Archive for March, 2011

Timber groups praise USDA decision on wood

March 31st, 2011

It’s long been known that wood is one of the greenest building materials in the world, and that wood was green before “green building” was even a buzzword. Now the U.S. government officially agrees.

This week U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that the federal government will promote and research the use of wood as a green building material, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Forestry Service will preferentially select wood in new building construction.

According to Vilsack: “Wood has a vital role to play in meeting the growing demand for green building materials… (the) USDA has made a strong commitment to conserving and restoring our forests to protect watersheds, recreation, and rural jobs.”

Vilsack directed all USDA agencies to make domestic wood the preferred choice for new construction, just like the Forest Service already does. And Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell said his agency will increase its use of locally milled timber in new buildings.

“Our country has the resources, the work force and the innovative spirit to reintroduce wood products into all aspects of the next generation of buildings,” Tidwell said.

The announcement was also a boon for the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) because Vilsack said the Forest Service will promote not just the LEED building standard but also Green Globes and the National Green Building Standard, both of which recognize SFI.

Here’s some of the reaction from SFI President Kathy Abusow:

“We thank Secretary Vilsack for his leadership and for sending a message that the Administration is serious about the role wood can play in supporting green building initiatives, rural communities, and the overall sustainability of the forest sector. The USDA strategy makes it clear that opportunities for wood and choice in green building rating tools are part of the solution.”

Several other groups also commended federal officials for their new stance.

Dave Tenny, CEO of the National Alliance of Forest Owners:

“Secretary (Vilsack) understands that for the past century the increased use of wood to build homes and other buildings has been our nation’s most important forest conservation tool. Thanks to growing markets for wood we have 50% more trees today than we had 50 years ago.

These same markets also provide jobs for 2.5 million Americans and $87 billion in paychecks annually for American families, particularly in rural areas. Wood provides a perfect blend of economic and environmental benefits. As we promote the use of building products from wood we help clean our air of excess carbon, keep rivers and streams pure and maintain wildlife habitat while at the same time providing economic security to rural communities and creating jobs and economic growth throughout the country.”

The Nature Conservancy:

“Managed properly, forests are, literally, a green resource. The use of wood is good for the American economy and, particularly for the economy of rural America. These economic uses are compatible with protection of our environment.”

Mr. Cees de Jager, Executive Director of the Binational Softwood Lumber Council, a nonprofit created by the U.S. and Canadian governments, said the U.S. decision was a “triple win.”

“This will create new jobs in rural communities, reduce energy use in buildings, and lower overall construction costs in buildings. USDA is taking a leadership role in the U.S. to put people back to work in rural communities and help our environment.”

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Posted in Green Building Standards, Timber Industry

Seattle Times strikes out on biomass

March 25th, 2011

The Seattle Times dropped the ball in its front-page story this week on the biomass industry. As the story points out, Washington is one of the country’s leading producers of biomass power, with a dozen plants operating and four more in the works. So taking a look at the state of the industry is a legitimate news story.

Unfortunately, the Times allowed the views of environmental groups to take control of its story, shifting it from a fair-minded look at the industry to a polemic that inaccurately portrays the industry as struggling, when in fact biomass is one of the fastest-growing energy industries in the world, with the support of the Obama administration and local and federal elected officials across the political spectrum.

The Times article cites “new studies” and “sophisticated calculations” that purportedly question the greenness of biomass, but the evidence is nowhere to be seen in the story. The only study cited is a study out of Massachusetts from June 2010 that has been widely discredited and whose own authors have said was misreported by the media and environmental groups. (We wrote about the study here and here.)

The Times’ reliance on a single study, as well as an inaccurate description of its conclusions, was so egregious that the Washington Department of Natural Resources posted a response to the story’s errors this week.

Here is an excerpt:

The (Times) article refers to a study commissioned by the Massachusetts’ Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences to report that using biomass for energy is “more polluting …than coal”. This claim, widely circulated in the media when the study was first published, has been repudiated by Manomet as a misinterpretation of their findings in June of 2010.

The Massachusetts study is actually the only major study that the press or biomass opponents can hang their hat on, and yet that study does not even make the conclusions that environmental groups try to claim it does.

Biomass is still a new technology, but the only “challenge” to the growing biomass industry is from environmental groups who don’t have the facts on their side. Their views are worth reporting, but the Times treated them as gospel, which shattered the credibility of the paper’s story.

What is clear is that biomass isn’t just carbon neutral; it gives forest owners an economic incentive to keep their land free from development, provides jobs for struggling rural communities and is one of our country’s most promising clean energy sources.

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Posted in Biomass, Timber Industry, Washington

The dark side of green policy

March 17th, 2011

While it is very popular nowadays for everything to be green and environmentally sustainable, as it should be, the federal policies pursued for the sake of a so-called “green” standard can have negative consequences.

Niger Innis, the spokesman for the Congress on Racial Equality, delves into these questions this week in a three-part series, “Green Injustice,” in the Washington Examiner.

In the series (Part I, Part II and Part III), Innis describes how large corporations, environmental groups and the Obama administation hurt poor people and poor countries in their quest for “green” products and policies.

In Part I, he says that Obama is raising the price of energy through his pursuit of a cap-and-trade policy and increased emission controls, and also advocating for budget cuts to the national low-income home energy assistance program.

…(I)t is simply mind-boggling that Obama would push such a heartless one-two punch by advancing policies that raise energy costs while at the same time removing policies that help poor people meet energy needs. It’s as if they want the poor to freeze in the winter or suffer heat stroke in the summer.

