Daily Score Blog

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

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

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

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

Why am I so fascinated by this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Short answer:  probably not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The result:  ecological devastation on a truly massive scale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You get the idea.

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.

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.

I find this both wildly perverse and perversely intriguing:

Ecological economist Robert Costanza... and his team of researchers have already released one study claiming to have commoditized the world’s biosphere. The total value: $33 trillion...

There's a big part of me -- the mountain-climbing, Edward Abbey-reading part -- that finds this simply appalling. The natural world is so astonishing and beautiful that I can't stomach the thought of putting a monetary value on it. Then there's the other part of me -- the pragmatic, Sightline-researcher part -- that tells me that we already put a monetary value on nature. We just don't do it systematically; and we often to do it in order to exploit rather than conserve.

Even though $33 trillion is more than the combined world GDP, and even though the researchers believe the estimate to be conservative, there's still something dissonant about putting a price on what feels priceless. Or, is it really the best way we have to quantify, and therefore protect, natural systems? After all, prices have a way of clarifying in a way that few things can.

Costanza will be speaking in Seattle next Wednesday. I doubt I'll be able to make it, but I'd love to hear what people think.

Update 1/18: This was probably one of the dumber posts I've written. I've been regretting it ever since I hit "publish," but I'm going to leave it up anyway in order to take one more crack at explaining what I was trying to do. Here goes:

Climate change has dire consequences. It affects humans, ecosystems and economies in alarming ways. But there are some ways of describing the problem that simply don't sound scary. One example of that is "trees are blooming earlier" -- it sounds nice. I was trying to suggest that if you have a choice between talking about wearing sandals more often or about unhealthful heatwaves, maybe you should go with the heatwaves. I didn't do a very good job of getting that across.

In any case, to go beyond my post, a huge amount of opinion research shows that talking about the consequences of climate change is ineffective. It paralyzes and overwhelms people. Instead, it's better to talk about solutions.

***

Says a leading presidential candidate:*

As a result of climate change, glaciers are melting faster; the polar ice caps are shrinking; trees are blooming earlier; more people are dying in heat waves; species are migrating, and eventually many will become extinct. [my emphasis]

The trees are blooming earlier? Panic!

I mean, I spend most of my waking hours thinking about climate policy, but "the trees are blooming earlier" sounds about as alarming as Christmas being held twice a year, or bunnies getting fuzzier.

Whatever we do, we must stop the trees from blooming earlier!

As we've written here before, forests have gained a lot of attention in the climate change conversation because of their ability to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. Individuals can buy "reforestation" offsets on the Internet. There's talk of including credits for carbon stored in trees and wood products as part of many proposed cap-and-trade systems. Cities and businesses are even planting trees as part of their efforts to slow climate change.

There's no doubt that forests, and their tremendous ability to store carbon, can play a role in protecting the climate. But we have to be cautious about that role. Forest ecosystems are, by their nature, unpredictable-there's simply no way to know how much carbon a forest will store over the long haul, Worse, climate change itself magnifies those uncertainties. If a warmer climate makes forest fires more frequent - as some people believe is possible - then a lot of "offsets" will simply go up in smoke. Or consider BC's devastating pine beetle infestation - an example of how ecosystem disruption can fell more trees than any chainsaw.

And there's troubling news today that makes us more cautious than ever: A new global study by researchers at the University of Helsinki shows that trees are absorbing less CO2 than predicted, as the world warms and vegetation patterns shift.

Lately it feels like Northwest wilderness protection can't catch a break. Not only has it proved damnably difficult to pass even popular new wilderness designations, but much-loved trails and access roads are getting pummeled by winter storms. Routinely it seems. 

But maybe -- just maybe -- there's a golden opportunity amidst the storm wreckage. Maybe we've been given a cheap and easy way to expand our wilderness areas. After all, a washed-out or heavily-damaged road means more than just frustrated hikers: it also means a lot more wild country.

That's because some of the worst storm-related fury is actually the aftermath. Chronic underfunding, mismanagement, and heightened concern for the environment often makes rebuilding access roads to trails prohibitively expensive or extremely controversial. In fact, Washington is a good example. The mangled Dosewallips and the Stehekin River Roads have probably been the most contentious locations. But also the Cascade, Suiattle, and White Chuck River Roads, plus the Mountain Loop Highway near Barlow Pass. Oh, and the Queets, which has been out of commission for who knows how long. And I hear the the South Shore Quinault is out again. That's just some of the major stuff: it doesn't include the welter of smaller forest roads that provide valuable access to lesser known trails and peaks.

Trailheads are part of a large share of my weekends, so I certainly appreciate the ready access that we Cascadians are blessed with. But I'm conflicted too. Despite Washington's comparative wealth of official wilderness areas -- a greater share of our land than any state other than Alaska and California -- I've long wish we had even more. But too much of our wilderness is barren rock and ice terrain; it's lovely to look at, but it's not habitat-rich like low elevation areas are. And that's where the road-destroying storms may have a silver lining.

Exhibit A is the ever-controversial Dosewallips River Road.

On my email accounts, I have filters that keep out most spam. But my regular mail boxes at home and the office? No such luck! Advertising arrives in the post daily, by the sheaf and by the ream.

It annoys me. Here I am, scrupulously recycling and contemplating the climate impacts of my consumption, while L.L. Bean and its ilk are dropping slabs of paper in my mail box: paper that took carbon-storing trees to create, climate-polluting factories to mill, and carbon-belching trucks to haul. All told, it’s 41 pounds of junk mail a year per American.

Admittedly, junk mail isn’t high on Cascadia’s lists of menaces. According to estimates developed for the US Postal Service, it accounts for just over one tenth of one percent of all energy use (at least, if Cascadia matches the US average), plus one-fiftieth of municipal solid waste.

Still, it’s worth a little attention, especially when you consider that virtually no direct mail actually works. Postal advertising is an industry where a mass mailing is considered successful if 2 percent of envelopes or catalogs generate a sale. That means 98 percent of the paper and ink was pointless waste. If we could wave a magic wand and make it disappear, both the mailer and the recipient would be better off.

Sickening. Kevin John Moran of Camano Island was just convicted of illegally cutting down 27 old-growth cedars on public land. They were between 400 and 700 years old. And they were dry-side trees, even rarer than our west-slope titans.

But here's the worst that can happen to him:

Theft of government property is a Class C felony, which means a maximum sentence of 10 years or less, and a fine not to exceed $250,000.

Some of these trees were mature giants long before Europeans ever encountered the Pacific Northwest. They were protected on public land. They were our natural heritage.

But destroying them? That's just "theft of government property." 

Sentencing is in February.