RELATED STORIES Introduction Hot Opportunities Technology Betting On Biotech Disease Rapidly Spreading Threats Insurance Feeling Storm-Tossed Graphic Diseases Moving Beyond The Tropics

By Jerry Hagstrom, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, July 6, 2007

If any U.S. industry can benefit from global warming, forestry and wood products should top the list.

Because trees remove large quantities of carbon dioxide, the prime greenhouse gas, from the air and sequester it for long periods, industry leaders and environmental activists should have an easier time these days defending forestlands from development. Wood stores carbon, and that should boost its popularity among environmentally minded consumers as a material for buildings and furniture.

As the planet warms, climatologists say, forests in the Northern Hemisphere are likely to fare better than those in the Southern Hemisphere, thus increasing the international competitiveness of the U.S. forestry industry. If the United States someday adopts a credit system for sequestering carbon, forestry companies should have plenty of credits to sell. And a breakthrough in technology for making ethanol from forest wastes could launch a whole new industry.

Nevertheless, Mark Rey, undersecretary of natural resources and environment in the Agriculture Department, predicts, "Growth of markets, competition from overseas, differences in land tenure among countries with a large forest base -- all of those variables are going to have a larger impact on the forest industry than climate change per se."

Ironically, the probability that forests and forestry practices can help curb global warming seems to have ratcheted up the conflicts between the forestry industry and environmentalists. The two camps are at loggerheads, for example, over how to the respond to the fact that Western forest fires have gotten fiercer of late -- perhaps because of climate change -- and have destroyed millions of trees. And the rise of "green" building standards has generated disputes over which forestry practices can reduce global warming and which production methods should qualify wood products to be certified as green.

Industry, environmentalists, and governmental officials agree on how trees and forests reduce, and emit, greenhouse gases. As trees grow, they draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, release oxygen back, and use the carbon to produce wood and leaves. When forests are disturbed by logging, fire, or insect infestations, they release carbon, adding to overall emissions.

Ideally, trees, forests, and wood products worldwide would sequester more carbon than they emit, achieving a status described as "carbon-negative." But reaching that goal depends on whether forests are clear-cut, maintained, or expanded, and on the production methods used to remove timber and make wood products.

In forestry worldwide, deforestation is the biggest climate-change issue. As forestland that once sequestered carbon is turned over to farming, houses, and commercial development, carbon is released. The United States isn't destroying forests as rapidly as Brazil, but American forests are losing ground nevertheless. About one-third of the U.S. landmass, some 750 million acres, is forested, but every year more than 1 million acres are cleared for other uses. The one-third of forestlands that are in federal or state hands are fairly safe from development, but both forestry companies and environmentalists say that for private landowners it's hard for the income from selling trees to compete with the profits from development.

The California-based Pacific Forest Trust is trying to put the brakes on development by making forest ownership more profitable. One way to do that is through a system of carbon-sequestration credits, which forest landowners could sell to businesses, such as oil refiners and cement manufacturers, that have a hard time reducing emissions.

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and a delegation of House members flew to Europe this spring to investigate global-warming causes and solutions, Pelosi made plans to purchase carbon-sequestration credits equal to the flight's carbon dioxide emissions from the Pacific Forest Trust's Van Eck Forest Project, which manages a working redwood forest to maximize carbon sequestration. "As a climate-change fact-finding investigation, it is essential that we lead by example and neutralize our travel-generated carbon emissions," Pelosi said. The trust estimates that its forest management methods will remove 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the next 100 years and says that Pelosi's purchase will help boost stewardship and restoration of these forests. Pelosi's office said she will pay the trust as soon as its executives calculate how much carbon dioxide her delegation's plane emitted.

Last September, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law making California the first to require serious reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. The law sets the state on the path to cutting emissions to 1990 levels -- an estimated 25 percent reduction -- by 2020. The Pacific Forest Trust backed the law and is working with state agencies to establish a method to quantify and verify the carbon sequestrations of California's privately owned forestlands and to create a system for trading credits.

Establishing measurements for carbon-sequestration contributions and keeping track of them should be fairly easy, according to trust President Laurie Wayburn, because the forest industry "is based on counting trees," and the U.S. Forest Service has done excellent research on estimating the amount of carbon in trees and wood products. Once California establishes its trading system, the forest trust hopes that other states and national will adopt the model.

Turning Into Torches
Aside from development threats to private forests, forest fires in the Mountain states and the Southwest are taking an increasingly heavy toll on federal forests. In 2006 scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California (San Diego) and the University of Arizona published a study of Western wildfires that burned at least 1,000 acres of U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service lands. The report concluded that from 1970 to 2003, rising temperatures and the earlier arrival of spring conditions led to a dramatic increase in the size of wildfires. The researchers concluded that the increased frequency of large, devastating wildfires might significantly change forest composition and reduce tree densities. If the trend continues, Western forests might no longer be the huge storehouse that sequesters 20 to 40 percent of all U.S. carbon and become instead a net emitter of carbon dioxide.

Neither the industry nor the environmental community is certain why forests are increasingly turning into torches. David Tenny, a former Agriculture Department forestry official who is now a vice president of the American Forest & Paper Association, said that whether global warming or a cyclical drought is responsible, "the fires are larger and hotter than any ever seen" and that forests are simultaneously suffering from a rise in infestations of beetles and other insects.

