We Can Have Our Carbon And Eat It Too

There’s an old expression in English, “He wants to have his cake and eat it too,” used to describe someone who wants to enjoy each of two contradictory things.  The saying might apply, for example, to someone who is a spendthrift throughout his life but also wants a handsome retirement fund at the end or, a government imposing confiscatory taxes on business but, wanting a vigorous economy as well.

In the environmental world a product exists, biochar, that may allow earth’s citizens to “Have their cake and eat it too.”

Biomass from thinning the forest for health and fire reduction could be used to create biochar, synfuels, and other products.

Biochar is hardly anything new.  Most famously the use of the material to enhance poor soils is attributed to the indigenous natives of the Amazon basin who are said to be responsible for some of the deep, rich soils found in some areas of the basin.

Biochar is produced by heating biomass in a very low, or even a, no oxygen, environment, an environment in which combustion does not occur.  The process is called pyrolysis.  In the pre-industrial world biochar was created both deliberately and accidentally (shovel a pile of dirt over a still burning camp fire and some biochar will result. 

When the conditions necessary to create biochar are present oils and syngas are produced.  The material left after the volatiles have been driven off is called “char.”

In an uncontrolled setting the oils and gasses are emitted to the atmosphere or absorbed into soil as what we today call pollution but, in an industrial setting the oils and gasses can be captured and used to create a host of high value products.

But the real “magic” in the process comes because the char can be worked into agricultural soils as an amendment capable of significantly improving productivity and, research seems to show, working over time to actually capture greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere.

In short, the research seems to show that creating biochar is actually a carbon negative process.  Oils and syngasses are captured and utilized in place of fossil fuels like petroleum while the char, worked into the soil, eventually captures more carbon than was contained in the biomass in the first place.

The implications are obvious.  In the forests of North America, for example, several hundred million acres of trees grow in overcrowded forests prone to massive fires.  In Washington State this year climate change gas emissions, toxic chemical and elemental emissions and particulate emissions to the atmosphere may have resulted in pollution exceeding all the industrial and auto related pollution created in the entire state for a year or more.

But what if the forests were to be thinned, as most professionals believe necessary, with the biomass used to create synthetic oil to fuel our vehicles, natural gas substitutes to heat our homes, and biochar to absorb the carbon emissions that must occur in the course of man’s living on the planet?  What if, in nations where most of the wood grown ends up fueling home fires, the fuel could be diverted to produce biochar with the resulting oils and gasses heating homes and the char going into the soil to enhance food production?

The pop-environmental community appears to prefer this.

Stunningly, there is little impetus among the pop-environmental community to press forward with investigations into the many benefits bio-char appears to offer.  One would think, if people who think of themselves as environmentalists were really interested in environmental enhancements, there would be massive pressure on the governments of the world to step up research and, if the conclusions are as favorable as initial investigations appear to indicate, to begin large scale production.

But then, there’s not much money for activist groups in actually solving problems.  In fact, resolving a large scale environmental problem is, in terms of the climate change discussion, revenue negative, for the pop-enviros so, don’t expect to see much excitement about a potentially paradigm changing solution to carbon emissions in the environmental community.  

We can only hope that someday we will actually get serious about environmental enhancement. 

Bad Study... Go Away: Suppressing Evidence In The Environmental Discussion

Whatcom County in Washington State is home to a holy body of water.

The water must be holy because nothing else can explain the almost religious fervor exhibited by the pop environmental movement as it mounts battle after battle over what the movement appears to consider the sanctity of the holy water flowing through the lake and on into Puget Sound.

Whatcom County residents discuss Lake Whatcom water quality

Controversy has surrounded use of the lake for at least the last two decades.  Anyone reading the history of discussions regarding the lake would think they’d been transported back to the days of the Crusades as the knights of the lake raise huge sums of money to outfit yet another attack on the infidels occupying the shores of the holy waterway.

The discussion regarding Lake Whatcom over the years serves to illustrate a serious problem with most discussions about environmental issues in recent times; science has become something to be manipulated for result and, if the result cannot be manipulated, science is to be suppressed.

