Daily Score Blog

Vancouver's greenhouse gas inventory recently completed by the sustainability office. Notwithstanding the methodological complexities that are inherent to this kind of work, it's a nicely done project (very comparable to the good work done in Seattle's recent inventory). Vancouver's headline message:

Vancouver is proof that cities can be vibrant, growing and prosperous while also taking meaningful action on climate change. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have already been reduced to 1990 levels and Vancouver is on track to meeting the Kyoto target (6% below 1990 levels by 2012). At the same time population has grown by 27% and jobs by 18%.

(Read the summary and the full report.)

Managing BC's Forests For a Cooler Planet by Ben Parfitt at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The subtitle sort of says it all -- "carbon storage, sustainable jobs, and conservation" -- but here's the top line from the summary anyway:

Climate change has hit BC forests hard. A billion or more pine trees are now dead in the interior of the province, the result of an insect attack of unprecedented proportions, made worse by warmer than average winter temperatures. Meanwhile, due to unusually dry conditions, forest fires burn with increasing intensity.

As greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the Earth’s atmosphere, there is a pressing need to manage our forests in new ways. Properly done, management techniques that maximize carbon storage both in our forests and forest products can go a considerable way to counteracting greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere in society. Such efforts can also create a stronger, more diversified and more sustainable forest economy.

(Read the summary and the full report.) 

Efficiency Works, a new website launched by Northwest Energy Coalition. I'm usually underwhelmed by website launches, but this is genuinely useful: an accessible yet detailed treatment of energy efficiency.

I realize that most folks don't get worked up into a lather about energy efficiency, but they should! Efficiency is more important than living buildings or algae-based biofuels or hyper-cars or whatever the latest sensation is. (No disrespect to those things, seriously, it's just that efficiency is better.)

Efficiency puts money in our pockets and it puts people to work. And we can actually, really, truly do it right now. So, in particular, go check out the section called Solving the Energy Efficiency Puzzle -- a treatment of how to overcome the economic and institutional barriers to making smarter decisions about efficiency. And if you love efficiency as much as I do, you'll probably want to check out the case studies too.

Via Climate Progress, a transcript from Marketplace that is just riveting. It's about the bark beetle infestation and forest die-offs around Helena, Montana. Here's an excerpt:

JIM ROBBINS: This was all forest here. And now it’s a lot of smashed pieces of wood here and pine needles and occasional patches of weed that we’ll have to spray next year.

SAM: So Robbins says when people are faced with these kinds of images daily, in their own backyards, it becomes a lot harder not to believe in climate change.

ROBBINS: There’s a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. I think there’s something along that line happening here. I mean, there are still some people who refuse to believe it. But I think there’s been an erosion of that disbelief and it’s changed pretty dramatically.

SAM: And a lot of people don’t want to call it global warming simply because it’s such a politically charged term. They basically equate it with Democrats like Al Gore. People they’d never vote for.

Helena’s Mayor Jim Smith definitely falls into that category. But Sarah, he told me something I’d never heard before. He said when your community is threatened, the political debate over climate change no longer matters.

SMITH: Whether this climate change is man caused or just the natural order of things, I don’t know and I don’t have a lot of time to ponder that important question. We just got to deal with the situation on the ground here regardless of what the cause is. So we’re doing that.

As you might expect, Joe Romm has much more to say, connecting the dots between climate change, bark beetles, and threatened forests in the West. And needless to say, this sort of thing stands to worsen if carbon emissions go unchecked.

As the US Senate begins to consider comprehensive climate policy, let's hope that certain powerful western senators -- cough, Max Baucus, cough -- are paying close attention to their home states. Turn your attention away from the airless hyperpolitics of DC lawmaking and you can see that there are serious dangers in failing to reduce emissions very soon.

Editor's note: Want to experience Seattle's parks for yourself? Sign up for our daily or weekly emails before October 28, 2009 and be entered to win a two-night trip for two to Seattle. Sign up here.

It's only fitting that the Emerald City should be home to more than 400 parks. And that doesn't even count the nearly 150 "pocket parks" that are tucked into street ends, often giving a glimpse of the city's lakes or the Puget Sound. 

Seattle has parks and green spaces for all tastes. Moms with strollers seem magnetically drawn to the paved trail ringing Green Lake for its easy walk and great views. Parks including Seward and Discovery have miles of forested trails and some super tall trees that provide a verdant escape from the traffic and bustle of the city. Or check out the rainbow-hued rose garden at Woodland Park. Not only is it one of a handful of the American Rose Test Gardens (which basically means they try to grow fancy new varieties), but the whole place recently went pesticide free.   

Other favorites:

Carbon-dioxide consuming forests are helping control climate change -- and that's turning some polluters into tree huggers. Businesses that emit greenhouse gases want to be able to pay forest owners to save their trees in order to receive credit for cutting pollution. And while there's no question that trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, there's plenty of debate over how to value those reductions, as this recent story in the Wall Street Journal explains in plain, non-wonky English. 

