winds, including a recent one right out my office window.

Caused by Climate

Let’s also look at the exact words used in news stories, as the idea of “causes” is pretty complex. Any journalism grad students out there interested in doing a study?  In this Colorado Public Radio story, they quote someone who said it, not exactly the same as claiming it themselves.

“The impact of climate change was undeniable in the Boulder County fires

Regional land managers draw a clear line between the fire and climate change.

“This is a result of climate change,” said Stefan Reinold, the resource manager for parks and open space in Boulder County. “It is impacting communities across the west. This drought and having no snow is outside the norm.””

Or in this article, it’s “the face of climate change.”

But what did our science friends at NOAA say?

High winds, even with occasional hurricane-force gusts, are not unusual in this “foothills” region, where the eastern prairies meet the Rockies. The day of the windstorm, atmospheric pressure dropped sharply east of the Rockies, and strong downslope winds followed. At the base of the foothills west of Denver, wind gusts reached 100 miles per hour.

But winds alone didn’t account for the destruction. In the months leading up to this wildfire, climate conditions set the stage for a disaster. The spring of 2021 brought unusually wet conditions, encouraging vigorous plant growth. Starting in June, though, precipitation levels fell below average, and remained well below average for the rest of the year.

OK, so after unusually wet spring (is that AGW also?) precipitation below average and temperatures above average.  But of course averages are averages because.. some observations are higher and some are lower.  I would have said “the dry conditions we experienced (not the wet ones that encouraged plant growth) are predicted to become more likely under AGW.”  That is very different from being a “result” of climate change.  Also there is a difference between the same conditions that used to happen, happening more frequently (we know how to adapt, and have to just do those things more often) and things that never happened before happening (where we need to respond differently). I’m not sure that distinction is often made.

Ignitions

This fire was what we call “human caused”. Generally we think wildfires caused by humans are, at least to some extent,  their fault and we hold them responsible (hence, prosecuting arson).  So I think we need to think this through- it seems like a possible defense for people who start wildfires.. “but for climate change, the fire I started would not have burned up forests and homes, so you can’t hold me solely responsible.” For example, Sierra Pacific and the Moonlight Fire.

We apparently still don’t know exactly what “started” (in the used-to-be-considered causal sense) the Marshall Fire.  Contenders include people being irresponsible, something to do with electric wires, and coal seam fires.  It seems to me that lighting fires in areas with dry grasses on windy days is a bad idea, regardless of climate change.  So, while we are working toward our goal of decarbonization, perhaps it would be useful to focus on improvements in reducing ignitions.. remember the old Smokey Bear.. “only you”?  Maybe it’s time to bring him back..

The Frequently Maligned Cow and Grassy Fuels

Note that Boulder County Open Space Wildfire Risk Management talks about how the Open Spaces “evolved with fire” and includes “tree thinning, livestock grazing, prescribed burning and weed management.” It also includes fire prevention (anti-ignition) practices and education. On the TV news coverage, I saw a rancher who showed how the fire had burned right up to a grazed pasture. While overgrazing removes too much plant cover, it’s pretty clear that (cattle) grazing reduces grassy fuels. It’s also pretty clear that that helps both with AGW-related drying and natural variability related drying. Cows can be good!

Fires are Now in Cities/Suburbs Due to Climate Change

The Denver Post boldly says “Marshall firestorm shows Colorado suburbs now vulnerable as climate warms”

We are sitting ducks to the repercussions of the climate that we have to deal with year-round

Patty Limerick, noted western historian at University of Colorado, has a different take.

In the last half of the nineteenth century, fires regularly laid waste to Western towns and cities. In April 1863, a fire swept through Denver, leaving “most of the eastern half” of the town “in blackened ruins.” Flagstaff, Arizona, was an epicenter of cyclical combustion, with major fires in 1884, 1886, and 1888. In 1889, three major cities in Washington Territory — Spokane, Ellensburg, and Seattle — went up in flames, leaving their residents hard-pressed to rebuild. In that same year, the residents of Durango watched a fire destroy their downtown.

Throughout the West, Euro-American settlers harvested timber from local forests or sometimes imported ready-cut wooden houses for on-site assembly. They then packed these structures close to each other, with little or no preparation for emergency water supplies. Frequent, devastating fires became a feature of Western urban life. When people caught onto the pattern, they made more use of building materials like brick and stone, created permanent fire departments, and set up better systems for supplying water to firefighters.

Solution: Fire Suppression?

And so, as Limerick points out, we now have suppression folks who are endlessly well.. putting fires out.. of whatever contribution from AGW.

Here is the After Action Report on the fire, so what suppression folks feel that they could have done better. The Colorado Sun had an article here on the AAR. There were communication problems, power knocked out a water plant. I suppose all Front Range fire folks will be reviewing the AAR.

Densification, Evacuation and Public Transport
In case you haven’t noticed this (I was on the El Paso County Planning Commission) it is considered cool, noble and environmentally best to advocate for dense housing and people using public transportation. However, the evacuation during the Marshall Fire (including the livestock evacuations by volunteers from around the Front Range and beyond) was amazingly successful. One wonders if those folks hadn’t had personal vehicles, would that have been as successful? Something to think about.

