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Strong viewpoints out of Oregon

August 27th, 2010

Two op-eds were published recently in the Oregonian that bring up some important issues about the future of the timber industry. The two pieces discuss Oregon, but they may as well be talking about any state with an active timber industry.

The first opinion piece is from Marvin Brown, the Oregon State Forester and Chair of the the Sustainable Forestry Initiative; Clint Bentz, Chair of the American Forest Foundation’s Board and a family forest landowner who resides in Scio, Ore.; David Ford, Executive Director of Oregon Small Woodlands Association and a family forest landowner who resides in Beaverton; and Steve Wilson, a member of the Oregon Board of Forestry and Secretary-Treasurer of Woodworkers District 1 of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.

These are guys who obviously know their stuff, and to them, the U.S. Green Building Council is shortchanging local communities by not allowing other forest certifications into the LEED building standard.

An exclusive LEED policy is a problem for Oregon, where forestry is crucial to the economy. There are nearly 30 million acres of forestland in Oregon, covering 48 percent of the state. SFI and the American Tree Farm System provide the standards for prudent forest management on more than 5 million acres of our state’s land, and Forest Stewardship Council standards are used on 500,000 acres. All three are credible certification programs, and we have personally seen how they each work on the ground. With a lifetime of first-hand experience and extensive background in the application of forest certification programs in our state, we find it bewildering that the Green Building Council has not opened its LEED policy to all credible forest certification programs.

Opening LEED would benefit our forests, our economy and green building in Oregon and throughout North America. Responsible forest management supports jobs. Limiting which certified wood can be credited in LEED projects reduces demand for wood from SFI and Tree Farm certified lands and puts forestry jobs at risk.

The op-ed is an important article to read because it brings together the ideas of people who are active in public and private forestry in Oregon, and their opinions carry real weight.

The second opinion piece is from Karla Kay Edwards, a  Rural Policy Analyst at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization. She argues that Oregon could be a national leader in biomass, because of its vast forestlands and the state’s renewable energy policies. But the only way for this to happen, Edwards says, is for the state’s federal forests to be opened to “long-term sustainable timber harvests.”

Federal lands must play a role in creating a long-term consistent supply of merchantable timber and logging residues. Simply providing grants for biomass facilities that create a greater demand for biomass feedstuffs, without any significant movement toward providing long-term access to the captured supply of merchantable timber and logging residues on federal forestlands, is setting up an industry for economic failure.

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Posted in Federal Issues, Green Building Standards, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Timber Industry

The EPA Threat

August 20th, 2010

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is still considering whether to pull its exemption for biomass plants when it comes to obtaining greenhouse-gas emissions permits. These proposed changes to what’s called the “Tailoring Rule” are critical to the future of the timber industry and many rural communities across the country.

If the EPA’s proposed changes go into effect, biomass plants would no longer be considered carbon-neutral by the federal government, and it would make it more difficult for the plants to pencil out financially.

Fortunately, the EPA hasn’t made its final decision just yet. It’s taking public comment on the changes until Sept. 13. But even more important, according to the National Alliance of Forest Owners (NAFO), anyone who is concerned about the proposed rule change should contact their members of Congress.

NAFO has put together a Biomass Energy Advocacy Toolkit to help spread the word to Congress about the EPA threat.

According to NAFO, here are the most important things you can do:

  1. Call your local office and request time for a 15-30 minute meeting with the Senator, Representative, or key staff while they are in the state.
  2. If they are not available for a meeting, ask if there is a town meeting scheduled in the area that you can attend.
  3. If that is not an option, leave a message and ask for a letter in response or hand deliver a letter to the office with supporting materials (see below). Working with the local office, as opposed to the D.C. office, underscores it is an opinion coming from a voter and the staff you talk to in the state are more likely longer-term staffers who will raise the issue as important to the Member.

In the meantime, the Blue Mountain Eagle in Grant County, Ore., just wrote an editorial about the proposed EPA changes.

In rural communities, pellet mills like the ones going into service in parts of Eastern Oregon are expected to provide jobs in a timber industry rocked by the recession. Meanwhile, community hospitals, schools and other institutions are switching to biomass heating as a low-cost, local and clean alternative to fossil fuels.

On the forests, we see foresters looking to this new industry as a way to remove a decades-long build-up of fuels from the forest floor, leaving tree stands more resilient against insects and fire. If the alternative is open burning of slash piles – or catastrophic wildfire – biomass harvest seems like a good option. Do we really need to remind the EPA that slash burning and wildfires produce huge amounts of particulate matter?

Contact your legislator and let’s make sure that our timber communities are protected!

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Posted in Biomass, Federal Issues, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Timber Industry

The Biochar Moment

August 13th, 2010

Is biochar the world’s most promising solution to climate change? That seems to be the news coming out of a multiyear study published in Nature Communication this week.

