Selling Durham’s Urban Forest

In 2007, Durham, North Carolina, where I live set a goal to reduce or offset 90,000 metric tons of the greenhouse gases produced communitywide (city and county, businesses, residents and visitors) by 2030.  Just 17 more years to go.

Hopefully, part of the plan is to place its neglected urban forest canopy on the auction block.  A few months ago, Shell Energy North America announced plans to offset 500,000 metric tones of its carbon emissions by buying into forest regeneration in Michigan.

One of the companies selling the offset is The Forestland Group (TFG), a company headquartered in nearby Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  TFG manages the largest portfolio of hardwood forests in the U.S. but the 3.5 million acres it manages in 24 states are diversified by species, geographic region and age including two areas in North Carolina.

A study conducted by the Institute for Environmental Solutions as part of The Tree Project, concluded that tiny Golden, Colorado (pop. 19,186) could net $20 per metric ton per year by managing its urban forest.  Colorado was the first in the nation to have communities band together to support urban forestry by mitigating climate change.

Colorado’s urban tree canopy is only 13%, compared to 43% in North Carolina and 51% in Durham County, home to the state’s fourth largest city by the same name.  Maybe scarcity helped Colorado cities and towns catch on more quickly.

There is obviously great potential for revenue from Durham’s urban forest, as well as a means to meet its sustainability goal.

However, Durham will need to do three key things in a major paradigm shift in order for this to happen:

1. Take a holistic approach to urban forestry that includes residential and commercial property.
2. Begin to view its green infrastructure not only as a renewable resource but as an investment in not only quality of life but public health, crime reduction, water and air purification, as well as economic development.
3. Overcome years of cutting urban forests short by investing in catch-up, much as it just did with street resurfacing.

As California has already nicely laid out, selling urban forests as carbon credit is not like the song goes “playing the guitar on the M.T.V.” or “money for nothing.”   It requires a detailed management plan.

About five years ago the Congressional Research Service, the public policy research arm of the United States Congress, computed that afforestation of crop or posture land would have the potential to sequester between 2.2 and 9.5 metric tons of greenhouse gases per acre per year.

Reforestation, including efforts to assist natural regeneration, would sequester between 1.1 and 7.7 metric tons per year.  Durham’s forest yields would be on the upper side of those estimates.

Durham also has many areas where afforestation and reforestation can take place including tree “deserts” and areas along the rivers and streams and basins that recharge its water supply.

Like New York City, San Diego and many other cities, it could plant trees in its watersheds where they extend into more rural counties and count this as carbon offset as well.

Tree planting could also be used to mitigate downstream runoff that affects Raleigh’s water supply, which comes from a lake built primarily in Durham during the 1970s – borrowing a page from a tree planting project initiated by Congress and President Reagan.

During the mid to late 1980s, the Conservation Research Program was used to incentivize private property owners to put sensitive lands back into forestland, stream buffers, wildlife habitat, wetlands and ground cover.

At Dow Chemical’s Seadrift Plant, engineers planted 110 acres of trees to do the job of a proposed water treatment plant at 3% of the cost.  Iowa-based Ecolotree has learned that a thousand willow trees on an acre of land can treat ten gallons of toxic water per minute.

Care and deployment of Durham’s urban forest as a form of environmental capital and green infrastructure would include not only tree planting but thinning out brush so both over story and under story trees and vegetation can reach optimal effectiveness.

I hope those responsible for meeting Durham sustainability targets are already aggressively pursuing this. 

Tax-Shift Humor and Climate Change

Distinguished as “systemic causation,” if not direct, in a post last week by cognitive linguistic researcher Dr. George Lakoff, even scientists previously skeptical of climate change at Berkley Earth, who are now able to make assessments as far back as 1753, are confident in the “clear agreement between global land ­‐temperature rise and human-­caused greenhouse gases.”

That’s the same year a 21-year-old George Washington rode across the Blue Ridge Mountains and the upper Shenandoah Valley as an ambassador for the British Crown on a mission to assess the intentions of and convey a warning to the French and their Native American allies along the border of what is now Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Following a route I also partially traveled on one of my four cross country trips over the last three years, Washington cut northwest at the Quaker village of Winchester and up through the Forks of the Ohio River, the site of present-day Pittsburgh.

The fall of 1753 was also when the first steam engine arrived in America.  It doesn’t take a crash course in the Industrial Revolution to understand just how much that single machine has influenced our quality of life, but that doesn’t change the fact that we now need another revolution to ensure that quality of life for subsequent generations.

On Washington’s follow up mission in 1754, the first truly global war was ignited which led to the need for British taxes to fund it on this continent which in turn, led to the American War of Independence also led by Washington and the creation of the United States of America of which he was elected the first President.

