Forests Carbon Services

 Avoidance, capture, and sequestration of Greenhouse Gases.  To come.

This is the core value proposition for the FREE/GWesCo solution design, implemented through the GWF business.

Answering Nilso,

Hello neighbor.

Your Governor Brown is all over it, and has a tame student (a senior professor at Eugene) of Professor Nordhaus (Nobel at Yale) advising her.  

Naturally, since I am a consultant, and have been saying this forever, they’re not doing it right.  Which probably means they’re running as fast as they can.

I have not found the latest on the ObamaFuel project (I just made that name up), in Lakeview.  Collins Pine Lakeview has always had cogen (biomass fueled generation in the lumber mill industry came in around 1900, although grid-fed mills dominated for a few decades in the middle of the 20th Century); during the previous functioning administration sombodies put together a project to build a wood-to-jet-fuel plant, fueled by all those small diameter trees, the removal of which are the focus of current forest health work.  Here is where I am working on that discussion.  Come on over.

Thank you for asking about choice of technique.  This is where SierraMiMi says “welcome to my life,” and offers you a tip for giving her a break from listening.

I want to know the full carbon footprint of alternative programs.  The mechanized treatment, which is cheaper in dollars, may effect the methane-sink capabilities of the forest floor.  The scientists know how to measure this.  It may be important.  There are likely other elements , including the obvious of the carbon costs of building and operating the  machinery, that enter the computation.  The FREE/GWF commercial solution optimizes for carbon balance.  My guess is that the best carbon balance solution uses a great deal more hand work than is common today.  It costs more in dollars, but the FREE/GWF carbon balances increase in value as carbon prices increase.  Or it enters offers in a carbon-services auction, in $/TonnesCO2.

In the carbon accounting and decision making, the catastrophic fires are a key driver.  There are estimates for the CO2 injections by various named fires.  This should (maybe already is) a standard report from the fires.  The basic science of the short-term value proposition is that reductions in density lower the expected CO2 injections from fires. Stochastic fire simulation is a thing, using high-granularity models of ignition based on fuel loading, slope, wind speed and direction, humidity and, importantly, whether the pixel (whatever they call a cell in GIS modeling) next door is burning like a tree on fire.

Whether the short term value of the forest health activity, based on reductions in frequency and severity of fire, exceeds the value of future carbon saved, depends on the price of carbon, which the political economist predicts will climb.

Hey a thought!  I can copy all that over to, hmm, the Forests Carbon Services post.  This is what we call co-production, a practice at the core of the Solution.

Beckwourth engaged in co-production as a matter of routine, as did the other forests people of his time.