That on-going attacks on science by the environmental movement would be the cornerstone of the future movement first came into clear focus for me when, nearly 20 years ago, I attended the Clinton Forest Summit in Portland, Oregon as an analyst for a number of forest products industry oriented trade magazines.

The experience was a stunning one in a number of ways, especially since I was considerably more naïve in those days regarding the environmental movement and some of its approaches; I still thought that science and reason mattered when it came to environmental issues and that the excesses of the pop-environmental movement mostly came from lack of information.

So I was pretty optimistic about the Summit.  It was billed as a science based, rational look at environmental issues surrounding the health and use of the forests of our nation.

The event was held in Portland’s convention center.  Reporters, including myself, were allotted space at tables surrounded by broadcast trucks sent in by the major U.S. and regional media.  Around the edges of the Convention Center floor were several hundred stations manned by activist groups providing studies, brochures, letters, press releases and other material designed to influence the reporters at the event.

Had I not known in advance the Summit was about forestry I’d have thought I was attending a druid’s convention.  At least 80% of the materials provided by “environmental activists” had to do with Earth Mother Gaia, the sacred ocean or some other religious enterprise involving how trees scream when they are cut down and so on. 

Almost nothing involving forest health, responsible harvest, fire reduction strategies or any other aspect of the actual point of the Summit was offered.

Even worse, twenty years ago the Northern Spotted Owl was all the rage, or at least everyone was all enraged, over the controversy surrounding the little bird.

The timber industry in the United States was in the process of being decimated with the need to protect the Spotted Owl being used as an excuse to suspend logging over huge expanses of timber land.

But wait!  Scientists had discovered in the years immediately preceding the conference that the Spotted Owl was not only far less endangered than had been thought, the little creature could also survive nicely in second growth timber stands; a cornerstone relied on by the pop-environmental movement to prop up their end of the discussion had been removed.

Whoops!

Guess what?  Evidence regarding the potential widespread occurrence of the bird in ranges previously thought unsuitable was very specifically banned from discussion.  Only discussion revolving around the need to preserve old growth forest to save the Spotted Owl was allowed to be presented.



The Pop-environmental View - Nothing Should Ever Change



Back to holy water.

Near the turn of the century, after years of discussion about Lake Whatcom, a highly respected engineering firm was hired by local authorities to prepare a report at assembled all of the various studies about Lake Whatcom, analyze them, then draw conclusions regarding the entirety of the data about the lake, especially in terms of the Lake’s being used for drinking water.

Well, unfortunately, the firm hired to do the analysis was infested by engineers and scientists who hadn’t been informed about the desire outcome of the study.  That meant the draft was based on science.  The final report was particularly disdainful of some of the work being done by the local university so, when a preliminary draft was circulated to a small number of local officials, the proverbial excrement hit the fan.  In very short order the report was fitted with concrete boots and “disappeared,” to use a term often attributed to gangsters eliminating a rival. 

Similar studies in recent years have suffered the same fate as the jihad against any use of land around the lake has continued. 

The experience with Lake Whatcom data is, of course, not unique.  More and more we see science being cooked to match emotional needs rather than as a learning tool. 

The essence of drawing conclusions about any issue is the attempt to use observable fact and rational thought to inform decision-making.  Often, properly done studies will point to data allowing for differences of opinion.  We learn when we, from the differing perspectives we all have, discuss, comprehend and arrive at agreement with the data in mind.

The problem comes when data is deliberately suppressed so that pre-determined decisions can be supported.  If only data supporting one point of view or another is allowed in the discussion we get only one result; the wrong one. 

The larger problem comes in that suppressing data that might be in opposition to a desired conclusion is no longer seen as particularly inappropriate by the environmental industry. 

Lose An Industry; Lose A Forest

An interesting juxtaposition of events has the potential to teach a lesson both political decision-makers and the pop-environmental industry need to pay attention to. 

On the one hand, massive forest fires in the western United States are demonstrating what can happen when a forest products industry has been hounded nearly out of existence in states like Colorado, Utah, and others with the subsequent lack of attention to forest health attending the loss. 

These trees were dead before they burned.  They should have been used for lumber.