As Americans were declaring independence, Scottish professor Adam Smith was publishing An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations which upended the notion that wealth could only be achieved by hording and inspired instead our current market economy based on creating wealth.

Ironically, many inspired by Smith have turned to hording wealth and denial of climate change, while, according to public opinion polls, 75% of Americans support regulating greenhouse gases such as CO2 and 60% support revenue-neutral taxes on carbon.

By 3 to 1, Americans believe that protecting the environment “improves economic growth and creates new jobs, while just 17% cling to a notion described by David Jenkins, a Republican conservative and environmentalist (yes they do exist) that:

“we can dig up all of that sequestered carbon from bygone eras, burn it, and send it back into the atmosphere without consequence?”

Jenkins, an official with ConservAmerica then chided a fellow conservative that such a view “is as impious as it is imprudent. It is certainly not conservative.”

Given political will by those elected to office, there is obviously bipartisan support for the ideas promoted fourteen years ago in a book of just 89 pages plus appendix entitled Tax Shift – How to Help the Economy and Improve the Environment, co-written by Alan Thein Durning and a young Reed College research intern named Yoram Bauman.

The now-Dr. Bauman is an environmental economist who teaches at the University of Washington.  He is even more famous as “the world’s first and only Stand-Up Economist.”  Click here for his hilarious five minute explanation of economics textbook author and Harvard professor Dr. Gregory Mankiw’s (pronounced Mank-u) Ten Principals of Economics.

Revenue-neutral tax-shifting has already been shown to work over the last few years in British Columbia, Canada where it was implemented several years ago based on the recommendation of Bauman and others.

It is based on the economic principle that the way to get less pollution is to make polluting expensive.  Revenue-neutral means shifting taxes off of things such as income and payroll and business while shifting them to things such as CO2 emissions.

Beginning in 2008, B.C. began a gradual revenue-neutral tax shift to carbon pollution in 2008 and an assessment four years later by a group of business, environmental, policy and academic leaders shows that it is working by reducing emissions far faster than elsewhere and without any negative effect on the economy there.

The B.C. experiment, while it must to likely be ratcheted up to have the intended impact, is well worth replicating in the United States.  The carbon tax approach is also supported by Mankiw, an advisor on the economy to both President George W. Bush and Republican presidential-candidate Mitt Romney.

In a TED presentation, Bauman quotes conservative columnist George Will, who, when it was noted that he agreed with Al Gore on this issue, paraphrases a quote from 20th-century American newspaper humorist Don Marquis by quipping back that:

“an idea should not be held responsible for the people who believe in it.”

Hope for Collectively Rolling Back Climate Change

In response to one of his fellow-Republicans who had been dismissive of one of my recent posts which took a market-driven approach to reducing carbon as a means to roll back climate change, David Jenkins wrote:

“So are we to believe that we can dig up all of that sequestered carbon from bygone eras, burn it, and send it back into the atmosphere without consequence? That view is as impious as it is imprudent. It is certainly not conservative.”

Jenkins, who grew up in Taylorsville, NC, worked as a volunteer in high school on Jesse Helms Senatorial campaign and then attended Brevard College here before graduating from Furman University in South Carolina, also delivered possibly the most concise, if not best, description of what carbon regulation is and why it is important when he wrote:

“The earth was designed (I happen to believe it was designed by God)with something called the carbon cycle that naturally regulates the chemistry of our atmosphere and keeps it in balance.”

Of course a market-driven approach to reducing emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases such as methane is to levy a tax on them.  The idea was first proposed by Republican Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush before being stigmatized as a liberal conspiracy by many of the economic conservatives who now control the Republican Party.

Economists all along the political spectrum prefer the use of taxes to curb negative behaviors such as “sin taxes” on tobacco and alcohol.

The idea of substituting a carbon sin tax for taxes that currently exist on productive behaviors such as work, has been supported by many such as Mitt Romney advisory Dr. N. Gregory Mankiw at Harvard and Cornell University’s Dr. Robert H. Frank, author of this year’s award-winning book entitled The Darwin Economy.

Frank argues that a relatively small $80 per metric ton tax on carbon would balance the climate while resulting over time in a gradual increase in the price of gasoline of 70 cents per gallon.  To level the “playing field” it could also be applied to imports from countries who refuse to curb their emissions.

As applied to some examples in or near Durham, NC, where I live, this would translate to $3.1 million for a municipal landfill here and $1 billion to a huge coal fired plant further north along the Virginia border.  Free marketers shouldn’t complain because these are costs to society that should have been accounted for anyway but were left as externalities.

