Forests posts from the Daily Score blog - Sightline Daily

The Bark Beetle's Bite

Eric de Place — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:38:45

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.

The Greenest Parks You've Ever Seen Are in Seattle

Lisa Stiffler — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:25:12

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:

Kubota Garden: A Japanese-inspired park with a weeping Douglas fir, steppingstones that send visitors hopping across tranquil pools, and a steeply-sloped Moon Bridge that embodies the challenge of living a good life: "Hard to walk up, and hard to walk down."
Carkeek Park: My favorite neighborhood park, Carkeek has miles of trails that wind through woods up to bluffs overlooking the Sound, as well as along salmon-bearing creeks.
Washington Park Arboretum: The arboretum last year opened a new 12 acre exhibit called the Pacific Connections Garden that features the vegetation of ecosystems from around the Pacific Rim, including Chile, China, New Zealand, Australia, and our own Cascadia.

But all of this green loveliness has been hard fought to acquire and maintain.

A community group called Friends of Street Ends has worked year after year to pry pocket parks from neighbors who sometimes have absorbed the public land into their own property.

The city of Seattle along with volunteers and nonprofit groups teamed up to form the Green Seattle Partnership to wage a war on invasive species that threaten to overrun and destroy native firs and maples, turning forested parks into deserts of ivy.

And community activists have struggled to pass parks levies, including the levy approved last November that allowed a property tax increase for more parks spending.

Kids at Kubota Garden photo courtesy of Flickr user Seattle Municipal Archives under the Creative Commons license.

Big Polluters Turn Tree Huggers

Lisa Stiffler — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:03:08

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.

Offsets only make meaningful cuts in carbon emissions if they prevent pollution that would have otherwise occurred. That is, it doesn't count as a reduction to pay for forest preservation if the woods were already safeguarded against logging. So you have to prove that logging was imminent until the offset came along. And there's the problem of what happens if the woods burn down, or for how long logging is prohibited.

But with lots of money and environmental good at stake, there are countless folks pitching ideas and trying to solve the forest offset conundrum.

Thursday, the Western Climate Initiative, a government coalition of US states and Canadian provinces combating climate change, released its first draft of "Offset Definition and Eligibility Criteria" for public comment.

The paper calls for offsets that are real, additional, permanent, and verifiable -- all features that Sightline Institute also deemed necessary in our "Cap and Trade 101: A Climate Policy Primer" (for definitions of real, additional, permanent, and verifiable offsets -- plus some added features we see as important, see page 15 of the document).

The WCI document doesn't, however, give specific recommendations for regulating forestry offsets, though concerns about them are sprinkled throughout. State-level efforts have tackled the matter, including Washington's Forest Sector Workgroup on Climate Change Mitigation at its report on forest offsets and Oregon's Forest Carbon Stakeholders Workgroup.

While this is all being sorted out, entrepreneurs are ready to start turning trees into cash. Finite Carbon hung up its shingle earlier this month, promising that it's:

"the forest carbon development company that provides a single-source solution for creating and monetizing carbon credits ... offer(ing) the most comprehensive forest carbon project development and commercialization service in the United States."

For great ongoing analysis of forestry offsets, check out the Climate Forests blog.

Steeple photo courtesy of Flickr user Ben Amstutz under the Creative Commons license.

OR's Green-Collar Jobs, Defined and Counted

Jennifer Langston — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:33:20

Oregon has released its study of the state’s green-collar jobs. The results are strikingly similar to Washington’s, and given how many different ways there are to define and count green-collar jobs, it’s nice to see multiple studies begin to confirm what appear to be regional trends.

The Oregon Employment Department found 51,402 green jobs in the state in 2008, based on a survey of both public and private employers. The construction industry accounted for 17 percent of the state’s green jobs, and the most common occupations were carpenters, farm workers, truck drivers, hazardous materials workers and landscapers. Overall, green jobs made up 3 percent of Oregon’s total employment, or about the same number of people working in the state’s private hospitals. (A study in Washington found 47,194 green jobs, with farm workers, electricians, construction laborers and carpenters topping the list.)

