Good article on not seeing the forestry for the trees.
William Wade Keye: Protocols put trees ahead of the forests
By William Wade Keye - Special To The Bee
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, September 23, 2007
Environmentalists like forests, but they don't especially like forestry. Since forestry, by actually touching the landscape, messes with the fantasy of unspoiled nature, activists promote land-use policies that preserve the fantasy but ignore the reality.
Take global warming, and the potential role that California forests -- and forestry -- can play in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in trees, forest soils and long-lived wood products. Only here in the birthplace of the Sierra Club could you have a state-sanctioned Climate Action Registry with a system of forestry protocols carefully concocted to service the fantasy and snub the reality.
Our Kyoto-inspired protocols resulted from legislation passed in 2002 (Senate Bill 812), in the halcyon days before global warming -- and genuine interest in so-called "cap and trade" carbon trading schemes -- really went mainstream. Now, after Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and the passage of Assembly Bill 32, the forestry part of the issue is about to get serious.
Under AB 32, the Air Resources Board is charged with leading California's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels. A small but important component of this is expanding and financially crediting the role that forests -- and forestry -- can play in capturing and storing carbon dioxide.
The ARB is scheduled to adopt the existing but flawed forestry protocols at its October meeting. If it takes this action, it will please "cut no tree" environmental types but greatly diminish the true potential for California forestry to help in achieving the goals of AB 32 by playing a vigorous role in the emerging marketplace for carbon credits.
