Terrestrial vegetation is part of the planet's natural carbon cycle, i.e. forest fires are normal, expected, and necessary. Unlike oil and coal which hasn't historically extracted itself from deep underground to combust in the atmosphere.
It escapes me how anyone can consider it for long-term carbon storage/offsetting of excess atmospheric co2 derived from fossil fuels.
> It escapes me how anyone can consider it for long-term carbon storage/offsetting
Because, the occasional fire notwithstanding, it's not ephemeral. The canonical idea here is taking stripped land like farms, which has had all the carbon removed and burned off into the atmosphere, and replacing it (over a century or two) with a mature forest where very large amounts of carbon is stored in biomass. Yes, it burns sometimes. But over time forests house vastly more carbon than farms. So planting them is a win.
The ding against forest sequestration isn't fires, it's that they just don't work fast enough. It's not enough to scrub all the CO2 out of the air by 2221 AD, we need it done now.
That is... probably not correct? The forest stores x amount of carbon it has extracted while the forest exists, but forests are ephemeral over geological timescales, or in some cases even 100's of years. And while they suck up carbon while growing, they reach equilibrium relatively quickly, and then mostly just cycle it, not store much more.
It's great if you have a bunch of land that COULD have a forest, but currently doesn't for some reason (harvested?) - but there isn't a lot of that anymore. If it doesn't have it now because the last one burned, then it's just getting back to it's previous storage point, not really changing the overall equilibrium. You can't easily make more land be forestable, as it requires quite a lot of water, and most places with a lot of water already have forests.
> forests are ephemeral over geological timescales
No, forest cover over the whole planet has been pretty consistent over the past hundred million years or so. It's only recently that we've seen widespread continent-scale deforestation. A simple return to the geological status quo would effect a ton of carbon sequestration.
In fact in the longer term (since "forests" have existed anyway) forest have been absolutely enormous carbon sinks. It took until the end of the carboniferous (the name is not an accident!) ~300M years ago for bacteria to even be able to decompose wood. Most tree trunks from that era never rotted at all, they got buried and turned into coal.
The existence of forests is long lived, but any given forest is not. And the carbon locked up was because the forest died and was stuffed somewhere it could not rot or burn - which is what I was talking about sequestration wise. If not locked up that way, the carbon would have been released, and some new forest somewhere that eventually popped up would grab it. Net plus or minus though depends on the epoch, as sometimes it was rain forest earth, other times relatively barren.
CO2 isn't stored in dead trees, and forests do not just keep sequestering more and more. If you hold the number of trees constant, you're not affecting the carbon cycle. Living trees are a reservoir of carbon. If you increase the total number of trees, that increases the size of this reservoir. A forest "moving" over the course of time is a non-issue.
There are immense areas on Earth right now which were deforested within the past few centuries and are still perfectly capable of supporting forest today.
Here in California, 2 million acres burned last year and we may well have 2 million acres burn this year (we're up to at least a million). And before 1850, 2 million acres also burned, so we're essentially catching to the average - in the worst way possible. It's global warming and an abused, fire-based ecology, together. And people imagine "plant a tree" is the solution.
So forests here are very ephemeral indeed. The idea that people keeping a forest here forever would fight global warming is mind boggling.
You're mixing some stuff up here. Land area "burned" isn't literally deforested, don't be ridiculous. Only in the worst-affected regions of the biggest fires do you see acreage where the majority of trees are killed. And even there the trunks of killed trees tend to remain standing; their carbon doesn't enter the atmosphere until they fall and rot.
What happens in a fire isn't that the forest goes away, it's just that the dead fuel burns. In fact in a healthy forest, total carbon uptake significantly increases after a fire (as younger, faster-growing plants rush into the voids left by the removed cover).
Yes, "plant a tree" is absolutely part of the solution. It's not sufficient, but it's important. Turning forests into low-productivity farms is a disaster, and reversing that is a huge win for carbon balancing.
You're mixing some stuff up here. Land area "burned" isn't literally deforested, don't be ridiculous.
You're right and that doesn't change the basic point. That is: California and the West broad has an excess of trees and tree-density so keeping a given forest as a carbon sink is ridiculous and impractical.
In fact in a healthy forest, total carbon uptake significantly increases after a fire (as younger, faster-growing plants rush into the voids left by the removed cover).