As in Washington, the greatest number of “green” jobs were actually what we’d traditionally think of as blue-collar, but with a sustainable edge. And many pay well, with at least 64 percent earning more than the state’s median wage.

So what sorts of jobs did industries self-report as "green"? Carpenters working on home weatherization, an herbsman at an organic dairy, truck drivers for compost and biomass companies, asbestos removal workers, a crew leader doing riparian restoration, an auto parts dismantler at a salvage yard, sorter at a recycling plant, people who sell solar panels, retail clerk at an organic nursery, technicians monitoring salmon and firefighters removing hazardous fuels.

This helps explain a question we had: How could Oregon, with its smaller population, have produced even more green jobs than Washington? Is the state really that much better at it?

(A recent national study with an entirely different methodology pegged Oregon as the country’s leader in creating green jobs.) In this case too, the numbers are likely explained by slight differences in the way the two studies were structured, according to Nick Beleiciks, an Oregon state economic analyst and author of the study. Though the approaches were similar, Oregon used a broader definition of a green job:

One that provides a service or product in any of the following categories: Increasing energy efficiency; producing renewable energy; preventing, reducing or mitigating environmental degradation; cleaning up and restoring the natural environment and providing education, consulting, policy promotion, acceleration, trading and offsets, or similar services.

Washington left out the last catch-all category and defined a green employee as someone who “worked in any of these core areas as their primary job function.”

Oregon also sent the survey to a broader group of industries, including government employers, not just the “green” ones that Washington’s study targeted. Some industries that reported having green jobs are a little surprising – the arts, food prep, protective service. It's fair to question, as some have done, what kind of green jobs should qualify to receive the benefit of federal stimulus money and other perks: a security guard in an energy-efficient building? Someone who drives a hybrid bus? In this case, though, Oregon decided to let individual companies make the call about how many of their employees fit the definition:

We realize our definition is broad, leaving room for interpretation from each respondent. However, we felt that part of measuring what is green is capturing public sentiment and counting jobs which the public views as green.

Oregon has also compiled good information about the educational and licensing requirements for its green jobs (nearly two-thirds require no education beyond high school), which is useful information for anyone trying to design community college curricula or apprenticeship and training programs.

Finally, most industries say they expect to add more green jobs in the coming years, with an estimated growth rate of 14 percent from 2008 to 2010. (Exceptions that any recent college graduate might want to avoid include sales, office support and arts/design/entertainment/sports/media.) In a state that’s experienced staggering job losses, the report ends in a bright spot: the pace of growth for green jobs in Oregon is expected to be much faster than overall employment.

Photo courtesy flickr user of greenforall.org via the Creative Commons license.

In the News: Rewriting History

Jennifer Langston — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:02:19

When someone says "Klamath" I think these words: Water. Fish. Farms. Forest. Fights. It's a story I saw so often for so many years that I long ago lost interest. So I was delighted to find this weekend's story in the Oregonian that showed me a different side of Klamath County, Oregon.

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.

Photo courtesy of flickr user Tracy27 via the Creative Commons license.

The Wolves of Olympic National Park

Eric de Place — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:03:59

Update 10/20: Crosscut has a version of this post.

What happened to the Olympic Peninsula after its wolves were hunted to extinction in the 1920s? There's a fascinating new study (pdf) out on this question -- the first of its kind as far as I know. As it turns out, eliminating this one keystone species sent shockwaves through the whole ecosystem. Some of the effects were felt almost immediately after wolves were extirpated and some are only just now becoming clear.

It's a shame that reading articles like means hacking through verbiage that can feel as dense as an Olympic rainforest -- it's all "flow-induced shear stresses," "fluvial erosion," and "ungulate exclusion" -- because the study's content is incredibly important for lay people to understand. (Good ordinary language articles are here and here.) The upshot is that researchers have determined that the Olympic wolves were river-keepers, in an indirect but very real sense.

