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Food or Biofuel Production?
World biodiesel production has some alarming and negative consequences. By Lester R. Brown July 5, 2013 The grain required to fill a 25-gallon fuel tank of a sport utility vehicle with ethanol just once would feed one person for a whole year. A press release from Earth Policy Institute . Earth Policy Institute will be releasing Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity by Lester R. Brown in installments. Look for a new chapter about every other week. Supporting data, videos, and slideshows are available for free download, here . At the time of the Arab oil export embargo in the 1970s, the importing countries were beginning to ask themselves if there were alternatives to oil. In a number of countries, particularly the United States, several in Europe, and Brazil, the idea of growing crops to produce fuel for cars was appealing. The modern biofuels industry was launched. This was the beginning of what would become one of the great tragedies of history. Brazil was able to create a thriving fuel ethanol program based on sugarcane, a tropical plant. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, however, in the United States the feedstock was corn. Between 1980 and 2005, the amount of grain used to produce fuel ethanol in the United States gradually expanded from 1 million to 41 million tons. Then came Hurricane Katrina, which disrupted Gulf-based oil refineries and gasoline supply lines in late August 2005. As gasoline prices in the United States quickly climbed to $3 a gallon, the conversion of a $2 bushel of corn, which can be distilled into 2.8 gallons of ethanol, became highly profitable. The result was a rush to raise capital and build distilleries. From November 2005 through June 2006, ground was broken for a new ethanol plant in the United States every nine days. From July through September, the construction pace accelerated to one every five days. And in October 2006, it was one every three days. Between 2005 and 2011, the grain used to produce fuel for cars climbed from 41 million to 127 million tons, nearly a third of the U.S. grain harvest. The United States is trying to replace oil fields with corn fields to meet part of its automotive fuel needs. The massive diversion of grain to fuel cars has helped drive up food prices, leaving low-income consumers everywhere to suffer some of the most severe food price inflation in history. As of mid-2012, world wheat, corn, and soybean prices were roughly double their historical levels. The appetite for grain to fuel cars is seemingly insatiable. The grain required to fill a 25-gallon fuel tank of a sport utility vehicle with ethanol just once would feed one person for a whole year. The grain turned into ethanol in the United States in 2011 could have fed, at average world consumption levels, some 400 million people. But even if the entire U.S. grain harvest were turned into ethanol, it would only satisfy 18 percent of current gasoline demand. With its enormous growth in distilling capacity, the United States quickly overtook Brazil to become the new world leader in biofuels. In 2011, the United States produced 14 billion gallons of ethanol and Brazil produced under 6 billion gallons; together they accounted for 87 percent of world output. The 14 billion gallons of U.S. grain-based ethanol met roughly 6 percent of U.S. gasoline demand. Other countries producing ethanol from food crops, though in relatively small amounts, include China, Canada, France, and Germany. Most ethanol production growth has been concentrated in the last several years. In 1980, the world produced scarcely 1 billion gallons of fuel ethanol. By 2000, the figure was 4.5 billion gallons. It was still increasing, albeit slowly, expanding to 8.2 billion gallons in 2005. But between then and 2011, production jumped to 23 billion gallons. A number of countries, including the United States, are also producing biodiesel from oil-bearing crops. World biodiesel production grew from a mere 3 million gallons in 1991 to just under 1 billion gallons in 2005. During the next six years it jumped to nearly 6 billion gallons, increasing sixfold. Still, worldwide production of biodiesel is less than one fourth that of ethanol. The production of biodiesel is much more evenly distributed among countries than that of ethanol. The top five producers are the United States, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, and France, with production ranging from 840 million gallons per year in the United States to 420 million gallons in France. A variety of crops can be used to produce biodiesel. In Europe, where sunflower seed oil, palm oil, and rapeseed oil are leading table oils, rapeseed is used most often for biodiesel. Similarly, in the United States the soybean is the leading table oil and biodiesel feedstock. Elsewhere, palm oil is widely used both for food and to produce biodiesel. Although production from oil palms is limited to tropical and subtropical regions, the crop yields much more biodiesel per acre than do temperate-zone oilseeds such as soybeans and rapeseed. However, one disturbing consequence of rising biofuel production is that new oil palm plantations are coming at the expense of