There was this story in the Denver Post “closely built homes helped Marshall firestorm spread”

The insurance industry researchers determined that the Marshall firestorm, as it spread from grasslands into houses, accelerated because flames found abundant fuel and radiant heat ignited closely-packed structures, adding to the ignitions from wind-whipped embers.

“Conflagration happens when you get that proximity,” Roy Wright, chief executive of the insurance institute, said Thursday as his team began their investigation.

Spacing closer than 12 feet favors fire, researchers have established, and gaps between homes of 50 feet or more are advisable, Wright said. “Dispersion is one way to eliminate the domino effect” and with greater spacing “you would not have had so many structures lost.”

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As you can see, managing people and fire is complex. Maybe AGW makes it more urgent or more important, and I’m fine with that framing. But as we’ve seen, the solutions are far more complex, and local, and less simplistic than some would believe. Certainly if we banned fossil fuels tomorrow (including fire and emergency vehicles, and air resources, of course), we would still need to deal with wildfires, grasses, wind and all that.

And then the next day it snowed. So there’s just plain old bad luck.

Are “Fire Seasons All Year” Really A New Thing? And Some Thoughts on the Dominant Climate Narrative

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Good morning everyone! I had a great trip to the East Coast.  More later on that.

I think Matthew was right about my calling particular kinds of statements “drive-bys”; as he said, that word has intimations of violence, and we don’t need that.  I think “throwaway lines” might be in the same category.  Or perhaps “generalized knowledge claims without invoking evidence.”  These usually occur in an article or a talk as if they were something that everyone knows or believes.  The thing is, writers don’t always have time to invoke evidence, so you see those GKCs thrown around a lot.  The writers may think that they are true, because they read it somewhere, and it sounded plausible, and fits with a commonly accepted narrative. But often a GKC will lump apples and oranges and kumquats in such a way that the slurry is unrecognizable to people knowledgeable about specific places and practices.

Often it seems to me that a GKC will sprout from something that is true in certain places and situations, but has been generalized to the region/country/world.  Who is generating the GKC, and to what end? Often GKCs seem to spread throughout certain media/academic worlds, and it’s unclear exactly where they started, so it’s hard to find the original evidence.

Here’s an example.

“Now fire seasons are all year, due to climate change. “

Many of us live in areas where fall and winter fires were never uncommon. Some of us live in monsoon country and when the grass dries out later in the year, especially if you have a wet year, there’s well, lots of dry grass (especially if not eaten by cows) and high winds.

If (1) ignitions aren’t gotten to right away (which our counties generally do) and (2) if the winds are so fierce that air resources can’t get into the air (and from what I can tell there is not a wind imprint of climate change yet), and (3) if there are people and their structures or animals around, you can get fires that are destructive.

I agree that (4)  AGW (anthropogenic global warming) is part of the story.

But there seems to be a tendency, at least in some media, to blame everything (that is bad) on AGW.  I’ll call that the Dominant Climate Narrative (your ideas for other names are invited).

The DCN is a problem for a number of reasons:

1. It’s not actually true;

2. AGW is much harder to get at than resilient communities and fire suppression (or other adaptive responses).

Which leads to bad psychological vibes to people who believe what is written.  Note that I’m not the only person who has observed this. Our friends at Solutions Journalism are  funding a Climate Beacon Newsroom effort:

The Solutions Journalism Network is leading a systems-level change in journalism so that all people – no matter how or where they get their news – have access to rigorous reporting not only about problems, but about promising and evidence-based responses to them as well. This is especially critical for the coverage of our changing climate, where apocalyptic, unsolvable, doom and gloom stories far outweigh those that examine meaningful efforts to advance environmental repair, resilience and adaptation. The news plays a pivotal role in making this information widely available.

3. It tends to promote fear (of our mutual future) and hate (of oil and gas people).  Not only that, but I think each person who uses products derived from oil and gas (which is all of us) must sense a weird internal moral tension between “it’s OK for me to use these products” but “people who produce them are bad” and “unless they live in other countries, and we don’t want to look too deeply into the moral behavior of those countries.”

Scapegoating of others for bad things happening has a long and sordid human history.

4. People who don’t believe in the DCN often get labelled as “climate deniers” when we don’t deny climate change.. leading to unnecessary infighting among people of good will which distracts from… doing things to help the problem that we agree exists.

5.  Since it is hard to decarbonize in physical world (as opposed to writing-about-it world) people are likely to despair if they believe this narrative.  Hmm. Hate, fear and despair. The bad psychological trifecta. And not what we need to make progress.

Other writers have suggested that the DCN is ultimately partisan, or religious, or a plot by China, the WEF, or others, or simply a default to some apocalypticism neurons in the human psyche.  I’m agnostic on all that.

Anyway, back to “fire seasons are now all year due to climate change.”

This certainly could be true in some places, I’m not saying it isn’t. But let’s figure out where that is and talk about it.

The Hotshot Wakeup Person with his wildland fire experience also questions this claim on this podcast.