Even as the environmental devastation caused by those fires continues, the pop-enviros in my community are taking steps likely to help assure the end of a significant forest products sector in the community. 

Over the past month in the U.S. State of Colorado more pollution has been pumped into the atmosphere as the result of forest fires than is likely to be produced by all human activity in that state for years to come.  Incredible tonnages of a variety of greenhouse gases, particulate matter and metals actually smelted from the earth as fires burn (much of the mercury in the atmosphere, for example, is there as a result of forest fires) are circling the earth today because of those fires.

The intensity of the fires could have been significantly reduced had the massive numbers of dead trees the fires fed on been harvested, milled into useful products and sold to build homes, businesses and other structures rather than being left in the woods to serve as torches.

Lumber or Torch?  The pop-environmental community has consistently fought harves in areas like this.

A big reason those trees weren’t used, aside from resistance to harvest by a strong pop-environmental movement, has been the lack of a harvesting and processing infrastructure capable of making use of the trees.  All of Colorado, based on Forest Service analysis released in 2009 contains only 3 softwood sawmills, none of them large.  Many other states are equally underserved, especially considering the billions of board feet of potential lumber that could be milled from dead and dying trees. 

A business building being constructed out of lumber and logs milled from dead trees.  The bluish tint is typical of lumber cut from trees killed by the pine beetle.

Cut to my neck of the woods, Whatcom County, Washington.

Whatcom County’s first industry in the mid-1850s was a softwood sawmill.  The first non-native, permanent resident built a mill on a waterfall at the edge of Bellingham Bay and got to work.  At the turn of the 20^th Century dozens of sawmills, large and small, served the county’s forest products industry, mills fed by the 1.3 million acres of forestland contained in the County.

Times change; by the end of the 20^th Century well over a million acres of land in the County had been converted to national parks, national forests and other uses.  Today, about 100,000 acres, mostly owned by the State of Washington, remain formally set aside to provide the timber necessary to maintain an industry in the county while an additional 120,000 acres is privately owned forest, subject to conversion but, at present, mostly available to serve the forest products industry.

The former forest products industry was, of course, devastated by the constriction in supply.  Sawmill closures, reductions in the number of firms engaged in harvest and other losses reduced the industry to a shadow of its former self.  Today, only one softwood sawmill of any size operates in Whatcom County with a few additional mills available in neighboring counties.  The forest products industry has become a regional industry with most harvesting firms working in at least three counties and some in more due to lack of a sufficient supply of harvestable wood. 

Now, Whatcom County’s “environmental” community is preparing to administer what could be a fatal blow to the area’s forest products industry.  A desire to grow, over time, an “old growth forest” and a presumed need to avoid damage to a water supply even the State’s famously liberal Department of Ecology sees as unlikely, has led the pop-environmental community into promoting the conversion of about 8,700 acres of designated commercial forests into a “forest preserve” destined, for the most part, to never again see a harvest. 

The area to be set aside surrounds a local lake and was almost entirely incinerated in forest fires burning through the area a hundred years and more ago. 

The light tan represents areas of forest incinerated in the 1800s.  The X marks are the locations of the present day forest designated for commercial use but now under pressure for conversion.

So, now the question an environmentalist would always ask, a question that has received almost no discussion at all in the rush to judgment regarding the matter;   “Given recent events in Colorado, and elsewhere, should a community of 200,000 people, with almost immediate access to several hundred thousand acres of existing park land and millions of acres of park lands already available within an hour's drive, risk the health of its forests for the sake of yet one more park?”

I suspect the recently chastened people of Colorado would at least think about the answer to that question. 

Too many in Whatcom County answer simply, “Park good.  Cut trees bad.  It probably won’t burn anyway.”

Forest Fires And Greenhouse Gas Emissions - We Fail The Forest When We Oppose All Harvest

One of the ways the pop-environmental movement is most successful at assuring plenty of greenhouse gasses are emitted to the atmosphere is to hinder attempts to treat forests for forest health.  The successes go beyond increased greenhouse gas emissions.  In the United States and Canada, at least, decades of neglect in terms of treating for fire reduction have created a situation where forest wild fires burn so hot they vaporize streams, and everything living in them and, actually smelt things like mercury from the ground, sending it into the airstreams to settle in lakes, streams, bogs and lungs.