tropical forests. And any land that is devoted to producing biofuel crops is not available to produce food. Not only are biofuels helping raise food prices, and thus increasing the number of hungry people, most make little sense from an energy efficiency perspective. Although ethanol can be produced from any plant, it is much more efficient and much less costly to use sugar- and starch-bearing crops. But even among these crops the efficiency varies widely. The ethanol yield per acre from sugarcane is nearly 600 gallons, a third higher than that from corn. This is partly because sugarcane is grown in tropical and subtropical regions and it grows year-round. Corn, in contrast, has a growing season of 120 days or so. In terms of energy efficiency, grain-based ethanol is a clear loser. For sugarcane, the energy yield that is, the energy embodied in the ethanol can be up to eight times the energy invested in producing the biofuel. In contrast, the energy return on energy invested in producing corn-based ethanol is only roughly 1.5 to 1, a dismal return. For biodiesel, oil palm is far and away the most energy-efficient crop, yielding roughly nine times as much energy as is invested in producing biodiesel from it. The energy return for biodiesel produced from soybeans and rapeseed is about 2.5 to 1. In terms of land productivity, an acre of oil palms can produce over 500 gallons of fuel per year, more than six times that produced from soybeans or rapeseed. Growing even the most productive fuel crops, however, still means either diverting land from other crops or clearing more land. The capacity to convert enormous volumes of grain into fuel means that the price of grain is now more closely tied to the price of oil than ever before. If the price of fuel from grain drops below that from oil, then investment in converting grain into fuel will increase. Thus, if the price of oil were to reach, say, $200 a barrel, there would likely be an enormous additional investment in ethanol distilleries to convert grain into fuel. If the price of corn rises high enough, however, as it may well do, distilling grain to produce fuel may no longer be profitable. One of the consequences of integrating the world food and fuel economies is that the owners of the world’s 1 billion motor vehicles are pitted against the world’s poorest people in competition for grain. The winner of this competition will depend heavily on income levels. Whereas the average motorist has an annual income over $30,000, the incomes of the 2 billion poorest people in the world are well under $2,000. Rising food prices can quickly translate into social unrest. As grain prices were doubling from 2007 to mid-2008, food protests and riots broke out in many countries. Economic stresses in the form of rising food prices are translating into political stresses, putting governments in some countries under unmanageable pressures. The U.S. State Department reports food unrest in some 60 countries between 2007 and 2009. Among these were Afghanistan, Yemen, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Haiti. International food assistance programs are also hit hard by rising grain prices. Since the budgets of food aid agencies are set well in advance, a rise in prices shrinks food assistance precisely when more help is needed. The U.N. World Food Programme, which supplies emergency food aid to more than 60 countries, has to cut shipments as prices soar. Meanwhile, over 7,000 children are dying each day from hunger and related illnesses. When governments subsidize food-based biofuel production, they are in effect spending taxpayers’ money to raise costs at the supermarket checkout counter. In the United States, the production of fuel ethanol was encouraged by a tax credit granted to fuel blenders for each gallon of ethanol they blended with gasoline. This tax credit expired at the end of 2011. Still in place, however, is the Renewable Fuel Standard, which is seen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as part of a strategy to help recharge the rural American economy. This mandate requires that biofuel use ramp up to 36 billion gallons annually by 2022. Of this total, 16 billion gallons are slated to come from cellulosic feedstocks, such as cornstalks, grass, or wood chips. Yet for the foreseeable future, production of those cellulose-based fuels has little chance of reaching such levels. Producing ethanol from sugars or starches like corn or sugarcane is a one-step process that converts the feedstock to ethanol. But producing ethanol from cellulosic materials is a two-step process: first the material must be broken down into sugar or starch, and then it is converted into ethanol. Furthermore, cellulosic feedstocks like corn stalks are much bulkier than feedstocks like corn kernels, so transporting them from distant fields to a distillery is much more costly. Removing agricultural residues such as corn stalks or wheat straw from the field to produce ethanol deprives the soil of needed organic matter. The unfortunate reality is that the road to this ambitious cellulosic biofuel goal is littered with bankrupt firms that tried and failed to develop a process that would produce an economically viable fuel. Despite having the advantage of not being directly part of the food supply, cellulosic ethanol has strong intrinsic characteristics that put it at a basic disadvantage compared with grain ethanol, so it may never become economically viable. The mandate from the European Union (EU) requiring that 10 percent of its transportation energy come from renewable sources, principally biofuels, by 2020 is similarly ambitious. Among international agribusiness firms, this is seen as a reason to acquire land, mostly in Africa, on which to produce fuel for export to Europe. Since Europe relies primarily on diesel fuel for its cars, the investors are looking at crops such as the oil palm and jatropha, a relatively low-yielding oil-bearing shrub, as a source of diesel fuel. There is growing opposition to this EU goal from environmental groups, the European Environment Agency, and many other stakeholders. They object to the deforestation and the displacement of the poor that often results from such land grabbing. They are also concerned that, by and large, biofuels do not deliver the promised climate benefits. The biofuel industry and its proponents have argued that greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels are lower than those from gasoline, but this has been challenged by a number of scientific studies. Indeed, there is growing evidence that biofuel production may contribute to global warming rather than ameliorate it. A study led by Nobel prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany reports that the nitrogen fertilizers used to produce biofuel crops release nitrous oxide emissions large enough to cause climate warming instead of cooling. A report from Rice University that carefully examined the greenhouse gas emissions question concluded that it is uncertain whether existing biofuels production provides any beneficial improvement over traditional gasoline, after taking into account land use changes and emissions of nitrous oxide. Legislation giving biofuels preferences on the basis of greenhouse gas benefits should be avoided. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences also voiced concern about biofuel production’s negative effects on soils, water, and the climate. There is some good news on the issue of food or fuel. An April 2012 industry report notes that the world ethanol engine continues to sputter. U.S. ethanol production likely peaked in 2011 and is projected to drop 2 percent in 2012. An even greater decline in U.S. ethanol production is likely in 2013 as oil prices weaken and as heat and drought in the U.S. Midwest drive corn prices upward. For many distillers, the profit margin disappeared in 2012. In early July 2012, Valero Energy Corporation, an oil company and major ethanol producer, reported it was idling the second of its 10 ethanol distilleries. Numerous other distilleries are on the verge of shutting down. If the ethanol mandate were phased out, U.S. distillers would have even less confidence in the future marketability of ethanol. In a world of widely fluctuating oil and grain prices, ethanol production would not always be profitable. Beyond this, the use of automotive fuel in the United States, which peaked in 2007, fell 11 percent by 2012. Young people living in cities are simply not as car-oriented as their parents were. They are not part of the car culture. This helps explain why the size of the U.S. motor vehicle fleet, after climbing for a century, peaked at 250 million in 2008. It now appears that the fleet size will continue to shrink through this decade. In addition, the introduction of more stringent U.S. auto fuel-efficiency standards means that gasoline use by new cars sold in 2025 will be half that of new cars sold in 2010. As older, less efficient cars are retired and fuel use declines, the demand for grain-based ethanol for blending will also decline. Within the automobile sector, a major move to plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars will further reduce the use of gasoline. If this shift is accompanied by investment in thousands of wind farms to feed cheap electricity into the grid, then cars could run largely on electricity for the equivalent cost of 80¢ per gallon of gasoline. There is also a growing public preference for walking, biking, and using public transportation wherever possible. This reduces not only the demand for cars and gasoline but also the paving of land for roads and parking lots. Whether viewed from an environmental or an economic vantage point, we would all benefit by shifting from liquid fuels to electrically driven vehicles. Using electricity from wind farms, solar cells, or geothermal power plants to power cars will dramatically reduce carbon emissions. We now have both the electricity-generating technologies and the automotive technologies to create a clean, carbon-free transportation system, one that does not rely on either the use of oil or the conversion of food crops into fuel. Read more: http://www.motherear…2#ixzz2Yk9vmPkF Continue reading
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California’s Market for Hard-to-Verify Carbon Offsets Could Let Industry Pollute as Usual
By Maureen Nandini Mitra and Michael Stoll San Francisco Public Press Earth Island Journal — Jul 8 2013 – 2:21pm Timber, dairy and chemical companies line up to sell credits to biggest emitters One hot day this spring John Buckley scrambled up a dusty slope of a patch of deforested land in the middle of California’s Stanislaus National Forest in the Sierra Nevada, five miles west of Yosemite National Park, and surveyed the bleak landscape: 20 acres of blackened tree stumps and the shriveled remains of undergrowth. On neighboring ridges, similar brown expanses dotted the green forest canopy. “This,” he said, spreading his arms wide, “is resource management.” The denuded clearing is on a tract of private forestland owned by timber giant Sierra Pacific Industries that is close to being approved as a sort of carbon bank under California’s new cap-and-trade scheme. It will soon grow into a plantation of mostly Douglas fir, ponderosa pine and cedar. Based on calculations of how much carbon the new and old trees in this forest area will remove from the atmosphere, the timber giant will soon be able to sell carbon credits, which regulators call “offsets,” to the largest California polluters so they can compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions. Looking to make a profit from their environmental practices, companies in forestry and other industries are rushing to meet the demand. Buckley, an environmental activist from Tuolumne County, is dismayed that projects like these — that involve clearing out old, diverse forests and replanting the area with a handful of quick-growing timber varieties — are being considered as a means to enable California industries to emit more pollutants into the air. Many environmentalists say that because it is notoriously difficult to prove that such projects actually reduce the state’s overall carbon footprint, California should proceed slowly in approving a vast expansion of the cap-and-trade market. The plan is to start the Compliance Offset Program this summer. Sellers include some of the largest forestland owners in the U.S., dairy farms and companies that neutralize greenhouse effect-producing refrigerants. The program might also expand to other activities, such as methane capture from mining and rice farming. Proponents say that by providing incentives to voluntarily reduce emissions and use new technology, the offset program could help California meet its legal requirement, set in 2006, to reduce its carbon footprint from all sources by about 16 percent by 2020, and even more in later years. But critics call offsets a loophole that could undermine an effective cap-and-trade system. They say pledges of reductions that are not required by law often cannot be considered real, since companies might have made them anyway without the extra money from selling offsets. Left unchecked, the critics warn, poorly measured offsets could lead to an overall increase in California’s emissions. Depending on the future price of offsets, the addition of these credits from around the country and possibly abroad could swamp the existing regulated emissions market. Independent environmental economists now estimate that offsets could grow to more than 200 million tons of carbon dioxide or the equivalent in other greenhouse gases — representing at least 50 percent of the program. And under certain supply-and-demand conditions, state trading rules could allow offsets to cover 100 percent of the reductions required under cap-and-trade. In those circumstances, no power plant, cement factory or refinery would have to cut its emissions to comply with the carbon cap. Offsets “create the illusion that we are doing something to mitigate climate change,” said Kathleen McAfee, a professor of international relations at San Francisco State University, who studies global markets for environmental services. Instead, she said, the government should impose strict regulations on fossil fuel extraction and invest in renewable energy technology. Dave Clegern, a spokesman for the California Air Resources Board, the main state agency writing regulations to fight global warming, argued that carbon reductions can take many forms and should not be limited to one accounting method. He said several other regulatory programs in the state also aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emissions cover many of the same sectors regulated by cap-and-trade. “Frankly, as long as the emissions are reduced we are achieving our goals,” Clegern said. “Whether that’s done with offsets, whether that’s done with allowances, whether that’s done with reductions, there obviously would have to be some reduction in there to achieve this.” BILLIONS OF DOLLARS The cap-and-trade program, which went into effect in January, covers about 80 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, those emitted by the biggest electricity, industrial and fuel facilities. It sets an annual limit on total emissions that California’s largest polluters can release. The total supply of pollution allowances falls each year, helping the state reach emissions targets established by the landmark Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. The offsets program allows regulated industries to use offsets to cover up to 8 percent of their carbon emissions. But analysts say that based on the rules, that figure could exceed the reductions required statewide for the entire