Check out the podcast around 19:02 (actually the whole discussion of the Outside article is interesting) for his discussion of “different regions have different seasons” and “why time until containment is not a good measure of seasonality”.

Finally, this doesn’t have to do with seasonality, but he also points out that if you have more managed fires and prescribed fires that get out of control, more acres doesn’t equal “worse due to climate change”.  He is also concerned that the Outside story he looks at says that firefighter mental health issues are framed in the story as due to climate change and not pay and working conditions. Which perhaps should be added to my list of problems:  6. Interventions that will really help the problem will be overlooked, leaving people suffering and 7. DCN might be used as an excuse by people who don’t want to confront their own management mistakes, or ineffective or destructive policy calls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Greater Gila teaches us that worlds are sometimes forged in flame

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The Greater Gila, born in fire. Photo by Leia Barnett/WildEarth Guardians.

[This is a guest post by Leia Barnett, WildEarth Guardians’ Greater Gila New Mexico Advocate.]

There is a collection of poetry by Indonesian American poet Cynthia Dewi Oka titled Fire is Not a Country. I stumble across it while searching for poems about fire. I search for poems about fire because I’ve just been to the Greater Gila where, in all its dynamic unfolding, fire most certainly is a country, is Gila country. I want words that express such a force, lines to describe the wild paradox of destruction and regeneration that come in a fire-affected landscape. Alas, Dewi Oka does not explore such natural regimes; hers are wrenching descriptions of migration, familial love and obligation, political repression, and resistance. And while each human drama could be woven into a metaphor for the processes of the natural world, I’d rather not reach so far. I think the country of fire possesses lessons that apply to life in a different way.

Go to the Greater Gila and you will come away with fire in your eyes, fire in your heart. There is nowhere you can venture within the forest that does not bear the scars of fire. It is the breath and the wind and the soil of the landscape. It is the hand that shapes the tree and the river and the grass. Fire and its aftermath pervade even the loneliest mountain top, the darkest drainage, the rocky outcropping where the she-wolf dens, the mesa top where a bevy of Montezuma quail bed down. You cannot turn away from it. But in your forced witnessing, you discover something magic.

In her poem The Fire, Katie Ford writes:

When a human is asked about a particular fire,
she comes close:
then it is too hot,
so she turns her face–

and that’s when the forest of her bearable life appears,
Always on the other side of the fire.

In the forests of the Greater Gila, I think about what ecologists call disturbance events, the drivers of ecological dynamics that, when taken cumulatively, dictate biodiversity by influencing important structures and processes on the landscape. Like forests, we humans, both individually and as a collective, experience our own disturbance events: the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, political revolutions, wars, pandemics. And similarly, those events are often the drivers of transformative change. But when the fire is too hot, the change too painful, we also often turn our face and look to the forest of our “bearable life,” where our experience takes a more recognizable shape.

Yet our turning away does not smother the fire. It is the same irrational response as a child putting her hands over her face to hide from the monster right in front of her. The hillsides above Willow Creek are devoid of trees save a smattering of charred trunks. I feel exposed and discomfited in their presence. But when I resist the urge to turn my face, when I slow down and look and listen, a different story unveils itself, one of life in a different form. More species of grasses than I can give count to, various leguminous bushes, bugs, birds, and beetles. I think, “Perhaps this is the bearable life, the one that perdures and even thrives in the aftermath of the burn.”

In the Gila, I wonder, what does fire ask of us? Over the summer, we experienced the two largest wildfires in state history burning simultaneously. We grieved and wrung our hands and wondered if our forests would ever be the same. But the thing is, our ideas of sameness are fallacies we’ve created in service of some familiar “bearable life.” The discomfort of the disturbance and uncertainty of the world has led us to fabricate a form of stasis that doesn’t suit a resilient self, a resilient ecosystem, a resilient planet. In our quest for control, we’ve perpetuated stagnation, not to mention genocide, theft, and violent disposession. The Greater Gila teaches us that worlds are sometimes forged in flame. That change often requires us to look at the landscape through a new lens. That life is more resilient than perhaps we give her credit for, and therefore, by design, we are too.

Ford concludes:

You will not know all about the fire
simply because you asked.
When she speaks of the forest
this is what she is teaching you,

you who thought you were her master.

I do not know all about the fire simply because I asked. But I make a promise to the forest to listen when she speaks. And to disclaim the myth of mastery. This is what she is teaching us.

The Greater Gila teaches us that worlds are sometimes forged in flame. Photo by Leia Barnett/WildEarth Guardians.

Leia Barnett is the Greater Gila New Mexico Advocate for WildEarth Guardians. 

Petition urges Forest Service to mandate carnivore coexistence measures in its grazing program

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WildEarth Guardians has submitted an Administration Procedures Act petition for rulemaking to create a national framework for management of conflicts between livestock and native carnivores on National Forest System lands. Below is the press release with additional information, including a link to the actual APA petition.

