(NEWSCOM)
New US office takes fresh approach to carbon
One possibility: Industrial emitters of CO2 partner with landowners to plant forests.
By Todd Wilkinson | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor/ February 3, 2009 edition
Bozeman, Mont.
The Obama administration is off to a running start on climate change – pushing to let California and other states set tougher restrictions on greenhouse gases and accelerating higher gas mileage standards for cars and trucks.
But those are just the most obvious early moves reflecting a philosophy likely to be seen throughout the federal government, involving rural as well as urban areas. Already, first steps are being taken that will engage farmers, woodlot owners, and the federal land management agencies that oversee hundreds of millions of acres of public land – areas with the potential to “capture” considerable amounts of carbon dioxide that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere and accelerate warming of the planet.
Taking the lead here is a new bureaucratic mouthful called the “Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets.” It’s part of the US Department of Agriculture, which not only works with farmers and ranchers but also includes the US Forest Service and its 193 million acres.
Heading the new office is Sally Collins, a former Forest Service ranger who reports directly to new USDA head Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa.
Ms. Collins believes the approaches of her office may open a new era in which urban industrial emitters of carbon dioxide will partner with private landowners to plant new forests or crops to soak up CO2, or in which revenues generated from a carbon tax will pay for planting trees in federal forests lost to wildfire.
The idea is to nurture food- and fiber-producing activities that are more climate-friendly. Over time, Collins says by phone from Washington, “Where we go from here will alter the discussion of how the country thinks about natural resources.”
The program will be similar to payments farmers currently receive to rest their land in order to preserve the soil, restoration of wetlands along rivers by municipalities to promote water quality and flood control, and “biodiversity banks” in which landholders that affect habitat for endangered species are required to provide equal or greater amount of habitat elsewhere.
For now, the focus is on cataloging land-use activities that trap carbon and developing an acceptable standard for measuring them. The first step is setting up verifiable national standards – eco-bean counting for carbon sequestration as a 21st-century commodity crop.
Analysts, from free-marketeers to conservationists, find it an interesting – if not fascinating – idea.
“To have the Agriculture Department and Forest Service make a major commitment to … addressing global warming represents a major sea change,” says Charles Gauvin, an environmental attorney and president of the conservation group Trout Unlimited. “This is incredibly timely and consistent with what candidate Obama said he would do. The fact that it is occurring so quickly is indicative of how a concept can be translated into practical reality.”
In fact, the new USDA office was launched in the waning days of the Bush administration.
“For the ecosystem service concept to generate real results, it will have to go beyond valuing ecosystem services to actually contracting for them,” says Terry Anderson, executive director of the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Mont., a free-market economist who advocates resource protection based on economic incentives rather than government regulation.
“Just as the Forest Service produces trees and sells them to loggers or produces recreational services and sells them through its fee programs to hikers, it will have to think of itself as a supplier of ecosystem services for sale to those who value them.”
But environmental economist Ray Rasker is wary. “Incentives matter, but disincentives matter, too,” says Mr. Rasker, executive director of Headwaters Economics in Bozeman. “I believe in providing economic incentives for companies and landowners that do extraordinary things, but you can get results much more cheaply and effectively by penalizing polluters who put out CO2.”
In its recent “State of the World” report for 2009, the Worldwatch Institute in Washington calls for the use of economic incentives for landowners so that they manage their holdings for maximum absorption of carbon generated by agriculture, industry, and automobiles. But it says, “This calls for forging unusual political coalitions that link consumers, producers, industry, investors, environmentalists, and communicators.”
In any case, how natural resources are economically valued – especially for the environmental services they provide – is headed into largely uncharted waters.
Mark Nechodom, a senior Forest Service climate-change policy expert working with Collins, says the change of administrations, interest from businesses, and public awareness has pushed the issue past a “tipping point.”
“One of the things that has struck people who have been around the climate-change issue is the rapidity with which the move to a market-based solution has cascaded forward,” he says.
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Comments
2. Ray Rasker | 02.03.09
Todd,
Nice article! I really like being quoted opposite Terry.
But, maybe my quote should have been: “Since when do we have to pay Mother Earth to provide what she’s done for free for millions of years?” This idea of paying the Forest Service for the basic life-support its lands provide is absurd.
Cheers,
Ray –
3. Yaeger | 02.04.09
This has got to be the height of foolishness. If we get rid of CO2, there goes the planet. All plant life needs CO2. We raise almond orchards, vine seed crops, wheat and tomatoes. Without CO2 none of these food stuffs would be possible. I guess this is what the enviro freaks think is good for the planet.