cap-and-trade program. That means offsets — until now offered mostly as voluntary credits to companies hoping to burnish their green image — could soon become a major part of California’s lucrative mandatory program. Experts estimate that the higher price for California’s state-issued carbon allowances, currently more than $14 per metric ton, make the use of cheaper offsets, projected to bring costs down to about $10, especially attractive. If California industries do require at least 200 million offsets over the next eight years it would make them worth more than $2 billion on the market. The high financial stakes make accurate measurement of offsets a key concern. Cap-and-trade sets carbon allowance targets based on gases detected from smokestacks at the state’s 350 largest polluting companies at about 600 facilities. By contrast, offsets are calculated as comparisons with predicted future “business-as-usual” levels of pollution. This modeling requires teams of scientists and economists to anticipate choices that companies would have made had the offset payments not been available. And as any economist will admit, predicting the future is hard. Even when emissions cuts are proved to prevent the business-as-usual growth scenario, the exact amount of carbon dioxide stored or released comes with great scientific uncertainty. Supporters of offsets concede that it is hard to verify whether the offsets are valid. The use of offsets is also associated with unintended consequences such as increases in other pollutants locally, loss of biodiversity in timber plantations and reduced incentives to invest in local mitigation technologies. That is why some scientists and environmental advocates say cap-and-trade should not incorporate offsets. “The integrity of the offsets is the integrity of the cap-and-trade program, because of how strongly the program is relying on them,” said Brian Nowicki, California climate policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group headquartered in Tucson, Ariz. FOGGY FUTURE Offsets preapproved for California’s cap-and-trade program are thus far restricted to U.S.-based projects in four sectors — industrial forestry, urban forestry, dairy digesters and destruction of ozone-depleting substances. The Air Resources Board has developed elaborate protocols for each. The first round of credits, totaling 6 million metric tons of carbon from 45 offset projects, are expected to go on sale after a final staff review, according to a Reuters Point Carbon analysis. The board is considering adding offsets from other domestic sectors, such as methane capture from rice plantations and mines. It will expand the program internationally, linking up with Quebec’s offset program in 2014. It is also considering including offsets from a controversial program called Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, or REDD, that offers carbon credits for preserving forests and plantations in Mexico, Colombia and other developing countries. One obvious benefit of offsets for polluters is lower-cost mitigation. Since global warming can be addressed by reducing greenhouse gases anywhere, offsets proponents say innovative projects out of state or in other countries can achieve reductions more cheaply. “You want to make the program as cost-effective as possible to reduce the economic burden of the program for California consumers,” said Gary Gero, president of Climate Action Reserve, a Los Angeles-based organization that helped California design the four offset protocols and one of two groups screening companies seeking California credits. He said offsets offer businesses now outside cap-and-trade an incentive to curb emissions through innovation. Critics say this reasoning ignores myriad uncertainties that beset offsets, including measurement, verification and environmental justice concerns. The conundrum facing climate offsets policy is the debate over “additionality” — whether emissions reductions would have been made anyway. Carbon-saving technologies include installing methane-capture devices at large dairy farms or keeping trees standing for 100 years instead of 50. But there is no counterfactual world against which to measure which reductions are real. In many instances they must accept offset developers at their word. Economist David Roland-Holst at the University of California, Berkeley, said background changes in consumer demand for products and services with a lower carbon footprint make additionality difficult to determine. “Rising energy prices and a rapidly increasing public desire for environmental quality will drive emerging markets toward pollution mitigation,” he wrote in a recent paper on sustainable economics. But Roland-Holst notes that relying on offsets also produces “unwelcome secondary effects.” If industries meet the majority of their cap-and-trade requirements through out-of-state offsets, local air pollution in California’s industrial areas would worsen. In June 2012, two environmental groups, Citizens Climate Lobby and Our Children’s Earth Foundation, sued the state. They said offsets “credit emission reductions that would occur or have already occurred without the incentive of offset credit payments,” resulting in “false accounting of progress.” They sought a court order