California has insufficient wetland and grassland. Some of a given burned forest will become that. The ultimate, stable California ecology has a substantially lower density of trees than the existing ecology and so the fires that happen in that context tend to just clear the existing brush, leaving the trees, etc.
And still, doesn't change the basic point.
Edit: Reading my original post, I can't see where I claim fires "deforest" a region. Fires do lower tree density, how could they do otherwise?
Edit again: there's a limit to how much carbon a given landscape can absorb, determined by its ecology broadly speaking. Through fire suppression, California and the West have managed to go past that limit. It's biting us, I'm wearing two masks outside and this is the present reality. How hard is that grasp?
Depending on the area, some of them are destroyed. Yosemite has been changed dramatically by some of these fires for example, with the areas burned in 1990 still scrub manzanita instead of the 100+ ft tall timber that used to be there.
In some of these dryer areas, it isn’t clear it will ever come back the way it was, or if it does it may be hundreds of years from now.
Kinda? I think year to year stuff dies and turns to soil. At geological timescales, a forest adds a millimeter of soil over however long it takes, eventually that dead stuff turns into coal and oil. Can't quite dredge up the memories of nurse logs for evidence though.
I mean, we're not going to do that. Forests won't save us from global warming. But I'm pretty sure that's one of the mechanisms so much carbon got tucked away.
I mean, there are large chunks of the world that don’t generally catch on fire. The entire eastern have of the US, for example. The land is more expensive, but if you converted a corn field or prairie to forest anywhere from Wichita to Washington you wouldn’t expect it to burn down in a massive forest fire. The fire cycle thing is more of a mountain west problem.
Forests that don’t burn down in regular fires don’t sequester carbon long term either. Trees die and slowly rot on the forest floor, releasing their carbon back into the atmosphere.
Fossil fuels come from accidents of evolution. When plants first evolved lignin there was nothing around that could decompose it and so it built up in large layers, later to be converted into fossil fuels under pressure. Now there are fungi which can decompose lignin and so there will never be a natural build-up of lignin again.
Our best bet is to grow trees to sequester carbon and then cut them down and use the wood for durable goods such as houses and furniture. If we can take care of this wood to prevent it from rotting or burning then it’ll sequester carbon for a long time. We’ll have to find ways to cut out fossil fuels from the wood supply chain though.
> Forests that don’t burn down in regular fires don’t sequester carbon long term either. Trees die and slowly rot on the forest floor, releasing their carbon back into the atmosphere.
But at the same time those old trees are rotting, new trees are growing. So long as the forest exists (as opposed to say prairie), the carbon is sequestered.
Yes, that is true, but forests are limited in capacity by the fraction of earth's surface they cover. Fossil fuels represent hundreds of millions of years of accumulated growth. Against that even a thousand-year-old forest is minimal.
Where I grew up in the midwest prairie fires were definitely a thing [0]. Controlled burns were performed and even the local community college would perform them on a local prairie for education purposes, as they were such an integral part of the ecosystem.
And in case you haven't noticed, the climate is changing. Whatever assumptions you may have about the probability of abundant fuel left on the planet's surface going up in smoke are unlikely to stay correct, if they even are today.
It just doesn't get much press when it is in the middle of nowhere, generally, as compared to blanketing one of the most populous states in the US.
You can think of a forest like a giant spring. The more it grows, the more energy it stores/the more compressed it is, until eventually the right conditions happen and BLAM, it lets loose. This is true of all forests and frankly all collections of carbon. The ones underground just happen to be particularly well 'trapped'.
> It escapes me how anyone can consider it for long-term carbon storage/offsetting of excess atmospheric co2 derived from fossil fuels.
There's been a lot of talk about burying it as it matures.
I have a question though. Why can't we compost it and make soil out of it? I gather that this would release some carbon back to the atmosphere (in both anaerobic and aerobic composting) but wouldn't it be a net capture?
>I gather that this would release some carbon back to the atmosphere (in both anaerobic and aerobic composting) but wouldn't it be a net capture?
You can sequester carbon with any kind of organic matter. As long as the compost product contains carbon, you'll be sequestering it. The only problem is that if you just leave it around, plants will eventually extract it for nutrients, which means it will reenter the carbon cycle. To sequester it long term you have to prevent it from being used by lifeforms, eg. burying it really deep.
The idea that we dug up a bunch of sequestered organic carbon and released it into the atmosphere, only to now try to re-sequester it and stick it back into the ground is really amusing to me.