4. tom | 02.04.09
Whoa and then some. Ethanol production, supported by the Obama administration and particularly Vilsack and the USDA has resulted in plowing under up to 50% of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) grasslands in areas of the great plains in the last two years. CRP had sequestered carbon on millions of acres of grasslands that are now releasing all that stored carbon to the atmosphere. In addition, the ethanol production resulted in the further destruction of the last remaining native grasslands in the plains and even worse, the continued planting of very shallow wetlands in the Great Plains to corn for ethanol is further removing one of the most effective locations for carbon sequestration. I have not seen anything from the current administration, the past administration or the new leaders of USDA that will tell me how they can reconcile these two diametrically opposed programs and policies and they have not responded to repeated requests for statements.
5. Scott | 02.04.09
Yaeger, I can’t imagine this would be so successful as to eliminate all C02 on earth, unless perhaps we all stop breathing. :P
I’m off to check on my tomato starts to see if they’re still kicking.
6. Dan Belenky | 02.04.09
What a hoax.
So you plant a bunch of crops or trees, then when they are harvested, or burned, or just die and decompose, the CO2 goes back into the atmosphere. Net net you have no offset at all.
This is bogus science.
7. Anon | 02.04.09
At last! We could have done this eight years ago. Lets all be grateful that somewhere in Texas a village has got its idiot back.
8. clay | 02.04.09
dan belenky said there is no net offset. Actually the soils of the great plains have lost 70 to 80 percent of there organic matter since initial plow up. If you restore organic carbon through sequestration by not disturbing the root zone you have a huge potential sink for carbon dioxide by restoring the organic matter and thus organic carbon to the soil. Also, where did this fifty percent plow up of crp ground come from? I am almost 100 percent sure that is completely wrong. That sure has not happened in the southern plains and I do not believe the corn belt has seen anything close to that kind of plow up.
9. Leland Palmer | 02.05.09
It could be effective, if done right. What needs to be done is to sequester carbon for long periods of time. Biochar or terra preta, uses charcoal as a soil conditioner and fertilizer, and can sequester carbon for at least 5000 years.
Polluters should not be able to escape controls by buying such offsets, however, because that would allow “business as usual” when what we really need is radical change.
We need to nationalized the coal fired power plants, for example, and convert them to biomass fuel, oxyfuel combustion, and carbon capture and storage of the resulting CO2.
We should not allow this mechanism for paying nature to do what it already does to interfere with that.
10. Richard Wineberg | 02.10.09
Great idea…about time…valueing the priceless makes one part of something bigger than themselves…
11. Andrew Fielding | 02.10.09
A rigid domestic offset program is one of the tools to reduce GHG or increase CO2 removals, however the GOVERNMENT should only work to coordinate the effort. Objective Project Protocols are being developed now by the California Climate Action Registry. Government should focus on developing a real Cap&Trade and the rules for a robust project interface. Let the professionals in the private sector work with the landowners and the emitters. KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid!!!!!
12. Paul Kriegel | 02.10.09
Thats the beauty of growing trees. When you harvest and make lumber, the carbon continues to be sequestered in the lumber. Replant and you start over, making those acres of timberland far more productive for carbon storage than anything else!
13. Lou A. | 02.12.09
I can’t resist “the beauty of growing trees”, it reminds me of a friend, an employee of a logging/paper company who took me to visit one of his company’s replanted “forests”. It was stunning! There was no way to respond in civil terms to the sheer depressing overhang of 30′ tall Loblolly Pines, row after row, in the bare dirt. It was a desert, linearly punctured with what looked like plastic “trees”. NOTHING else was growing there. No birds, no plants, no nothing.
The forest had been ripped out to provide space for fast-growing, soft wood, cheap, junk lumber.
What could I say to the man, a really nice guy, who believed his company was doing something right. I kept the friendship and forfeited the argument.
No wonder the ground fell out from under our economy. We need to understand the ecosystems that we expect to sustain us, and live less greedily.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
1. Today’s Science Policy News for February, 4th 2009 - Scientists & Engineers for America Action Fund | 02.04.09
2. A New Faces Of US Environmental Management: Someone To See The Forest For The Trees…And The Crops | Only Hybrids | 02.05.09
3. USA: Sally Collins runs Obama’s Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets | Forest Policy Research | 02.05.09
5. Industrial CO2 Emitters Fixed Up With Landowners To Plant Forests · Environmental Leader · Green Business, Sustainable Business, and Green Strategy News for Corporate Sustainability Executives | 02.09.09
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1. Bryan | 02.03.09
This seems like a re-write of the CRP program for farmers with a few more players involved. Now how much is this going to cost?