Here's how it worked. Once upon a time, healthy wolf populations kept the native elk herds lean. But when the wolves were killed off, the elk populations spiked (with a colossal and much-noticed-at-the-time boom in the 1930s). The booming elk herds spent much of their time in the lush river bottoms, cropping the living heck out of new tree growth and hammering the seedlings of cottonwood, bigleaf maple, and even some conifers. Those young trees had stabilized the banks along the region's fast-flowing rivers. And without new saplings and their fortifying root-systems, the rivers began to erode their banks, eventually channelizing and "braiding" as they spread out along the newly-unstable valley floors.

By comparing places where Olympic rivers are relatively free of elk (owing to hunting or other causes), the researchers were able to document substantial differences in the shapes and dynamics of the rivers. In fact, the researchers even hypothesize that the native salmon populations in Olympic National Park have been harmed by a river system that is less supportive of certain invertebrates.

If you've hiked along the wilderness Olympic rivers, particularly on the rainforest side, you've no doubt marveled at the clean meadow-like glades where old alders and bigleaf maples reach for sky amid grassy meadows. There are few young or intermediate-age trees. They're lovely places but also symptoms, perhaps, of something missing from the wilderness. Maybe you've even seen the big Roosevelt elk there, cropping away at the green growth. You've certainly never seen wolves there as travelers in the Olympics once did.

Luckily, there's a solution at hand. We should restore wolves to the Olympic Peninsula just as we have successfully done in the Rocky Mountains. If wolves were returned to their home in the Olympic forests, we might expect that the next several decades would mean a gradual restoration. Young maples and cottonwoods might thrive again in river bottoms, knitting stronger river banks, and improving the health of the salmon nurseries. I'll bet a dozen (or a hundred) other things would happen too -- wolf-connected effects that we're not even aware of now.

The good news is that wolves are already returning to the state. But while gray wolves have begun a natural reintroduction of eastern Washington and eastern Oregon, it is unlikely that they will bridge the relatively developed areas west of the Cascade Mountains to reach the Peninsula. In any case, the Olympic wolves were probably slightly different from their interior cousins: they were likely a coastal subspecies of gray wolf, very similar or identical to the wolves that still range in British Columbia's coastal regions. These northern coastal wolves, by the way, would make an ideal transplant population.

This study (pdf) of Olympic National Park comes from Oregon State University -- the same folks who brought to light the fascinating ripple-effect of ecosystem restoration that occurred when wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park.

I Can See Clearcuts Now

Eric de Place — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:05:45

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?

Because back in the day we used satellite images to monitor clearcutting around Cascadia. We made pretty nifty maps -- some of them animated -- showing 30 years of cutting. Here's one that we made for a section of the southern Oregon coast.

All that red shows clearcutting since the early 1970s. And, yes, it's a lot of clearcutting.

These maps made a bit of a splash, and we were intending to update them every year or two. But then the imagery from the satellite became defective; and rather than fix the satellite, the US government opted to redeploy the money to the Mars space program (at least that was the word at the time).

We were bummed out.

But with the wealth of imagery available from Google Maps (not to mention Google Earth), it seems almost possible to use Google's free public images to construct a new and ongoing analysis that would track clearcutting as often as the images are updated. By calculating acreages it should be possible to develop an ongoing forestry score -- with supplementary pictures! -- to show how logging practices are actually happening. No doubt there would be some technical issues to sort out, but I don't think it's anything that some tech-savvy map-genius type couldn't handle.

Anyway, it's intriguing stuff.

Credit for this post really belongs with Clark; he came up with the idea.

Burning Slash for Electricity

Clark Williams-Derry — Tue, 27 May 2008 11:55:53

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.

Just running the numbers a bit -- and remember, these are order-of magnitude estimates, so use them at your own risk...

First off, let's assume that the slash in those 250 acres is fairly representative of yield across the state. That's a huge assumption, obviously, and it's probably wrong. But we're just playing around, right?
To power 37,500 homes for a full year, rather than just 8 hours, would require the slash from 3 x 365 x 250 acres = 273,750 acres of land. (In comparison, Mt. Rainier National Park is about 236,000 acres.)
Excluding wilderness, parks, and other protected areas, there are about 18 million acres of forest land in the state of Washington. (See here for more precise estimates.)
Assuming 50 year rotations, that makes about 360,000 acres of logged forest per year. (Remember, I'm a forestry newbie, so I have no idea if 50 years is a reasonable estimate for the average rotation length of the average forest in the state.)
If we used all of the slash from those 360,000 acres to generate electricity, it would power about 50,000 homes for a year, give or take.
The census says that there are about 2.6 million housing units in Washington State -- meaning that if the forest slash from all logged land in the state were burned for electricity, it could provide about 2 percent of the state's residential power needs. Note that this doesn't include the use of electricity in office buildings, factories, and smelters -- all of which are substantial.