Yes, it seems like a really dumb idea when we are also still extracting nearly pure carbon as coal from the ground to burn. I just picture someone trying to optimize it by buying coal to then burry.
It's not uncommon for some compost to be 'used up' (all carbon decomposed and nutrients used up) in a year or less. It's not very efficient as compared to, say, building a building out of a log, if what you want is carbon sequestration.
Forests can be a carbon sink if managed properly. Lumber is a carbon sink. If you build a structure with lumber, you are locking that carbon up. Smoke from a wildfire is a carbon creator. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Environmentalists preventing California forests becoming lumber are actually producing more CO2 in the atmosphere. I'm all for building more structures with lumber, locking carbon up.
(writing from Nevada City, between two major forest fires, btw)
The California timber industry is dead. It's dead because global lumber demand is shrinking, the world lumber industry is competitive, California cut down the big trees a while back and because the exurbanites don't like trucks driving by their mansions.
Lumber isn't a solution to fire because companies only want to cut the big tree that would survive the fires and aren't interested in the small, spindly trees and brush that are burning. Lumber isn't a solution to overall carbon capture because humans hold a fixed amount of wood at a time and cutting more trees in a given location isn't going change that amount. And fantasies that you can open the flood gates and restart logging are ridiculous and reprehensible imo.
Stopping CO2 production global is really the only solution but biochar is the only meaningful carbon capture form if we need to go there also (this would reverse coal mining, essentially - that would capture the substance). California and the North West US have too much forest (of spindly trees and brush), that and global warming is why things are burning. California mountains would be a good site for biochar but this isn't going to be a profitable venture, the government will have to pay. The present mess really can only be solved by state intervention and the OP gives further evidence that "market based solutions" are a despicable sham.
Have you heard of modern day engineered lumber that does not care about the size of the tree it comes form? Modern structures are built from glulams, osb and lvl beams which the size of the tree dose not matter.
"Have you heard of modern day engineered lumber that does not care about the size of the tree it comes form?"
Yep, that's a significant factor in reducing the demand for trees overall since every bit of each cut tree can used. But big and medium sized trees are still going to be more profitable to cut and with total demand shrinking, you won't get to the small trees even if you have the technology to use them.
The thing is, clear cuts are fire hazards since they allow underbrush to build up. A fire safe approach is clearing undergrowth and leaving large trees. Modest fires do that but there's no free way to do that. You'd need to pay people - that would be a good thing near towns and cities but beyond that, we need controlled burns or we get uncontrolled burns, as we see today.
The biodiversity of forests that are clear cut periodically is practically nil. Environmentalists oppose the most common kind of logging for good reason. If logging was done selectively there wouldn't be a problem.
the tweet is about forests burning in washington state, not california. apparently they lease trees up here for carbon offset programs and its not gonna work out very well in the long term based on the fires lately. :x
Also, it's not 14M tons that are at risk of burning from this fire. 14M is the total from which a fraction will be lost. This project (according to other tweets in the thread) is only contributing 2% to a risk pool.
What I'm interested in is, do they have time to make up the losses? If they re-plant, can they wait ~100 years before measuring how successful the project was?
i do not think so, here in washington Weyerhaeuser is selling off large sections of old logging land because the trees are growing much slower than they did historically at these locations, that coupled with increased fire risk, its easier to just divest. based on that, we cant use historical stats to project the success of the project.
if you want cheap land, you can get a full 640 acre parcel(one square mile) for ~$500-600k, they even have roads on them.
That sounds awesome. I assume that's for plots of land that are a long ways from any other towns/cities.
I kind of wish there was something like "Kickstarter for cities". Basically, you get a few thousand or more people to put down some amount of money that would collectively cover buying a few square miles of land and connecting it to roads and electrical and water infrastructure. Everyone gets a plot of land in the new city, and the development and funds are managed by a non-profit that eventually becomes the new city government once people start moving in and there's enough population to run elections. The non-profit/government retains unsold lots that are auctioned off to finance construction of schools, fire departments, police stations, additional roads, and so on.
Ideally, you'd partner with one or more major employers and/or a University that wants to build a new campus so that people coming in have jobs.
This is potentially a workaround to the problem of "there's only a few cities that everyone seems to want to move to, and those are getting really crowded and housing is unaffordable". We just need more nice places to live.
You could check out what Paris is doing with their budget. A fraction of the tax money gets distributed to projects directly voted on by the residents. https://citymonitor.ai/government/civic-engagement/how-paris... Maybe cities just need reduce the hierarchy and increase direct democracy.