 

WildEarth Guardians to Forest Service: Stop allowing killing of tens of thousands of native carnivores

Petition urges U.S. Forest Service to fulfill its legal obligation to mandate carnivore coexistence measures in its grazing program, saving wolves, bears, and other carnivores from slaughter

MISSOULA, MONTANA—WildEarth Guardians has called on the U.S. Forest Service to incorporate wildlife-livestock conflict mitigation measures into its grazing program on over 70 million acres to protect native carnivores from death due to conflicts with privately owned livestock on public lands.

Retaliatory killing of carnivores in response to livestock conflicts—including the mere presence of a carnivore in the vicinity of livestock—is a leading cause of death for species including wolves, grizzly bears, and coyotes. WildEarth Guardians filed a petition to fundamentally change that paradigm, protecting native carnivores’ inherent right to exist on federal public lands.

The Forest Service is legally obligated to mitigate the threat that livestock grazing poses to native carnivores. Currently, however, the Forest Service permits taxpayer-subsidized livestock grazing on 74-million acres of land that it manages—including in prime wildlife habitat—without any binding, enforceable conflict reduction measures in place. When conflicts ensue, carnivores die. The federal government kills tens of thousands of native carnivores every year, killing over 68,000 in 2021 alone, many in response to reported or suspected livestock-carnivore conflicts, and many others are killed preemptively before conflicts occur. And the federal government slaughter figures tell only a portion of the story. In national forests across the American West, state entities and hired contractors are also brought in to kill wolves and other carnivores in response to livestock conflicts.

“The Forest Service has both the legal authority and responsibility to create a proactive, science-based national grazing management framework that prevents these conflicts,” said Lizzy Pennock, carnivore coexistence advocate at WildEarth Guardians. “The agency should take this opportunity to prioritize carnivore coexistence with livestock instead of continuing to rely on its outdated grazing program, which too often results in the retaliatory shooting, poisoning, and strangling of carnivores in their native habitats.”

Wolf-livestock conflicts in Washington State provide an example of how this plays out on the ground. The Forest Service permits livestock grazing in most of the densely forested, rugged terrain that comprises the Colville National Forest. Conflicts between livestock and wolves occur here year after year, and yet the Forest Service has not made any changes to its livestock management to accommodate gray wolves expanding into their historic territory. Over 90% of wolves killed statewide in Washington between 2012 and early 2021 were killed in response to claims of predations on privately owned livestock permitted by the Forest Service in the Colville National Forest.

“For far too long, the Forest Service has simply thrown up its hands and said ‘not it’ when it came to accepting responsibility for the obliteration of wolf packs on federally-managed public land,” said Lindsay Larris, wildlife program director at WildEarth Guardians. “The Forest Service is responsible for creating this problem on the land it manages by issuing grazing permits, yet somehow the agency also claims it has no power in setting regulations for how to manage conflicts between native species and invasive livestock. This rationale defies both the law and basic principles of logic.”

The petition urges the Forest Service to modify its grazing program to incorporate specific, science-backed measures to prevent and mitigate livestock-carnivore conflicts and to stop the carnivore killing that follows, including:

• Creating a minimum one-mile buffer zone between livestock/livestock attractants and known wolf den and rendezvous sites;

• Prohibiting the turnout of young lambs, calves under 200 pounds in weight, and sick or injured livestock, to minimize predation potential; and

• Limiting grazing to open, defensible spaces and prohibiting livestock from grazing unattended by human range riders in remote, heavily treed areas.

A large and growing body of science shows both that non-lethal measures are more effective than killing wildlife for reducing conflict and that the majority of the American public supports the use of non-lethal conflict reduction measures instead of cruel and unnecessary killing.

Greenwire: BLM employees unionize amid change, uncertainty

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Excerpt (subscription):

GREENWIRE | Hundreds of Bureau of Land Management staffers have voted to join the National Treasury Employees Union, partly in response to the Trump-era relocation of the bureau’s Washington headquarters and the movement of hundreds of D.C. jobs to the West.

The decisions by about 200 non-supervisory headquarters employees in May, and another roughly 200 in the New Mexico state office in February and in the Taos and Rio Puerco field offices there last spring, were also spurred by the Biden administration’s efforts to undo the Trump BLM reorganization.

They likely will not be the last bureau employees to join the union, NTEU President Tony Reardon said.

“We continue to hear from a lot of BLM employees, not only in New Mexico, but really in states throughout the Western part of the country,” he said. “And so we are right now in the process of determining what the level of interest in those various locations are.”

Can’t Take a Joke

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Today’s under-the-fold news reported on an amicus brief the Onion filed urging the U.S. Supreme Court to protect smart-alecks from state-sanctioned bullies. When a not-very-funny parody of Parma, Ohio’s police department appeared on Facebook, self-righteous cops brought the full force of the state to bear against the perp. Armed with search warrants issued by an equally clueless municipal judge, the city’s finest raided the comic’s house, confiscating his and his roommate’s computers, cell phones, and, horrors, even the gaming console! The SWAT team tossed the miscreant into jail for four days, charged him with the crime of disrupting public services using a computer, prosecuted, and, wait for it . . . LOST when the jury found him innocent (the good citizens of Parma prevail).