Timber owners and polluters alike favor tree conservation as "offsets" for greenhouse gas pollution. Under a cap-and-trade program like the one being considered by the US Senate, carbon emitters can meet a pollution cap either by reducing their own emissions through cleaner technology, or by purchasing offsets in which others cut their emissions.

Explains the WSJ:

Trees are nature's antidote to smokestacks and tailpipes. Factories and cars cough out carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced when fossil fuel is burned. Trees inhale it. They store the carbon in their roots, trunks and leaves, and they send the oxygen back into the air.

And the trees do indeed inhale. The National Alliance of Forest Owners, a US forest-owners group supporting offsets, claims that American forests "sequester almost 200 million metric tons of carbon each year, offsetting about 10 percent of annual US emissions from burning fossil fuels."

That's fine and dandy, but let's get back to the question of how to value those trees.

One in which geothermal energy is heating greenhouses that help produce a pesticide-free application for strawberry patches, almond orchards and mint fields. The same hot water helps brew beer, raise tropical fish, melt snow off downtown sidewalks and sell homes in Klamath Falls' Hot Springs neighborhood. And renewable energy is just one plank of a plan to help right the rural area's economy by focusing on more sustainable business lines.

I don't know what Kool-Aid the region's newsrooms were serving this weekend, because it was one of several stories that reexamined iconic Northwest conflicts -- the timber wars and salmon recovery -- and found pretty constructive solutions.

That's not to suggest there hasn't been plenty of real fight to write about. And I'm no fan of self-serving "good news" stories pitched to make someone look good or mask actual problems. But as a journalist, it's also possible to get so bored with old narratives that you fail to see how the world has moved beyond them in interesting ways.

The Oregonian story isn't exactly a good news story anyway. It's about a place where unemployment hit 15 percent. Sure, there's a little positive spin about the "Sustainable Klamath" brand. But the story manages to offer a real - and surprising - portrait of a community that's thinking about its future and making investments so history doesn't repeat itself.

Check out the rest of the Northwest's top 10 sustainability headlines at Sightline Daily, or get the news delivered via email each morning by clicking here. All of today's news can be found here.

Oh, Google, what would we ever do without you? Check out this Google Maps-generated image of the region near Cannon Beach, Oregon:

The strange patchwork of brown? Those are clearcuts in the Coast Range. And many of them appear to be recent.

What's really great is that you can zoom in so close that you can clearly see the bulldozed logging roads, a line of "leave trees," and a striated green that I'm guessing is first season re-growth of vegetation. See::

I'll bet some tech-savvy map-genius type could collate enough Googe Map images together to do a systematic analysis of clearcutting. I could imagine starting in just one region -- perhaps a single Oregon county -- or expanding the analysis to include a large swath of the Pacific Northwest or even North America.

Why am I so fascinated by this?

This news from the Spokane Spokesman-Review caught my eye:

Tons of slash from a 250-acre logging site north of Loon Lake, Wash., could have gone up in smoke.

Instead, the woody debris will be chipped and hauled to Avista Corp’s biomass facility in Kettle Falls, where it will produce enough electricity to meet 37,500 homes’ needs for about eight hours.

I'm the very first to admit that I know very little about forest management.  No, strike that -- I effectively know nothing.  So I have no idea if carting away all of that debris could deprive the soil of necessary nutrients over the long haul -- or if burning slash is even a reasonable forest management technique.  (Can anyone out there in blog-land help me out?)

Still, from a novice's point of view, this doesn't seem crazy:  if the "waste" wood is going to be burned anyway, why not try to use the heat to generate some electricity?

Well, that's fine as far as it goes.  But what caught my eye was the numbers: 250 acres, for 8 hours of power, for 37,500 homes.  Could that possibly scale up?  Could wood waste offset a significant amount of fossil fuels in the generation mix?

Short answer:  probably not.

At long last, it's official: Washington gets a new wilderness area, the Wild Sky. It's 100,000 acres of  streams, forests, lakes, and mountains on the west side of the Cascades.

Big congratulations are in order to the hundreds of people who worked to win this designation. The Wild Sky political process was an epic. First proposed in 2002, the nascent wilderness area was an exercise in tenacity. Last week, when the bill finally passed out of Congress, Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly had a nice article on the context and history. (Also good coverage last week from Seattle Times reporter Warren Cornwall, here.)

New wilderness designation in the Northwest has been tough to come by lately. But 2008 looks to be a promising year. As High Country News reports, the Wild Sky may be the first of several in the West: these include more than 500,000 acres in the Owyhee country of southwestern Idaho (the first wilderness in 30 years in that state); plus 264,000 acres in Utah (some of which is already in Zion National Park); and if we're lucky, a small but important new wilderness on the Oregon Coast that would protect nearly 14,000 acres in an area dubbed the Copper Salmon.

It's almost trail season again. For semi-compulsive folks like me that means it's time to start nailing down plans for summits and other backcountry fun. And it's also time to start feeling just a smidge guilty about what is surely my personal largest source of carbon emissions: driving to trailheads.