So it looks like forest slash is small beans. That's not an argument that burning slash for power is a bad idea; I have no opinion on the matter, really. But it does suggest that it's a bit unrealistic to hope that slash will play more than a bit part in our energy future. Still, it's a worthwhile experiment; as long as forest soils don't suffer, every little bit of non-fossil energy can help.

Photo by Flickr user Joseph Robinson, distributed under a Creative Commons license.

Wild Sky Wins

Eric de Place — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:16:21

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.

Guilt-free Hiking

Eric de Place — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:00:43

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.

BC, Natives Work Together to Plan Taku's Future

Kristin Kolb — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:58:30

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.)

Beetle Mania

Adam Brown — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:41:35

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.

Good news about declining populations can't begin to compensate for the damage done to date. But good news is good news.

The ministry's annual survey on the pine beetle's spread in 2007 seems to indicate that it is slowing, said Doug Routledge, COFI's vice-president.

The survey shows that the pine beetle had infected 710 million cubic metres of lodgepole pine forests at the end of 2007, up from 582 million cubic metres at the end of 2006.

Routledge said that is an increase by a factor of 1.3, which is below the growth rate of 1.4 to 1.6 over the past five years leading officials to believe the beetle's spread is past its peak "The primary reason is that it has pretty much eaten itself out of house and home," Routledge added. 'It's running out of food.' (Times Colonist)."

Maybe we're just hungry for some sunny news amid the gloomy picture, but the peaking of the beetle infestation does represent a sliver of hope -- not only for the industries and communities that rely upon timber, but for fragile salmon habitats as well.

Since the infestation began, forest cover along the salmon runs has decreased. Forest cover regulates the temperature and levels of streams and rivers home to the salmon runs. Boughs of the dead, beetle infected pine trees do not "intercept snow and rain, or shade the forest floor to slow the spring snow-melt (Times Colonist)." As a result, the snow packs are greater and melt faster, causing flash floods and higher river flows that erode the stream beds of the salmon runs. The lack of shade over these habitats also causes the water's temperature to rise, decreasing the salmon's food supply and creating a difficult environment for the salmon to thrive in. However, with the beetle's declining population, efforts to protect and rebuild salmon habitats get a boost.

The beetles' smorgasbord has run out - they've taken "all you can eat" to a new extreme and they've left the place in shambles. But it looks like the end of the Mountain Pine Beetle epidemic may be near - at least this phase of it.

Good news for British Columbia...bad news for coleopterologists (or do they get excited about anything beetles do? - beetle mania?).

Imagery credit: Allan L. Carroll, Ph.D.Research Scientist Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Pacific Forestry Centre, Victoria, BC.

The Problem With Tar Sands

Eric de Place — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 13:06:02

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.

The Problem With Biofuels

Eric de Place — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:41:07

Earlier this month, two independent studies in the journal Science dropped a bomb into the already controversial world of biofuels. To cop the New York Times' lede, the studies found that:

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account...

Yesterday afternoon, when I finally got around to reading the articles, my chin hit the floor. The NYT was far too gentle: they don't just show that biofuels have worse GHG emissions than gasoline, but drastically worse emissions -- and for virtually every type of biofuel, including cellulosic ethanol (except in some highly specific conditions).

For really the first time, the studies are factoring in the carbon lost from land conversion. The authors argue (persuasively, in my opinion), that it's crooked accounting to simply do a GHG analysis of crops versus petroleum. After all, the crops used for biofuels don't grow in a vacuum. What really happens is that new land -- Indonesian rainforest, Brazilian woodlands, American grassland -- is cleared and ploughed to make way for biofuel feedstock crops. Existing agricultural land, of course, is already in production for food and fiber.