In his book Frank also illustrates that dramatic savings to society through reduction in CO2 would create enough revenue to self-fund vouchers to low income households to be used to replace highly polluting vehicles with  more fuel efficient cars.

Oil tycoon, T. Boone Pickens proposes that we can eliminate 75% of our reliance on OPEC oil by just converting the 8 million 18-wheel trucks on our nation’s highways to natural gas.  Dr. Richard Muller at the consortium Berkley Earth has suggested that one of the most effective things we can do to curb global carbon emissions is to make the technology for natural gas fracking readily available to China as a means to wean that country from coal.

Muller, a longtime climate change skeptic, dramatically reverse his position after analysis published two and a half months ago demonstrated that essentially all of our climate change problem is the “result from human emission of greenhouse gasses” over the last 250 years.

Click here or on the image shown in this blog to watch the impact of greenhouse gasses year by year or decade by decade in a very cool video of the earth.  Watch the video at that link closely for the impact of greenhouse gasses from 1950, just two years after I was born, until to today.

There is a renewed bipartisan interest in a carbon tax, as reported in an August Wall Street Journal story, including those at The Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a think tank formed by Republicans.

Social conservatives including many Evangelical Christians will be important to our coming together as a nation to address climate change.  Jenkins, the VP of Government and Political Affairs for ConservAmerica, formerly Republicans for Environmental Protection, laid this out in a 2009 brief entitled God’s Climate Plan, where he concluded:

“Once we, as Christians, understand how God has designed the earth to keep its chemistry in balance and support life, we have an obligation to respect that design and live within it.”

In their 2009 book entitled A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions, co-authors Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and Dr. Andrew Farley, a pastor, describe the need for urgency in addressing climate change and propose a Christian basis for action.

They note that:

“In the United States, individuals and households produce 21% of the nation’s heat-trapping gas emissions. Another 17 percent is produced by personal transportation.  As individuals, that means we control more than a third of the country’s greenhouse gas budget.”

It is easy to feel futile as my friend Jason Walser, a young lawyer and conservationist, does as he bicycles to work each day in Salisbury, a community in central North Carolina, as he passes a freight train consisting of nearly 200 carloads of coal which are required daily by a nearby Duke Energy power plant.

All this said, I still have a feeling that we’re turning the corner on the debate over climate change and that soon we’ll apply our collective efforts to successfully reverse this problem.

However, while collective action at the national and global level is critical, it is just as important to ensuring a future for our children and grandchildren that we apply the technology now available to pinpoint our efforts to address climate change at the household, street, neighborhood and community level.

The Cost-Effective Strategy Missing In Most Carbon Plans

Ambitious community plans to reduce their respective carbon footprints, such as the one for Durham NC, where I live, are typically missing what experts say may be “…the second most important thing we can do right now,” plant more trees, according to Jim Robbins, a journalist who writes news articles and books about science and the environment.

According to an inventory by Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute, there are 156 local currently in place, 26 of which are comprehensive, 55 establishing policy and 75 dealing with climate change plans.

The most inexpensive and likely the most cost-efficient action a city and county such as Durham could take in the pursuit of the goal of reducing local government greenhouse emissions by 50% and community-wide emissions by 30% over the next 18 years is to fund urban forestry at a level consistent with the benefits provided by trees.

New and deeper research regarding trees, including studies conducted by organizations such as the Carnegie Institution for Science Department of Global Ecology, shows that forests have an incredible effect on global warming, far beyond where they are planted.

The studies suggest that urban forestry must be incorporated in sustainability planning and this includes aggressive measures to foster, encourage and maintain those trees that naturally regenerate.

Deforestation, even such as the clear-cutting being uselessly conducted along roadsides in North Carolina by out-of-state billboard companies, contributes not only global warming but also to drought.  Trees are not only a critical part of cooling the earth’s surface but also pivotal to the cycle that creates and sustains and regulates rainfall.

Killing trees creates a vicious cycle.  A recent study by the Carnegie Institution for Science on the dramatic loss of Quaking Aspen reveals that during drought die-offs, trees show a 70% loss of water conductivity.

Currently Durham only budgets about $6,000 each year to purchase on average about 350 trees for reforestation which just barely exceeds the average of over 200 that are removed each year due to damage or disease etc. for net reforestation of about 150 trees.

Even when the Durham forestation budget is augmented by another $4,000 from Parks and Recreation (highly constrained to a few neighborhoods), something just doesn’t compute.

The amount being reinvested here in urban forestation is totally inconsistent with the $162,000 value per tree reaped over a fifty-year lifetime in ecosystem services (188 times the purchase price) and even more if the right species are planted and maintained in the best possible locations.