After the victim recovered from eating Ohio jail food, he sued the city for violating his First Amendment rights. A Sixth Circuit Trump/Trump/Bush panel dismissed the case on the grounds that “qualified immunity” protects even the dumbest jackbooted thugs from accountability. Now the Supreme Court is being asked to weigh in.

This reminds me of my favorite U.S. Forest Service story of idiotic can’t-take-a-joke overreach. In 1992, during the height of the Timber Wars, the “Environmental Air Force” — Lighthawk — purchased newspaper ads showing Smokey Bear with a chainsaw behind his back and the tag-line “Say it Ain’t So, Smokey.”

The Timber/Fire Service was not amused. Forest Service Chief Dale Robertson threatened to sue Lighthawk for unauthorized use of Smokey’s image and name. Feeling its speech chilled, Lighthawk sued first (anyone who knew Dale should not have felt threatened — his bark was mild and his bite non-existent).

Proving that no judge is above punning when given half a shot, Judge Dimmick concluded:

By ruling that the 16 U.S.C. § 580p-4(a) and 36 C.F.R. § 271.3 are unconstitutional as applied to LightHawk the Court by no means intends to create an open season on Smokey Bear. While the question is not before the Court the government can likely regulate commercial uses of Smokey Bear as allowed by USOC. Those portions of the regulatory scheme addressing solely commercial uses remain intact. However, the statute and regulation, which impose content based restrictions on non-commercial uses, cannot be applied to LightHawk’s purely expressive political speech.

Lighthawk, The Environmental Air Force v. F. Dale Robertson, 812 F. Supp. 1095 (1993 W.D. Wash.).

Fall Blogging Break

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The Wonkikus is often found in the tony resort habitat, along with associated species including Journales and Academicus.

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All, I’m starting my fall blogging break today- I will be gone for two weeks.  I’m exploring the natural habitat of Wonkikus coastalis (var. atlanticorum)  and will have much to report when I get back.

TSW Weekend Roundup

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Please add other news items of interest in the comments.

Senate Energy Hearing on a Potpourri of Bills.. check out the different FS vs. BLM testimony on the same topics…

Here’s a post from Wildfire Today that shows the locations on the video of different times of interest.

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Could the proposed Sequoia bill have lit a fire under the FS feet (or the WH or Dept’s) to let them use existing emergency authorities?

Sometimes this is part of the “behind the scenes” cycle.  1. Congressional types want something to happen. 2. Admin doesn’t like being told what to do. 3. Comes up with “hey the Agency can already do it… if we let them..”. Therefore we don’t need legislation.  4. Congress loses attention. 5. Admin and interest group alllies stop supporting intervention and/or intervention is defeated in court.  6) Return to step 1 but if and only if Congress maintains attention AND interested Congressionals have enough clout to make things happen.

I have seen this happen most notably with Condition Based NEPA and bug projects.

We perhaps see this in the Sequoia Bill testimony from the FS. Perhaps the door will open for more uses of the emergency provisions- or, if the opening was directed to reduce Congressional interest in the Sequoia bill, perhaps not.

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From E&E News..

Crockett said the agency supports several goals of the forest-thinning bill, S. 4904,introduced by Manchin and ranking Republican John Barrasso of Wyoming (E&EDaily, Sept. 22). But officials have “multiple concerns” with the bill’s language on forest-thinning targets, Crockett said. That bill, titled the “Promoting Effective Forest Management Act,” calls on the Forest Service to report regularly on whether land it manages is a net emitter or absorber of carbon on a regional basis.

It would also rein in the Biden administration’s efforts to define, take inventory of and potentially further limit timber harvesting on old-growth and “mature” forests — a section of the legislation that Crockett said the agency wants to “better understand” and help revise.

During the hearing, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) promoted his S. 2561 to undo the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling in Cottonwood Environmental Law Center v. Forest Service that has resulted in longer consultations between the Forest Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service on certain forest management projects. He pointed to support for undoing the ruling from federal officials, including during the Obama Daines’ bill, which would clarify that new consultations on forest management plants aren’t required when new information about potential impacts on endangered species emerges, passed the committee by voice vote in July, over objections from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) (E&E Daily, July 22). Daines said he’d like to see it attached to any revived permitting reform bill from Manchin.

Question to Oregonians… why does Wyden not support the Cottonwood fix?

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David Hayes is leaving the WH.. is that good news for people hoping to not have to deal further with MOG? Rumor has it that he was the main push. for the effort.   Only time will tell.

Interesting take on MOG and carbon in the NE by Yale scientists.

Note that I got pushback on this blog for stating “Dead trees sequester no carbon” which is actually pretty obvious. I didn’t say they can’t store carbon. And these scientists say the same:

When a tree dies from logging or on its own, that tree is no longer going to be sequestering carbon, and the carbon from that tree is eventually going to go back into the atmosphere.

Eagles Permitting EA from Nossaman blog.