> Ideally, you'd partner with one or more major employers and/or a University that wants to build a new campus so that people coming in have jobs.
This is really the beginning and end of planned cities. If you don't have an answer to "jobs" you're really planning a retirement community, not a city.
This is bound to happen as long as we keep practicing emotional approach to solving problems. The real scientific approach consists of breaking the problem down, quantifying different solutions, and prioritizing them based on cost, benefit and risk.
But, unfortunately, present-day people don't want to do that. They want instant gratification. The feeling that they are doing something to address the problem, even if it makes no sense in the long term. And the politicians keep sell them that feeling at a cost of such fiascos.
A lot of that dead wood is sitting on a hillside* with approximately 45 degree slope, more than 300 feet from the nearest fire/logging road. It's possible to harvest it, but the cost/reward ratio is not very good, and the wood is likely not high quality at this point. There's also just a tremendous amount of it. Not quite "boil the ocean" hard but walking in that direction.
*Really rough, rugged mountainous terrain, that most ski resorts would love to have
The title here is misleading. The trees in question are in Washington, but the credits are sold in California. From the link: "The Colville IFM project represents over 14M tons of carbon offsets, or ~6% of all credits in the CA compliance market."
Saying carbon credits are a scam is like saying phones are a scam — they both come in different qualities. (If one phone model’s battery explodes, do all phones explode?)
There are various ways of offsetting emissions that aren’t vulnerable to leakage. For example, you can capture methane from landfills and burn it. Since methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, burning it has a net greenhouse reduction. And there’s no chance of leakage — water, CO2 and oxygen aren’t going to spontaneously turn back into methane in the atmosphere.
In addition, in some cases it’s more cost effective to make a mostly reliable system and correct errors than to build perfectly reliable systems. Would you rather plant 2M T of trees and have none burn down or 10M T and have 20% burn down?
yea.. not a very good idea to invest in forests unless someone is going to actively log, graze or manage them, otherwise its just destined to burn and there goes your carbon. as we are learning now.
>otherwise its just destined to burn and there goes your carbon
It depends on what you're comparing it against. A forest contains more biomass (and therefore more carbon) than a grass field or a corn field. If before tree planting a plot of land had 100 Tons of biomass, and after planting + growth it had 200 Tons, then you sequestered 100 tons of carbon. If it goes up in flames some of that biomass will get released, but it will eventually grow back, recapturing all the lost carbon.
With that in mind, I don't see anything fraudulent about selling carbon offsets during the initial planting. Sure, it's not as good as burying carbon deep underground, but you're still sequestering carbon.
> If before tree planting a plot of land had 100 Tons of biomass, and after planting + growth it had 200 Tons, then you sequestered 100 tons of carbon.
Agreed, but it’s only temporary because the tree will burn at some point releasing carbon dioxide. At least in any coniferous forest in the western half of North America.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s much better than nothing. I just think they should probably pick locations that aren’t as prone to burning as the colville forests. So the carving stays locked a bit more long term.
>I just think they should probably pick locations that aren’t as prone to burning as the colville forests.
Or apply a discount factor. eg. for a simple model: if a forest has n Tons of sequestered carbon when fully grown, but every 40 years it gets burned bare for 4 years, then it's really only sequestering 0.9n tons of carbon over the long run.
> So the carving stays locked a bit more long term.
I think you got the adjectives flipped. If anything the sequester is long term, but there's cyclical short term release/recapture.
Over what timescale? Forest fires were a regular occurrence in North America before fire suppression was the standard policy. Now it looks like they're happening quite a bit despite that policy.
Large scale forest fires have never been a large part of the lifecycle of the moist northeast. That might change, but around the great lakes region at least our forest type is entirely different than the western half of the continent. Rain is fairly consistent here.
The first nations did practice controlled burns for the sake of wildlife management (to increase open grazing land) for sure, and smaller scale forest fires did/do happen. But nothing like out west.
Agreed. The eastern forests don’t burn like the western ones do. I guess my original posts were more aimed at the western coniferous forests, which is what this is related to.
That's an entirely different biome, boreal/northern conifer forest on the Canadian shield. What does that have to do with the great lakes and atlantic northeast? Forest here is composed of oak beech maple and some white pine and rainfall is consistent.
It escapes me how anyone can consider it for long-term carbon storage/offsetting of excess atmospheric co2 derived from fossil fuels.