In Part II, he takes a look at the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a wood certification standard that was started by environmental groups and is being pitched as a way to ensure wood products are green and sustainable. But the FSC standards vary widely by country, which makes it more difficult for developing countries to compete in the wood products marketplace. FSC also purports to be the best wood certification standard, when in fact the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) is the most popular standard in the U.S.

What this means in practice is that poor countries in the developing world are penalized in the marketplace. Green groups don’t care about the fate of the people in these countries. And the greens’ business partners in Europe’s forestry and paper industries are laughing all the way to the bank.

The results are not pretty.

Simply put, FSC certification raises the costs of almost, well, everything. In addition to coffee cups and grocery bags, paper products are a basic material used widely by just about every industry you can imagine. Globalization as we know it isn’t possible without abundant paper goods made for packing and transporting.

…The greatest harm is to poor men and women in developing countries. Trade in global markets is their lifeline and their best chance for raising living standards to those we in wealthy countries enjoy. But unfair schemes like FSC make the rise from poverty that much harder.

In Part III, Innis turns his eye on large corporations and says their policy of “Corporate Social Responsibility” has them pursuing products and policies that are supposed to be sustainable and make the world better, but in practice unfairly cut developing countries out of the new global economy.

At the end of the day, (Corporate Social Responsibility) is an infinitely malleable term that, like fair trade, has been hijacked by politically motivated ideological and special interest groups to undermine commerce and entrepreneurship. In its current form, CSR offers no hope that it will improve the living standards or dignity of those most disadvantaged in society.

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Posted in Federal Issues, Forestry Research, Timber Industry

Newspaper series on forestry goes off track

March 11th, 2011

The East Oregonian Co., which owns seven small newspapers in the Northwest, started a series of articles this week called “Fate of Our Forest.” The stories examine the changing face of the timber industry in Oregon and Washington, and we appreciate the coverage. Unfortunately, the newspaper company has already had its share of inaccuracies and distortions in the series.

Here are a couple examples:

One of the company’s papers, The Chinook Observer in Pacific County, Wash., took a look this week at the changing face of land ownership in the county, including the timber companies that are among the county’s biggest landowners.

But the Observer tried to make it sound like timber companies are trying to get away with something:

On the other hand, the recent purchaser of much of (Weyerhaeuser’s) hemlock forestland in the county, John Hancock Life Insurance, now is 16th on the list of biggest property owners in the county. Though it paid $126 million for the land, it is valued at only $2,312,800 due to a state law that grants timber companies an exception to the prevailing rule for everyone else that requires property assessments and taxes to be based on full market value.

In fact, John Hancock will be taxed on the full value of the land. Like all companies, when the timber is harvested, Hancock will have to pay forest harvest excise tax to the state. The Washington state timber industry as a whole paid $23 million in forest harvest excise tax, a significant boost to state coffers.

The Observer, in two other stories (here and here), also gives a lot of ink and quotes to the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) forest certification system and its adherents. The paper tries to paint the FSC standard as the future of the industry, even while it admits “FSC-certified wood is not big business yet and may never be.”

It’s true that the market for sustainably harvested wood continues to grow, but FSC is a small and minor standard. The Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) standard is the leader both nationally and in the Pacific Northwest, by a large margin, and yet the Observer never even mentions it.

A newspaper series can’t provide an accurate depiction of an industry if it ignores the realities of the business on the ground.

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Posted in Oregon, Pacific Northwest, State Issues, Timber Industry, Washington

Old hands contribute to timber industry’s future

March 4th, 2011

Jerry Franklin, a retired professor of ecosystem science at University of Washington, and Norm Johnson, a retired professor of forestry resources at Oregon State University, are veterans of the timber wars of the last few decades. They even helped write the Northwest Forest Plan, which is still in effect today.

And now, in Roseburg and Medford, Ore., Franklin and Johnson are helping lead pilot projects on federal land that might be a significant step toward timber solutions that address the needs of not just timber companies but rural communities and environmental groups.

It’s a tricky proposition, but if anyone has the know-how, it’s Franklin and Johnson.

(The professors) have proposed two strategies based on the type of forest being managed.

Moist forests — flush with Douglas fir and western cedar that experience fewer but more catastrophic fires — would be treated differently than dry forests dominated by pine and which experience more frequent but lower-intensity fires.

Managing dry forests would mean leaving the oldest trees, thinning to reduce the fuels that can drive intense wildfire and increasing the diversity of age classes among the trees.

Management on moist forests would put an end to regeneration harvests, a technique also known as clear-cutting, in favor of “variable retention harvesting,” a strategy that leaves 20 or 30 percent of the trees.

Tom Partin, the president of the American Forest Resource Council, told the Eugene Register-Guard that his group supports the dry forest strategy but not the project for wet forests.

Francis Eatherington with the environmental group Cascadia Wildlands said she’s not so sure about the projects and that there is no gridlock to solve in how forests are managed.

But the pilot projects are a start. And we’re glad to see two veterans of the timber wars out there trying to come up with new solutions.

Another compelling project, at Evergreen State College in Olympia, is studying the feasability of growing moss commercially. There is a high demand for moss from the floral industry, which consumes 37 million dry kilograms of moss each year. Because of the high demand, many people harvest moss illegally from private and public forestland, which can hurt the health of forests.

The commercial viability of moss is another example of the richness of our working forests. Our forestland is about much more than just trees.

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Posted in Federal Issues, Forestry Research, Oregon, Pacific Northwest, Timber Industry, Washington