On September 30, 2022, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) published a proposed rule to amend its eagle permit regulations (Proposed Rule) administered in accordance with the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act (BGEPA). The Proposed Rule seeks to improve administration of the eagle permit program by establishing a general permit pathway for eligible wind energy and power line applicants for incidental take of golden eagles and bald eagles. Eligibility criteria proposed by the Service for participation in the general permit program include factors such as eagle abundance and nest proximity. The Proposed Rule also establishes general permits for disturbance of bald eagle nests and removal of bald eagle nests under most circumstances. At the same time, the Service has published a draft environmental assessment evaluating alternatives to its proposed general permits. The Proposed Rule arises as part of a court settlement from a lawsuit brought by the Energy and Wildlife Action Coalition challenging the eagle permit regulations. The public will have until November 29, 2022 to submit comments on the Proposed Rule.

And this from the Center for Western Priorities:

The Biden administration is proposing a new permitting program to address the issue of wind turbines killing bald and golden eagles, without slowing down the construction of new wind energy projects. Bald eagle numbers have quadrupled since 2009 to about 350,000 birds, but there are only about about 40,000 golden eagles left.

The proposal, which comes after several major utilities have been federally prosecuted in recent years for killing large numbers of eagles without permits, calls for new permits tailored to wind-energy projects and power line networks. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams said the new program would provide “multiple pathways to obtain a permit” while also helping conserve eagles.

Federal officials have declined to say how many eagles are killed illegally by wind farms each year. Last year, companies were permitted to “take” 170 golden eagles—meaning that many birds could be killed by turbines or lost through impacts on nests or habitat, according to permitting data obtained by The Associated Press. Companies are responsible for offsetting each death by ensuring at least one eagle is saved somewhere else.

 

Future webinars of interest:

A webinar on geothermal via the WGA (Western Governors’ Association), Oct. 6

Sparking Solutions: Reducing Risk at the Wildland-Urban Interface from RFF (Resources for the Future). Oct. 12

The Manchin One-Pager on Regulatory Reform, Helpful or Not?

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The stars and the faint arm of the Milky Way can be seen over a wind farm just north of Medicine Bow on January 3, just before moonrise. The glow along the horizon is light from Casper, more than 80 miles away.
Kyle Grantham, Casper Star-Tribune

 

So it appears that there are at least three policy positions surrounding decarbonization of energy. Now remember that decarbonization is an environmental goal.  But many different kinds of decarbonizing projects have environmental impacts (think powerlines, wind turbines, solar arrays, rare metals and uranium mining).  Some people think we must achieve all kinds of targets within 10 years, or the planet is kaput. Others look at our track record in the US and say, we can’t get this stuff built in 10 years with current procedures.  If this is an emergency, we should invoke emergency procedures.

So we have some people … 1) decarbonization will work without regulatory reform, agencies should just hire more folks (more gas same brake, in my terminology);

2) we want regulatory reform for some projects (wind and solar) and not for others (oil and gas);

3) Let’s get regulatory reform for key energy projects, including oil and gas (this is the Manchin point of view).

These debates are related to our forest world via energy projects sited on FS and BLM land, and whether proposed reforms would make sense for other types of forest projects.

In this Salt Lake City Tribune article:

Although the text of the bill has not been made public, a one-page memo on Manchin’s website indicates it could include significant reforms to NEPA.

Over 650 environmental groups from across the country are opposing the bill, which they fear will amount to a giveaway to the fossil fuel industry. In a letter to Congressional leaders, the groups wrote that the “legislative language that was clearly drafted in consultation with the American Petroleum Institute (API),” a reference to a watermark on a leaked memo with the letters API.

The prospect of altering bedrock environmental law and permitting processes has divided the Democratic caucus. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, announced his opposition to attaching the bill to must-pass spending legislation, and over 70 members of the House of Representatives have signed a similar letter.

In a new policy paper published this week, Pleune referenced the Manchin deal and argued that weakening environmental protections in the name of expediency would be a mistake.

“Accepting unfettered environmental degradation in exchange for clean energy would achieve short-term gains in exchange for long-term pain,” she wrote. “The unrelenting challenges caused by climate change provide an almost daily reminder that downplaying environmental risks does not make them go away.”

Do the ideas in the memo seem like “unfettered environmental degradation” to you?  Or do you think they are unnecessary, or won’t work to speed things up? What has been your own experience, and would any of these help? Let’s move past the rhetoric to the reality and practicality.

Energy Permitting Provisions
*Designate and prioritize projects of strategic national importance.
 Direct the President to designate and periodically update a list of at least 25 high-priority energy
infrastructure projects and prioritize permitting for these projects.
 Require a balanced list of project types, including: critical minerals, nuclear, hydrogen, fossil fuels, electric transmission, renewables, and carbon capture, sequestration, storage, and removal.
 Criteria for selecting designated projects includes: reducing consumer energy costs, improving energy reliability, decarbonization potential, and promoting energy trade with our allies.
*Set maximum timelines for permitting reviews, including two years for NEPA reviews for major
projects and one year for lower-impact projects.
 Require a single inter-agency environmental review document and concurrent agency review processes.
 Designate a lead agency to coordinate inter-agency review.
 Expand eligibility for the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council (FPISC) streamlining and transparency programs to ensure smaller energy projects, critical minerals and mining, and other key programs can benefit from FPISC. Provide FPISC funds to accelerate permitting.
 Improve the process for developing categorical exclusions under NEPA.