So on Saturday when I finally laced up the hiking boots again after an unusually slothful winter, I chose to slog my way up West Tiger Mountain 1 and 2, partly because those destinations can be reached by driving fewer than two dozen miles from home. (Tangent: wow, there's a lot of snow out there.) But then today, as I was starting to feel pretty good about myself, I got an email from Andrew Engleson, the editor of Washington Trails Magazine, who one-upped me by biking from Seattle to the trailhead at Cougar Mountain, and then biking back home. Read about it here.

Andrew's adventure reminded me of a site I've been meaning to blog about: Hike Metro. It's a very cool smattering of hiking ideas, complete with instructions, about how to get to trailheads on bus fare. By necessity, of course, most of the listed hikes are relatively near cities, but there are a few far flung locales too.

It also reminded me that I've long wanted to ask folks about how they get to trailheads without that little lingering guilt. I carpool whenever possible, of course, and I drive a fairly fuel efficient car, even on roads that it's probably not designed for. But to be completely honest, I'm not going to cut back my hiking, skiing, or climbing. So what should I do?

And what about folks in British Columbia and Oregon? Are there ways to hike by bus -- or even by bike -- in those parts of the Northwest too?

Update 4/15: Adding that, somewhat counterintuitively, busing it may not always be the most carbon-efficient way to reach the trailhead (because when the seats are full, cars are pretty darn efficient per passenger-mile). It is, however, a good choice for those who choose to live carless, which is itself highly carbon efficient.

The Taku River valley is one of BC’s crown jewels. It’s 4.5 million acres of forest tucked up in the northwest corner of the province. It’s also the home of the Taku Tlingit nation, who have a vision of how to manage the land for future generations. Now they’re sitting down with the province to hammer out a plan. The Prince Rupert Daily News has the story.

Like Clayoquot Sound and the Great Bear Rainforest, the Taku project is the result of different people sitting down and working together on a solution. BC is a global leader in conservation success stories. And the key is collaboration among native people, government officials, conservationists, and businessmen. That ain’t easy. 

Check out the Taku Tlingit’s land-use vision here (PDF). And a fantastic map of the conservation plan here (PDF). The Taku Tlingit worked with Round River Conservation Studies to create the report. (Round River also drafted the conservation plan for the Great Bear Rainforest several years ago.)

We've been watching the Mountain Pine Beetle for a while as it's feasted upon the pine forests of British Columbia, infecting nearly 710 million cubic meters of the "1.35 billion cubic meters of saleable pine in the province (CBC News)." It is difficult to imagine that a beetle, no bigger than a grain of rice, can cause so much damage.  Then again, when that beetle has over a trillion friends, it is not so difficult to fathom. But new reports from the provincial Ministry of Forests and the Council of Forest Industries indicate that the infestation may have reached its peak, thanks in part to recent cold weather and a declining food supply.

It's simply impossible to overstate how rapid -- and devastating -- the beetle's spread has been. But it's wrong to think of it as a "natural" phenomenon.  Rather, it's a regrettable -- if not entirely unforeseeable -- consequence of two entirely of human forces:  timber management practices that have left unusually high concentrations of the precise sorts of trees that beetles like to feast on; and a climate-warming trend that's been simply ideal for beetle reproduction.  In other words, the pine beetle has enjoyed an all-you-can-eat buffet.

The result:  ecological devastation on a truly massive scale.

A shocking visual: Clark cobbled together the following animation from this Canadian government report (pdf link) on the mountain pine beetle's infestation of British Columbia's interior forests.  The beetle epidemic started with scattered, isolated outbreaks in 1999, and within 6 short years spread to cover an area about three times as large as Vancouver island.  The red spots represent places affected by beetle outbreak.  If your internet browser lets you view animated graphics, you should see the infestation spread like cancer.

Last week, when I expressed my concern about biofuels, it generated a lively discussion. But I'd hate for folks to think I'm picking on biofuels. Petroleum can really chap my hide. To wit, check out this new report from Environmental Defence Canada. The title says it all: Canada's Toxic Tar Sands: The Most Destructive Project On Earth (pdf).

I found the title a bit overheated at first, but take a look before you decide. The claim may be debatable, but it's also not mere hyperbole: the tar sands oil extraction very well could be the most destructive project on earth. In fact, it's already yielding catastrophic results for human health, not to mention for a vast swath of North America's ecology. (In any case, I've had the privilege of working on climate policy a bit with one of the authors, Matt Price, and I can attest that he's a smart guy.)

I won't summarize the study here, but just point out that among the many problems with tar sands oil, is that it can only be extracted and processed with very large energy inputs (which means very large carbon emissions):

The main reason is that extracting the oil from the sand is so energy intensive, from the large machines to the natural gas used to melt the bitumen out of the sand. It is estimated that by 2012 the Tar Sands will use as much gas as is needed to heat all the homes in Canada...  Using huge amounts of relatively clean burning natural gas in order to produce dirty and carbon heavy oil is what commentators have dubbed “reverse alchemy” – the equivalent of turning gold into lead.

For a long time, it wasn't economical to extract tar sands oil. But now, with high and rising oil prices -- and plenty of demand from Canada's neighbor -- it's starting to pencil out. It's just a shame the accounting doesn't factor in pollution, the cancer risk, the wildlife, the water quality, the air quality, the atmospheric carbon...

You get the idea.