prohibiting offsets trading. But a San Francisco Superior Court judge rejected the petition in January, saying the judiciary could not rewrite the statute. Our Children’s Earth Foundation filed an appeal on May 24. A hearing date has not been set. State officials say that they have developed stringent standards for additionality, and that offsets are subject to continuous monitoring. If the state finds flawed credits, they will be invalidated. “There are third-party verifiers who have been certified by us and there are more of them being trained,” said Air Resources Board spokesman Clegern, adding that independent experts will do on-site inspections. “If ARB finds malfeasance by any party that developed or verified the offset,” he said, the state “can take enforcement action on that party.” LARGER THAN THEY SEEM Steven Cliff, manager of the cap-and-trade program at the Air Resources Board, said it was “premature” to make assumptions about the scope of the offsets program. Offsets, he said, “can account for a pretty high portion of overall reductions. But under the most likely scenario, offsets would cover no more than 41 percent of the reductions.” Cliff based his assessment on a 2011 white paper by Adam Diamant, an energy and environment analyst at the nonpartisan, nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute. More recent assessments by Diamant and at least one other independent researcher, Barbara Haya, a fellow at the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic, show that offsets could represent a big chunk of the allowed emissions from industry — anywhere from 53 percent to 224 percent of required carbon reductions, measured cumulatively through the year 2020. Diamant said the range of projections is so wide because the calculations depend on several variables. The first is the overall cap. The state plans to block off a small portion of credits each year to ensure a steady price for allowances. This reduces California’s emissions limit. But if demand for allowances is high, the state will release reserves starting at $40 per metric ton. Other complementary state policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gases might further reduce emissions. These include energy efficiency, mandates on electric companies to produce renewable energy, and the low-carbon fuel standard for vehicles. That would ease the reductions requirements under cap-and-trade. If reserve allowances were untouched and complementary policies achieved their targets, total allowed offsets could add up to more than twice the reductions needed to make cap-and-trade work. Achieving reductions from complementary programs achieves the same overall environmental goals, Diamant said. “So it’s not like nothing is happening.” But critics say that if industries can buy offsets to meet all their reductions requirements in the program’s first eight years, technological innovation could stagnate. They say it also deprives California of the environmental, economic and public health benefits that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger promised when the global warming law was passed in 2006. “The more offsets you allow to be used,” said Nowicki of the Center for Biological Diversity, “the more you put the program at risk.” FOREST OR TREE FARM? The risk is most evident in the case of forest offsets, which market analysts predict is the sector where the bulk of California offsets will be generated. “Forestry offers the greatest opportunity, but it is also by far the most complicated and challenging offset protocol,” said Belinda Morris, California director of the American Carbon Registry, another agency certifying offsets for the state. Environmentalists say the state’s forest protocol, which rewards carbon sequestration through reforestation, forest management and avoided conversion of forests to other uses, contains several fundamental flaws. The rules do not account for “critical carbon pools” on the forest floor. It also inadequately accounts for soil carbon released during logging, said Nowicki of the Center for Biological Diversity. The protocol only accounts for soil disturbance through “deep ripping, furrowing or plowing” on more than 25 percent of a project area, which can cover several thousand acres. The U.S. Department of Energy’s guidelines for voluntary greenhouse gas reporting estimates that one acre of typical California mixed-conifer forest contains 60 percent more carbon collectively stored in soil (19.2 tons), litter and duff (12.6 tons), down deadwood (2.6 tons), understory (0.9 tons) and standing deadwood (2.5 tons) than in live trees (25.4 tons). Nowicki said even conservative estimates like these show that if logging takes place on smaller parcels, soil disturbance could dramatically change the overall carbon storage capacity of the area: “The worst case would be that the project gets carbon credits in a year that they should actually show a carbon deficit if they had fully accounted for the soil carbon emissions.” California’s forest protocol is also the first in the world to credit durable wood products, including building materials and furniture, that lock carbon out of the atmosphere for a long time. The Air Resources Board says objections to state rules are premature