Modern forest fires tend to be more intense than most were in historic times

Forest fires are, of course, nothing new in North America.  American Indians routinely burned forests, plains and anything else that could be burned to increase berry yields, attract tasty critters like deer, and other game animals, burn out enemies, create clearings and for a variety of other reasons.  When Isaac Stevens arrived in Washington Territory in 1853 fresh off a triple threat trip on which he surveyed routes for a potential transcontinental railroad, signed treaties with Indian tribes and, on arrival took office as first Governor of the territory one of his first observations was to the effect that the whole region seemed to be on fire.

But wildfires, into the early years of the 20^th Century, were generally different from wildfires today because the forest was different.  Today’s forests, especially in the American and Canadian intermountain west, are far more densely populated with trees, than they were when the pioneers first arrived on the scene.  Even more important, the fuel loads at forest floor level and up are immensely greater than they were 100 years ago so fires are much more prone to climb the fuel ladder from forest floor to the crowns of the trees and erupt into conflagrations that leap from tree to trees and are very difficult to suppress.

Isaac Stevens meets with the "Nez Perces" in 1852 or '53.  Note the state of the forest in terms of fuel loads.  The Stevens expedition included an artist charged with accurately rendering a visual record of the trip.

The modern forest is overloaded with fuel stock and too many trees making the forest a prime candidate for catestrophic fire

We know 100 + years of fire suppression is the big reason we have larger and more destructive wildfires.  That is not a reason to ignore the forest in the hopes things will go back to normal if we just bury our heads in the sand, or ashes, long enough.  We have the technology to restore the forests to more historic conditions but, thanks to the pop-environmental movement, we all too often lack the will to accomplish the task; the movement would rather see a fire unnecessarily burn an old growth tree than see a well managed thinning regimen reduce the intensity of a fire to the level where larger trees can withstand the fire event. 

The problem with large wildfires is they not only put the forest at risk, they emit massive amounts of pollutants into the air.  A single wildfire can emit many times the greenhouse gasses, particulates and other pollutants many entire industry sectors emit in entire years.

Dr. Thomas Bonnicksen is one of the world’s leading experts on forests and forest health.  In recent years he has developed a model for assessing the consequences of forest fires called, simply enough, the Forest Carbon and Emissions Model.

In 2009 Bonnicksen published the third in a series of examinations of emissions resulting from forest fires in California titled Impacts of California Wildfires On Climate And Forests:  A Study of Seven Years of Wildfires (2001 – 2007).

On summarizing the findings of his work Bonnicksen said, “The wildfire crisis is becoming more serious each year. Fires are getting bigger, more destructive, and more expensive. In 2001, California wildfires burned one-half million acres. In 2007, 1.1 million acres burned, and an estimated 1.4 million acres burned in 2008 destroying 1,000 homes. This was the most destructive fire season in the state’s history and 2009 could be worse.”

Discussing the emissions resulting from the fires Bonnicksen commented, “From 2001 to 2007, fires burned more than 4 million acres and released an estimated 277 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from combustion and the post-fire decay of dead trees. That is an average of 68 tons per acre. These wildfires also kill wildlife, pollute the air and water, and strip soil from hillsides. The greenhouse gases they emit are wiping out much of what is being achieved to reduce emissions from fossil fuels to battle global warming.”

Putting the impacts of fires in context, Bonnicksen pointed out, “The emissions from only the seven years of wildfires documented in this study are equivalent to adding an estimated 50 million more cars onto California’s highways for one year, each spewing tons of greenhouse gases. Stated another way, this means all 14 million cars in California would have to be locked in a garage for three and one-half years to make up for the global warming impact of these wildfires.”

Much of the damage done by unnecessarily intense forest fires in California and, across the rest of the United States and Canada can be reduced by a rational and well managed treatment program aimed at enhancing the health of the North American forests.

Well meaning, but misguided, demands that forests be left to their own devices only result in more destruction of the forest resource, huge amounts of unnecessary pollution and the waste of vast amounts of time and money better spent on ends with more likelihood of success.