*Improve Section 401 of the Clean Water Act by incorporating improvements from both the Trump
and Biden administrations.
 Require one of four final actions within one year of certification requests: grant, grant with conditions, deny, or waive certification.
 Clarify that the basis of review is water quality impacts from the permitted activity, based on federal, State, and Tribal standards.
 Require certification applications to include available information on potential water quality impacts.
 Prohibit State or Tribal agencies from requesting project applicants to withdraw applications to stop/pause/restart the certification clock.
 Require States and Tribes to publish clear requirements for water quality certification requests, or else default to federal requirements.

*Address excessive litigation delays.
 Set statute of limitations for court challenges.
 Require that if a federal court remands or vacates a permit for energy infrastructure, the court must set and enforce a reasonable schedule and deadline, not to exceed 180 days, for the agency to act on remand.
 Require random assignment of judges for all federal circuit courts.
* Clarify FERC jurisdiction regarding the regulation of interstate hydrogen pipeline, storage, import, and export facilities.
*Enhance federal government permitting authority for interstate electric transmission facilities that have been determined by the Secretary of Energy to be in the national interest.
 Replace DOE’s national interest electric transmission corridor process with a national interest determination by the Secretary of Energy that allows FERC to issue a construction permit.
 Require FERC to ensure costs for transmission projects are allocated to customers that benefit.
 Allow FERC to approve payments from utilities to jurisdictions impacted by a transmission project.

*Complete the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Require the relevant agencies to take all necessary actions to
permit the construction and operation of the Mountain Valley Pipeline and give the DC Circuit jurisdiction
over any further litigation.

 

PALS Database Hits the Permitting Reform Big Time

by

So things were heating up with the Manchin regulatory reform for energy projects, or perhaps “quid pro maybe… not. ” It’s kind of fun to watch (more important) groups discuss the same kinds of things we always discuss. But to my amazement, the Center for Western Priorities mentioned this paper, which is actually about the Forest Service and uses PALS. So I guess the FS has hit the permitting “big time.” Here’s what CWP said.

Senator Joe Manchin released the text of his proposed changes to the country’s process for permitting energy projects. The legislation proposes two-year time limits on environmental reviews, prioritization of transmission projects, and significant permitting changes under the Clean Water Act. It would also authorize the completion of the Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline in Manchin’s state of West Virginia.

Recent research from the University of Utah found that the median time for completing an environmental impact statement was 2.8 years, while environmental assessments were completed in a median time of 1.2 years. The study found the main cause of permitting delays was a lack of expertise or staffing, suggesting that increasing funding for federal agencies may be the best way to improve efficiency.

Here’s the conclusion of the law journal paper:

Reviewing over 41,000 NEPA decisions made by the Forest Service over a 16-year period, we observed that reports on average decision-making times across agencies are skewed by outlying decisions with extended timeframes. Focusing on the median decision-making times reveals that the majority of decisions adhere to a more predictable timeframe that is shorter than reported averages. Moreover, level of analysis does not dictate decision-making times. The fastest 25% of EISs are completed more quickly than the slowest 25% of EAs, and the fastest 25% of EAs are completed more quickly than the slowest 25% of CEs. This overlap demonstrates that efficiencies can be achieved at each level of analysis without foregoing the “hard look” required by NEPA. Focusing on activities associated with delay revealed that many sources of delay attributed to NEPA are caused by external factors. Some of these delay factors, like inadequate staffing, insufficient funding, time spent on inter-agency coordination, and litigation aversion can be addressed through fiscal and cultural reforms. Other sources of delay, like delays obtaining information from permittees, are not caused by NEPA and should not drive NEPA reforms. Finally, when used properly, NEPA’s function as an umbrella statute and can mitigate or avoid delays caused by compliance with other statutory and regulatory requirements. We hope that our work, focusing on real-world problems causing delay within NEPA implementation, will provide a springboard to reforms that improve NEPA efficacy and advance the twin goals of public engagement and informed decision-making

It’s nice to know that scientific researchers aren’t the only ones to not spend enough time on framing.  When people provide “evidence-based” answers in the literature and basically tell people who work in an area “your observations are wrong and off-base”, to me it’s a “Knowledge Production Situation That Shouts Watch Out!”.  If I had one improvement to make, I would require that before any journal publish an article about the practice of something, that practitioners review it.  Does that sound crazy? I hope not.

Nevertheless, there are many interesting findings in this paper that are worthy of discussion. So for those who are interested, please consider reading the whole thing and commenting.

1.  The Forest Service, for historical reasons, has never sited much wind or solar energy, it’s mostly BLM. So if you were going to ask the question about wind and solar and transmission  NEPA, why would analyzing FS decisions even be relevant? Perhaps because PALS exists, and BLM doesn’t have an equivalent (perhaps this is an example of the streetlight effect).