The clearing is a death sentence for wildlife in some of the most biodiverse places on earth. It also releases huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere -- called the "carbon debt." In fact, the carbon debt run up by land conversion is, in most cases, far more than is saved by subsituting biofuels for petroleum products. (Details on the studies' are below the jump; abstracts are here and here.) It would take decades at best, centuries at worst, to repay the carbon debt. And this when we need steep emissions reductions now.

Look, I'm sure there will be further debate, and maybe even counter-studies. (The biofuels industry appears to be fighting back already.) But in a way, uncertainty could be the real problem for biofuels, as well as for the latest fad in climate policy, low-carbon fuel standards. Either biofuels are a climate catastrophe, as these studies indicate; or we have no idea what biofuels do to the climate because experts don't agree. And that second option is the best case scenario, at least in the near term.

The worst case scenario, of course, is what the studies show. Corn ethanol is plain awful, needing many decades to repay its carbon debt even when planted in abandoned cropland. But corn ethanol is benign compared to biodiesel. The best biodiesel scenario from the study (soybeans planted on Brazilian grassland) would take nearly four decades to repay its carbon debt. Other biodiesel scenarios are even worse: palm oil planted on former southeast Asian tropical rainforest takes 86 years to repay its carbon debt; biodiesel from soybeans on tropical rainforest would take at least 300 years; biodiesel from palm oil on peatland rainforest would take more than 400.

To be fair, the authors point out that future generations of very specific kinds of cellulosic ethanol -- municipal waste or desert algae, for example -- could have positive GHG benefits. (And, presumably, the boutique biodiesel from french fry oil, which can never scale to meaningful production levels, is not quite so awful.) But the hope for a benign biofuel future is predicated on our demand for fuel not inducing futher land conversions. And that's a very big "if."

In any case, those future climate-friendly fuel sources are mostly hypotheticals. Real-world stuff isn't so promising. I quote:

...if American corns fields of average yield were converted to switchgrass for [cellulosic] ethanol, replacing that corn would still trigger emissions from land use change that would take 52 years to pay back and increase emissions over 30 years by 50%.

Ouch.

I'm bearish on biofuels. And if you want my opinion, biofuels are really just the latest in a long line of Hail Mary's that try to avoid ending Americans' car addiction. There's always a technological miracle around the corner -- just wait a few more years -- then we'll have plug-in hybrids running off clean or surplus energy; then we'll HyperCars or FreedomCars that can cross the continent on a tank; then we'll have Segways that will revolutionize personal travel. I could go on. In the meantime, we avoid the bread and butter fixes we've known about for decades, and we keep sending ever greater amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

This is really happening. Right now, maybe the single biggest threat to good cap-and-trade programs like the Western Climate Initiative is that policymakers will avoid capping transportation fuels, which are easily our largest source of emissions. The latest attempt to punt involves adopting a low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS), which is supposed to be a big boon for biofuels. (Depending on its construction, an LCFS can work like a cap on absolute emissions or a cap on the intensity of emissions.) The LCFS would quantify the lifecycle carbon emissions of every fuel stream entering the economy. To begin with, that's an analysis of mind-bending complexity. But now, in light of the new studies in Science, it appears that an honest LCFS would either favor conventional oil or simply be technically infeasible because the accounting is so incredibly complex.

Or -- and this is the biggest danger -- the LCFS would use an accounting like we've seen in the past: one that favors biofuels, but that downplays land conversion or other factors. In that case, the carbon reductions could be a chimera.

There is a very real chance that LCFS, or something like it, will trump a general cap on transportation emissions. If that happens I am going to start calling it cap-and-pray. Pray that some new miracle solution can keep us all in our cars with no climate consequences.

For the record, I don't pretend to be an expert in biofuels or in life-cycle analysis. But remember, these are peer-reviewed papers by respected researchers in a top science journal. (And in case you're wondering, the authors' affiliations don't indicate a prediliction to anti-ag positions; they hail from places like Iowa State University, the University of Minnesota, and the USDA.)

Finally, I've hunted around a little -- not a lot -- for counters to these studies. I couldn't find much, but please do share if you know of any! In the meantime, my take is that the findings are damning, even if they're not the last word on the subject.