And Durham isn’t even tracking how many trees are being subsumed each year or have been lost historically to development although that information could probably be mined from development site plans or other documents and probably numbers in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Such a metric should be available to help inform funding and residential and commercial incentives for reforestation and afforestation (planting where they haven’t already existed) in numbers that will significantly increase carbon sequestration and more than compensate for the loss of forest infrastructure.

A good first step is the funding of an Urban Forestry Strategic Plan such as one advocated by Durham’s Urban Forester, an example of which can be found at this link for Santa Monica, CA where even the original developers in 1875 appear to have grasped the importance of forest infrastructure.

A plan for Durham could include deployment of well-proven technology utilized to much more accurately measure not only tree canopy but the amount of area under development and used for roadways or parking lots as well as to identify tree deserts in low income areas and areas that could be used for reforestation.

Of course urban forestry here spearheads a process below the national average of one tree planted for every two that naturally regenerate.  The survival rate for naturally regenerated trees is probably around 1 in 20 based on a recent study.

Unfortunately, unless incented otherwise, many of the trees planted residentially or commercially are invasive species that are not large enough or of the type that will yield the full benefits trees can yield while crowding out those that do.

The value of trees, including the nation’s 3.8 billion trees found in urban areas, becomes more apparent every day as revealed by scientific inquiry.  This far transcends the huge contribution they make to the aesthetics important to property values and sense of place, leveraged into economic development such as tourism.

It includes crime reduction, healthy immune systems, energy savings, water management, removal of toxins, soil and water remediation, prevention of soil erosion and biodiversity to name just a handful.

According to the evidence put forth in the fact-filled and insightful book Robbins published earlier this year, Durham’s forestry plan should include:

• Restoration forestry far in excess of what has or will be deforested by development, going forward and back 30 or more years
• Reforestation or afforestation of low income neighborhoods including neighborhood streetscapes
• Incorporating forest infrastructure along with other types of infrastructure as part of urban and suburban developments
• Afforestation incentives to encourage planting of trees where they have not existed historically or recently
• Agroforestry to marry agriculture and forestry to the benefit of both
• Use of trees as a much lower cost alternative and more effective approach to removal and remediation of toxins including polluted storm water

But there is no benefit from trees more critical than carbon sequestration, valued in a recent study of roadside trees as 16.6 million metric tons per acre, per year which is why they should be included in every local plan to reduce or mitigate a community’s carbon footprint.

North Carolina Power Plants Emit 87% of Greenhouse Gases

If all I want is the score and a few highlights, I tune into SportsCenter, but that seems to be what most news reports are becoming including the ones headlined this week stating that power plants release 72% of greenhouse gases.

So I decided to drill down a bit, specifically, to see if I could find more information specific to where I live.  Fortunately EPA posts the original news release, along with a series of informative PowerPoint slides and fact sheets.

Actually, power plants, especially those that are coal-fired release 72% of the emissions that EPA began to track in 2010, in cooperation with 6,700 of the largest industrial stationary sources nationwide and this is about 80% of total US emissions. Prior to this EPA could only go by estimates.

As much as I agree with some utility executives quoted in a previous blog who point out that for years many coal-fired plants have been gaming the system, it is important that we keep these new and far more accurate numbers in perspective.

The new information shows that the percentage emitted by power plants is even higher in my adopted home state of North Carolina, where nearly 87% come from that source, equating to 71 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent alone, or about 3% of the total from that source nationwide and placing even more value on the 60% of the state that remains forested as a means of sequestration.

By clicking on this link a breakdown of sources and locations is revealed  including the amount reported by sources where I live such as the City of Durham's sanitary landfill, Duke University and GlaxoSmithKline.

For fun I checked into emissions from Charlotte Motor Speedway which is actually in Concord, NC but I guess gases Charlotte nonetheless. EPA is collecting information from 12 additional industrial categories for 2011.

Protecting the environment is one of the critical roles government plays in partnership with a free market economy and the 2008 legislation that required more accurate reporting is a major step forward for achieving the ability to prioritize and zero in even better on the goals we need to set to reduce this impact.

There are some promising new technologies, such as capturing carbon dioxide from the air using a polyamine –based re-generable solid absorbent.

A new book based on a three-year research project at MIT entitled Unlocking Energy Innovation lays out a 40-year framework for Decarbonizing the US energy system. The book advises against what it calls a “moonshot mentality” in favor of long term widespread public and private collaboration at every level.

Among other things, the book which was published last October argues for a full deregulation of the electricity market to introduce greater competition and help spur more innovation in an area that has been risk-averse, including critical financing.

Another great resource is www.thirdway.org which is a refreshingly moderate think-tank with a number of pragmatic white papers on how to achieve energy independence.