Part of the problem, Tenny said, is "overstocked" forests, adding that the Bush administration's "Healthy Forests Initiative" has made it easier for forestry companies to remove ground material that can fuel fires. But Franz Mattzner, the forest and public lands advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, points to "a lot of evidence" that the increase in fires is caused by poor management, excessive road-building, logging, and the increase in the number of people living near forests. "The best thing the industry can do," Mattzner said, "is move to growing bigger trees that can survive drought, heat, fire, and bugs."

Both Tenny and Mattzner said they are worried that the U.S. Forest Service now devotes 45 percent of its budget to fighting fires -- up from 15 percent in the early 1990s. The shift is causing the Forest Service to neglect its other duties, including research and forest management, they said.

Whether the forest industry has a positive or negative impact on global warming depends in part on how logging crews cut timber and how manufacturers make wood products. U.S. forestry and wood products companies contend that their production practices have been environmentally positive for at least 50 years and that their products do less harm to the environment than alternatives made of concrete or steel. The forest and wood products industry, by putting its waste to work, creates 60 percent of the energy it uses in its own production processes and sells energy to electricity grids, said Lori Perine, vice president for policy analysis and research at the trade association. The industry originated this practice, Perine said, out of a desire to "reduce energy costs and utilization" and to "have as small an environmental footprint as possible."

Today, she said, the association and its members "are constantly looking at how we can reuse materials that are a natural part of the manufacturing process -- not just bark and wood chips, but actual byproducts of our manufacturing process that we burn and convert into energy uses." Forest biorefineries, she said, may create an opportunity to create a "green transportation fuel" by extracting components of wood before turning it into pulp and then converting the extract to ethanol. "This is a totally new contribution in reducing the amount of carbon produced by others, because they are using these fuels," Perine added.

To achieve these goals, forestry and wood products companies want to gain greater access to materials on the forest floor, benefit from government-sponsored research, and get tax credits for purchasing the expensive new equipment required. Tenny noted that the industry must break through a "wide technological barrier" to be able to convert complex sugars in forest materials into ethanol. He applauded the Energy Department's research-and-demonstration projects but said the government needs to do much more to encourage commercial production of wood-based ethanol.

Environmentalists say that the forestry industry is asking for more applause than it deserves. "The real bottom line is that the same actions that make for sustainable forests economically are going to be the best bet to protect forests from global warming," Mattzner said. The industry should cut trees selectively rather than clear-cut, preserve the native structure of forests as much as possible, and plant trees that grow large, he said.

The NRDC's Mattzner charges that forestry companies' demands to log in virgin old-growth forests hurt their claim that they are fighting global warming. Of the potential for making biofuels from forest materials, he said, "If we are talking about biofuels as a method to address global warming, it would be utterly perverse to clear-cut and convert an ecosystem and release that stored carbon in order to theoretically to create a fuel that has a carbon benefit. You are taking a step backward."

Green Ratings
Many Americans are trying to fight global warming by "building green." The wood products industry maintains that wood is environmentally superior to steel and concrete as a building material because it uses less energy to manufacture and that even as a finished product wood stores carbon. "Compared to wood construction, steel and concrete consume 12 percent and 20 percent more energy, emit 15 percent and 29 percent more greenhouse gases, release 10 percent and 12 percent more pollutants into the air, and generate 300 percent and 225 percent more water pollutants," the forest and paper association declares on its website.

Various rating systems have been developed to certify wood products and paper as coming from sustainable forests and production methods. The U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit group sponsored by the building industry, has developed a "Green Building Rating System" based on a structure's use of wood products as well as its site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality. The council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, program sets standards for wood products and paper based on a certification system developed by the Forest Stewardship Council, a German group founded after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The council is supported by Greenpeace, the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the World Wildlife Fund, as well as by some forestry companies.

The group certifies as environmentally and socially friendly manufacturers and distributors that do not engage in illegal or irresponsible practices that damage biodiversity, water quality, wildlife, or timber resources; it also provides a "chain of custody" certificate for wood and paper products from these companies. One of the council's main objectives is to provide certainty to investors that products from these forest companies will not be subject to environmentally based bans or boycotts.

The American Forestry & Paper Association says, however, that LEED "discriminates" against certain wood products by not giving credit to products certified under other ratings systems and not giving credit for a wood product's entire life-cycle. Although the association is a member of the U.S. Green Building Council, in 2005 its chairman, Aubra Anthony, in a speech to the National Association of Home Builders denounced the council as part of an "environmental Taliban" that "is trying to turn the flawed LEED standard for commercial buildings into another residential building code."

Anthony had reason to be concerned. The Agriculture Department has adopted LEED standards for new Forest Service office buildings, visitor centers, research facilities, and climate-controlled warehouses. Many other federal agencies, including the General Services Administration, and state and local governments have also adopted the standards.

Michelle Moore, the vice president for policy and public affairs at the U.S. Green Building Council, noted that building materials are only a small part of the LEED standards. She said that LEED does not rate any building material as superior to another and that its rating for cement, for example, would depend on its content. The council is re-evaluating its LEED standards for wood, she said, and may incorporate some of the American Forest & Paper Association's views.

The role that buildings play in climate change should not be underestimated, Moore said, because at least 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions come from structures; cars, SUVs, and light trucks account for a total of only 17 percent. Moore also offered a motto that captures the potential for the forestry industry in the global-warming debate -- if industry leaders, environmentalists, and builders could ever reach agreement: "Building green is a way to go home a hero to your kids every day."