2. Many of us think it’s litigating claims under NEPA, NFMA, and ESA that takes time, not NEPA docs per se.  This paper doesn’t discuss litigation at all.

3. The FS has, jointly with BLM,  analyzed fossil fuel decisions, some of which I’ve been involved with.  They are usually in litigation for many years.  Interestingly, though, it’s hard to find a database of these timeframes.  I wonder, though, it seems like both the FS and the BLM should have tracking of litigation timeframes. In fact, the FS has/had an Appeals and Litigation database similar to PALS at least at one time.  We would be able to tell something relevant from that, I think.

4. I wonder what “litigation aversion can be addressed through fiscal and cultural reforms” means in the absence of changes in litigation. It seems to me that litigation aversion may be an  altogether rational response.. to.. er… litigation.

Litigation aversion leads to unwieldy, bulky, time-consuming documents. The EADM Roundtables National Synthesis Report summarized the problem as follows: “Minimal litigation or objection is viewed as a positive outcome in terms of a project moving to implementation, but the negative costs of defensive over-analysis, unwieldy documentation, and narrowing the scope of projects in order to ‘fly under the radar’ of litigants are not usually considered.”248The concern resurfaced later in the report when discussing lengthy documents as a barrier to efficient decision-making. “Risk aversion and a history of legal challenges to USFS decisions have led to the ‘bullet-proofing’ of environmental analysis documents and specialist reports.”249The report continued, noting that “the complexity and size of analysis is of-ten inconsistent with the complexity and size of the project.”250The report explicitly distinguished between this dynamic, which it identified as a cultural barrier within the Forest Service and the NEPA process it-self. “NEPA is often blamed for these problems, when really it is not the law itself but the Agency’s process that is the cause [of lengthy documents].”251This observation is consistent with external research on Forest Service NEPA practice. In 2010, Mortimer et al., found that the threat of litigation had more influence than the degree of environmental impacts on Forest Service decisions whether to prepare an EA or an EIS for recreationa nd as “risk averse,” fearful of “backlash,” “not feeling supported in making risky decisions,” “perceived risk of being litigated and fear of losing in court” and feeling criticized for taking a risk where “success [is] defined as lack of objections or litigation”); REGION 4ROUNDTABLE REPORT, supra note 195, at 8 (identifying Forest Service staff as “risk averse” and hemmed by a “sue and settle” reality); REGION 5ROUNDTABLE RESULTS, supra note 192, at 6, 20, 28 (identifying “risk averse USFS staff” with “fear of making decisions based on imperfect data” and stating that “fear of litigation results in excessive time spent and detail in EADM documents” where EADM documents are “‘padded’ to mitigate risk of litigation” and “litigation threat undermines opportunities to conduct large landscape EADM”); REGION 6ROUNDTABLE REPORT, supra note 192, at 6 (identifying “risk aversion” as a barrier with line officers “not wanting to ‘rock the boat’”); REGION 8ROUNDTABLE REPORT, supra note 192, at 6, 8 (identifying “fear of litigation and defensive NEPA stance” as well as reluctance toward “taking on large projects for fear of objection to one small part,” suggesting that District Rangers resist a project for political reasons “until they change jobs”); REGION 9ROUNDTABLE REPORT, supra note 192, at 6 (characterizing a “risk averse USFS culture at all levels” that produces “excessive documentation”); REGION 10ROUNDTABLE REPORT, supra note 200, at 6 (describing “risk aversion” as a barrier with Forest Service “litigation-proofing documents” based on a “perception that all NEPA documents are challenged when only a small percent are challenged”). 247REGION 1ROUNDTABLE REPORT,supra note 192; REGION 2ROUNDTABLE REPORT,supra note 192; REGION 3ROUNDTABLE REPORT,supra note 200; REGION 6ROUNDTABLE REPORT, supra note 192; REGION 8ROUNDTABLE REPORT, supra note 192.248EADMROUNDTABLES NATIONAL SYNTHESIS REPORT,supra note 131, at 13.249Id. at 19.250Id.251Id.

5.  Interesting about focusing on APD’s and the operator not providing information that slows down the use of CE’s.. My view would be that it’s leasing decisions that draw most fire (because APD’s have other analysis completed) and I think should have been looked at separately. But all of this is probably moot because it’s the litigation/litigation proofing cycle that takes time.

6. Most puzzling to me was this..

The regression database identified 86 projects involving Forest Plan Revisions. The fastest took 45 days and the longest took 5,695 days.  Only 16 (19%) took less than a year. Fifty-two of the 84 projects (60%) were analyzed in an EIS, 21 (24%) were analyzed in EAs, and 13 (15%) were analyzed in CEs. Eighty-four percent of the EISs took longer than the median time for EISs (44 out of 52 took longer than 1,006 days).

We could certainly learn something from the Forest Plan revisions that took 45 days and less than a year.. or maybe they were mislabeled or .. this certainly points to the utility of practitioner review, IMHO.

Again, there are many other interesting observations in this paper, and as long as this post is (sorry!) I only highlighted some. so please post the ones that you find intriguing in the comments.