***

Postscript: A commenter points me to a letter from two government researchers that objects to one of the two studies (the Searchinger et al. study). To drastically summarize here, the letter makes the following principal claims: 1) US ethanol production won't rearch the levels used in the study because of current legislation; 2) Average corn yields in the US and other countries will increase, meaning that less land will be converted; 3) Brazil and China will not convert much additional land because of current legislation and practice in those countries; 4) Ethanol refining processes can become more efficient in the future; and 5) There's a lot of biomass already available from forest growth, crop residues, and other sources.

Without spending too much more time on the keyboard for this post, I think that most of letter's claims are debatable, at best. (But go read it for yourself, and tell me why I'm wrong!) In any case, the letter concludes by acknowledging what I take to be the central problem -- uncertainty:

...indirect land use changes are much more difficult to model than direct land use changes... While scientific assessment of land use change issues is urgently needed in order to design policies that prevent unintended consequences from biofuel production, conclusions regarding the GHG emissions effects of biofuels based on speculative, limited land use change modeling may misguide biofuel policy development.

Exactly. But "limited land use change modeling" is what we've seen in the past. That's what got us into biofuels. Uncertainty of this nature is a double-edged sword, one that should cut against biofuels until we're confident they're not a danger.

How Trees Cause Pollution

Eric de Place — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:48:46

Backyard trees may not accomplish much, but forests soak up vast amounts of carbon. In fact, some people argue that trees and native plant communities may be one of our best remedies for climate emissions. Unfortunately, forests not only store a lot of carbon, they can also emit a lot carbon.

Take California's redwood country, for example. Data from the North Coast Air Basin shows astonishing carbon emissions from a typical year of forest fires in just three counties. Enough, in fact, to equal 367,000 average American cars on the road. And this in a region with just 167,000 souls.

Here's the down-low. Experts estimate that forest fires in Del Norte, Humboldt, and Trinity Counties were responsible for more than 1.8 million tons of carbon-dioxide over the decade from 1994 to 2003. Not only that, but fires kicked out more than 56,000 tons of methane, which is roughly 23 times as climate-potent as carbon-dioxide. All that adds up to nearly 2 million tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent climate pollution. (Major hat tip to Lynn Jungwirth, who emailed me the data.)

Of course, the emisions from fires is really only half the story of forests. It's debits, but not the credits. Northern California's forests stored carbon during that period too ("sequestered" it, as they say in the biz). Just how much? Well, it's hard to be certain. And that's part of the problem.

As North America gets serious about climate change, there's growing interest in understanding the role of forests (and land use change more generally). That's as it should be. But we should also acknowledge the big uncertainties that are inherent in dynamic ecosystems.

One big risk is counting forest carbon storage as a plus -- an "offset" to our emissions -- but then not counting their emissions when they burn. We shouldn't treat trees as permant carbon storage if, in fact, they're not.

And in truth, at least as I understand the state of play, it's very hard to know the extent to which forests are permanent carbon storage vehicles. In fact, some research suggests that climbing temperatures may turn big carbon sinks, like Pacific Northwest forests, into carbon sources.

Depending on how climate change plays out, hotter (and drier and longer) summers could lead to more wildfires, and therefore more emissions. Spreading forest pests, probably linked to warmer winters, can kill vast tracts of forest, simultaneously reducing carbon uptake and increasing susceptibility to fires and logging.

So before we start banking on forests to do our climate work for us, we need to get serious about answering some quesions. Do forests permanently store carbon? And, if so, how can we verifiy the amount (and changes to the amount over time)?

Surely afforestation adds to the world's carbon storage, but what about a mature forest? Is it a carbon sink, a source, or a steady state?

Now, I'm not saying that the right solution to ignore forests. Not at all. The questions I'm posing all have answers. We just need to figure out what they are.

Timely update, 2/13: In yesterday's throne speech, BC premier Gordon Campbell announced that the province will use forest offsets to help address climate emissions. The Vancouver Sun article is pretty short on details, but it sounds like the offsets would come mostly from afforestation projects.