(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



A better way to clean up our forests before they immolate us. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2023-01-02

Riverside Fire from La Dee Flats in the Mt. Hood National Forest (Oregon). Sept. 9, 2020. La Dee Flats itself burned, a few years ago. --Photo public domain, courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Region.

I just sent this to my congressional delegation. Maybe some of you will be moved to help make this happen, any way you can.

Dear Senator [Jeff] Merkley:

I really appreciate hearing back from you. I’ve written to you a couple of times lately, about similar issues, so I’m not sure which letter you were responding to in your letter dated Nov. 28, 2022. The one in which I ask you for a Cleaning Up Our Forests Before They Immolate Us Act?

Unfortunately you did not address my main concern.

Controlled burns get out of control and do great harm. They create air pollution that contributes to the deaths of 177,000 Americans each year, and dump all of the carbon sequestered in that biomass back into the atmosphere. There it speeds climate change and deepens the permadrought, in a vicious circle that makes forests and grasslands ever more vulnerable to fire, “fixing” the problem by making it worse. Controlled burns are a huge waste of a resource, and of jobs. And they squander our best opportunity to stop and reverse climate change.

There are hundreds of sawmills spread across the West, many shut down for lack of timber. All generated their own electricity burning wood waste, most are already connected to the grid, and many of those generators can be put back into service. Pacific Biochar [1] is profitable, chipping waste wood in the forests, and hauling it to some of those mills. They “add one or two pieces of metal,” and tweak the burner so that it burns the gasses but leaves the char. They sell that to farmers: It is a superb soil amendment, and spreading it on/in the soil sequesters that carbon for millennia. Those mills already have electrostatic precipitators to scrub their exhausts. Adding Ethan Novek’s (Innovator Energy) [2] inexpensive ammonia-and-salts tech to scrub the CO2 would cost little, and if we used electric trucks and equipment this scheme could be almost completely carbon negative, could sequester megatons of carbon every year.

Make pyrolysis oils from wood waste for all of the chemicals we can extract from them instead of petroleum, at the mills or out in the woods—the equipment is readily available—and leave some char on the forest floor to improve those poor soils and sequester more carbon. Make and sell clean-burning, carbon neutral wood fuel pellets, too. And while we’re there, instead of taking chip/oil trucks back out to the woods empty, use that trip to haul crushed aluminosilicate rock out to the woods, and blow it onto the soil with the char. It will sweeten acid forest soils, add needed minerals, and draw vast quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere as it decomposes: “enhanced weathering” with side benefits to the forest.

Some people would take croplands out of food production in a hungry world to grow energy crops for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, which includes capturing CO2 from power-plant exhausts and pumping supercritical CO2 underground: expensive. Making char is a much simpler, smarter, less expensive way to sequester carbon—with side benefits for the forest. Nature already gives us a biomass crop, and not harvesting it leads to forests and farms and whole towns burning. Wasting it making climate change worse while we waste croplands on BECCS crops would be insane.

Please, could we not waste this opportunity to turn a huge liability into an asset, to turn one of the worst contributors to climate change into one of our best tools for reversing it, while creating jobs, clean energy, and clean non-petroleum/fossil-gas chemicals, and preserving croplands for food production?

Sincerely,

***** **********

C.C. Senator Wyden and Rep. Blumenauer, via email; perhaps others in congress—AOC, Ed Markey, Bernie Sanders; maybe Daily Kos. Wherever I might get some traction on this issue.

-----------

BTW: Whole forests are being cut in the Southeastern US (and in British Columbia) and turned into wood pellets to feed European power plants with “clean” energy. This is greenwashing. It is counterproductive. It is nutz. Please educate yourself on this part of this issue, [3] and work to stop it.

---------------

Endnotes from the book, Pumping the Brakes on Climate Change: A Review of the Technologies and Politics that Could Leave the Future a Future, by John O’Renick, with permission of the author. www.ptbocc.com (the Rants are good) or download an advance reader PDF here: https://www.ptbocc.com/download-book.html

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/2/2145020/-A-better-way-to-clean-up-our-forests-before-they-immolate-us

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.