because none of the proposed offsets have yet been approved for the market. LOBBYING REWARDS That the forest protocol allows timber companies to sell offsets by replanting trees in areas they clear-cut is among the most controversial of the state rules. This is called “even-aged management” — a stand of trees all planted at the same time, for future harvesting. Landowners may clear-cut up to 40 acres at once, as long as they show that tree growth elsewhere in the project area stores more carbon than is lost. But environmental groups contend that making even-aged management more profitable undermines less damaging alternative carbon storage options. Clear-cutting degrades forest ecosystems, water quality and wildlife diversity, scientists say. Initial drafts of the forest protocol disallowed clear-cutting. But around 2007, the timber industry began to seek more favorable rules. Some of the most aggressive lobbying came from Sierra Pacific Industries, California’s wealthiest timber company and largest private landowner. It made sure to regularly attend offset rule-making workshops hosted by Climate Action Reserve. The company, which owns nearly 1.9 million acres of timberland in California and Washington, has long sparred with environmentalists who oppose its clear-cutting practices. A recent report by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that between 2007 and 2008 Sierra Pacific Industries hired a Sacramento lobbying firm, California Strategies, for $37,500, to present its case. In September 2007, the company sent a letter to the Air Resources Board requesting rule changes to permit even-aged management and storage of carbon in wood products. The board accepted most of the recommendations. But the decision to include clear-cutting led to a schism among environmentalists. Nearly 50 groups, including the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Rainforest Action Network and Buckley’s Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center, urged the Air Resources Board to exclude offsets for clear-cutting. But other big green groups, such as the Nature Conservancy, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Pacific Land Trust supported the idea. “It’s a sticky situation, but it’s probably the best way to get landowners to follow better forest management practices,” said Paul Mason, vice president of policy and incentives at the Pacific Land Trust. Mark Pawlicki, director of corporate affairs and sustainability at Sierra Pacific Industries, said the company’s influence in framing the forestry protocol was completely aboveboard: “It was an open and public process, and there were many diverse groups involved. We just participated in the process like anyone else in the public would.” Rajinder Sahota, the Air Resources Board’s offsets policy manager, dismissed criticisms that carbon accounting was imprecise and that the standards for additionality were lacking. “With an approved forest project you can have situations where you are able to harvest within a geographical boundary and also sequester carbon at the same time,” Sahota said. WILDLIFE VS. CARBON Sierra Pacific Industries is now preparing four offset project areas on its land totaling 80,000 acres for approval by the Air Resources Board. This includes the clear-cut area near Yosemite that Buckley surveyed. The company owns about 130,000 acres of forestland in the area. Viewed from an airplane, its land resembles a patchwork quilt of green forests and brown clear-cut land that stretches for miles. Pawlicki said improved land management practices in the project areas would remove an additional 5.6 million tons of carbon from the air over 40 years. That would yield the Redding-based company $56 million at current offset prices. For Buckley, who finds clear signals of climate change in the Sierra Nevada’s rapidly receding snow line, this is worrisome news. “It is not the loss of a 20-acre block of forest that hurts any particular species, because most wildlife can move to another area when bulldozers and chainsaws destroy a block of forests,” he said. Aggressive logging and replanting, he explained, leads to “a loss of the biggest trees — most of the oaks, dogwoods, maples and alders, and most of the plant diversity. It wipes out blocks of habitat, one after another, that are important shelter and food sources for wildlife species that depend upon mature shady forest conditions.” Heavy logging has been associated with the disappearance of the American marten and Pacific fisher from that corner of the Sierra Nevada, and has affected populations of the spotted owl, the northern goshawk, the pileated woodpecker and the northern flying squirrel. “To somehow claim that this will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and have no impact on the environment,” Buckley said, “is ridiculous.” This story is part of a special report on California’s cap-and-trade program, in collaboration with Earth Island Journal and Bay Nature magazine. It was made possible by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. – See more at: http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2013-07/californias-market-for-hard-to-verify-carbon-offsets-could-let-industry-pollute-as-usual#sthash.j0HTp5dx.dpuf Continue reading