From WalesOnline:

A substance invented thousands of years ago by Amazonian Indians could hold the key to defeating man-made global warming, Welsh scientists believe.

Here’s the headline from The New Republic, not usually a supporter of anything that might help the timber industry:

Yes, Biochar Really Might Be That Magical

The gist of the study is that biochar could offset up to 12 percent of the world’s current greenhouse-gas emissions. It does this by “reducing methane production from decaying plant waste, reducing nitrous oxide release from soils, and avoiding carbon dioxide emissions by storing carbon in the soil,” according to the BBC.

Twelve percent is no panacea, but it’s as close to a lifesaver as we get with climate change nowadays. Is it possible that a charcoal formed from the burning of wood waste and other materials could provide, at least in part, environmental salvation?

The answer is maybe.

First the positive:

The vision put forward is of a world where waste is burned, where some of the heat from that burning is used to transform waste to charcoal, and where the charcoal is ploughed into soil, increasing its capacity to support crops and locking up carbon for centuries, possibly millennia.

The waste that can be used includes spare stuff from plants, such as husks and shells and stems, and even sewage and plastics – pretty much anything based on carbon, in principle.

Even sewage and plastics!

What’s proposed would be nothing less than a revolution in the way we handle waste – turning it from waste into fuel, fertiliser and climate saviour with a single blast of the charcoal oven.

Now here’s the rub:

The big question, though, is whether you can grow the plants needed for biochar sustainably. As groups like Biofuels Watch have warned, if farmers start tilling virgin land to grow switchgrass, with the intention of creating biochar, then that could end up releasing additional carbon-dioxide and methane into the air. Alternatively, if biochar crops are grown on existing farmland, then that might encourage farmers elsewhere to hack down forests for space to grow the displaced food crops. This could be like the destructive ethanol craze all over again.

So for the Nature Communications study, the researchers just looked at the world’s supply of crop leftovers: corn leaves and stalks, rice husks, livestock manure, yard trimmings. If virtually all of that biomass was used to make biochar, we could conceivably offset 12 percent of global carbon emissions. Trouble is, it would take a massive shift in production: “Using biochar to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at these levels is an ambitious project that requires significant commitments from the general public and government,” said study co-author Jim Amonette of the Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest Laboratory. “We will need to change the way we value the carbon in biomass.”

Well said. While those of us who care about working forests know about the benefits of biomass, the rest of the world still needs to get the message. The stakes are high, and not just for the timber industry. This is much bigger than us.

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Posted in Biomass, Carbon Sequestration, Forestry Research

Why the federal biomass rule matters

August 5th, 2010

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is now considering  whether to pull its exemption for biomass plants when it comes to obtaining greenhouse-gas emissions permits. These proposed changes to what’s called the “Tailoring Rule” would mean that biomass plants would no longer be considered carbon-neutral by the EPA, and it would make it more difficult for the plants to pencil out financially.

The National Alliance of Forest Owners (NAFO) just petitioned the EPA to stop any changes to the Tailoring Rule. Here is what NAFO President David Tenny had to say:

EPA’s reversal…was a significant step backward for renewable energy that came as a surprise without prior notice or adequate explanation in the record. If allowed to stand, this decision will cripple the biomass energy marketplace at the very moment when our nation needs additional investment to realize its renewable energy goals. It could also cause significant harm to forest owners and mills using biomass energy that, combined, form the economic and employment backbone of many rural communities.

Meanwhile, the Daily World in Abderdeen, Wash., just wrote a profile of a local biomass plant that shows exactly what the plants are capable of doing. The Sierra Pacific Industries sawmill has an 18-megawatt biomass plant that supplies electricity to the public and is one of the biggest sources of renewable energy in Grays Harbor County. The plant’s electricity generated from wood waste is expected to only go up and eventually supply enough to ensure the local public utility district complies with Initiative 937, which requires Washington utilities to generate 15 percent renewable power by 2020.

Lastly, we go to Massachusetts, which has been probably the least timber-friendly state in the country the last few months. First the state jacked up the amount of public forestland where logging is banned, from 13 percent to 60 percent. And then a state-sponsored study spread a lot of misinformation nationally about the carbon impact of biomass.

But the Boston Globe, in an editorial this week, came out in support of reasonable concessions for the timber industry and noted the importance of working forests:

It would be a mistake for conservationists to criticize the state’s aid to timbering. The greatest threat to Massachusetts forests is not logging but development. If a more vibrant wood products industry can help keep private land owners from seeking a bigger payoff from developers peddling sprawl, so much the better. Forests that are harvested grow back; those that are paved don’t.

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Posted in Federal Issues, Logging Communities, Timber Industry, Washington