Carbon swap plan draws mixed reviews

The California Air Resources Board adopted a program the Schwarzenegger administration pushed through late last week that will allow polluters to buy carbon offsets from logging companies, which environmentalists say will be rewarded for “business-as-usual” clearcutting practices.

Essentially, the program will allow industrial polluters, like power plants and oil refineries, to buy carbon credits from logging companies, like Sierra Pacific Industries, which adhere to forestry practices outlined in the plan.
  

This could bring timber companies millions of dollars as Assembly Bill 32, the landmark global warming bill, goes into practice in two years. The bill will put caps on polluters so they have to either clean up their acts or buy carbon offsets.

“In theory, they’ll come to us, tell us how much carbon they need to offset, and we’ll sell it to them,” said Mark Pawlicki, spokesman for Sierra Pacific Industries, which participated in the program’s development.

SPI is one of the few logging companies that didn’t participate in an earlier version of the program, which did not allow clearcutting practices.

In the new wording, according to a handful of environment groups, the baseline is being set so low that SPI will be monetarily rewarded for its standard 17- to 20-acre clearcuts.

 “It seems to be a very similar type of logging,” said Josh Buswell, Sierra campaigner for ForestEthics, of what the report defines as “natural forest management” compared to SPI’s current clearcut methods.

“If you can essentially do business as usual and say you are sequestering carbon, and getting rewarded for it, given that this is going to be a model for the world ... I think it seems a little bit hypocritical,” he said.

Last year, SPI and environment groups ForestEthics and Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch unleashed contradictory reports detailing how SPI’s timber-harvest practices affected carbon sequestering.

According to the environment groups’ report, deforestation is second only to fossil fuel emissions in causing greenhouse gas emissions.

“A clearcut is about as beneficial to the climate as a new coal-fired power plant,” said Brian Nowicki, a biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity.

But SPI’s report concluded that “intense forest management” stored carbon at almost twice the rate of an unmanaged forest.

“They are extremely wrong,” Pawlicki said at the time of the report. “We will offset 877,000 automobiles because of our forest practices.”

Meanwhile, the air board is claiming a widely-approved victory with the new program’s unveiling.

“Landowners, forestry experts, academics, environmentalists and government agencies all came together to produce a protocol that will capture and store millions of CO2 emissions every year through cost-effective, sustainable forestry practices,” said Barbara Riordan, acting board chairwoman.

The main difference between the new program’s wording and a similar program passed in 2007 is that the new program considers clearcutting practices “sustainable forestry.”

“We are pleased that the protocols recognize the value of forest management in addressing climate change and encouraged that they may provide sufficient incentives to allow California’s private forestland owners to participate in carbon-trading markets,” said David Bischel, president of the California Forestry Association, a logging lobbying group.
 

Trees, through the process of photosynthesis, naturally absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store the gas as carbon in their trunks, leaves, branches and roots.

Methods the program lays out to increase carbon sequestering in forests are reforestation, improved forest management and avoiding conversions.

Reforestation involves restoring tree cover on land that is not “at optimal stocking levels.” Improved forest management deals with activities that maintain or increase carbon stocks in forests relative to an established baseline. Avoiding conversion prevents the conversion of forestland to a non-forestland use.

“If we invest more in our land and grow more timber ... it can be sold in carbon offsets,” SPI spokesman Pawlicki said. “It’s got to be an amount above a baseline, though.”

The program is in its infancy and won’t really get a chance to take off until AB32 begins to put carbon caps on industries in 2012, Pawlicki said.

“Putting it in place is going to be quite complex,” Pawlicki said.

Environmentalists are determined to stop it from ever getting that far.

“For us in the Sierra Nevada, climate change effects are already here, and happening fast ... Clearcutting not only exacerbates these effects, but is a carbon emitter, not a sink, for years,” said Addie Jacobson, a member of Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch.