Green Diamond timber company agreed to slow their logging operations in Southern Oregon in return for millions of dollars in payments from Microsoft and other companies seeking to offset their carbon dioxide pollution from fossil fuels. The companies are essentially paying the timber company to grow more trees on this land. The Bootleg Fire upended the Green Diamond carbon storage plans, burning through nearly 20 percent of the company’s Klamath project lands. Reporter Hal Bernton looked into the viability of carbon offsets in an increasingly fire-prone world. He joins us with the story.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with a frustrating paradox. One method humans have come up with to address climate change is to create markets for carbon offsets. These offsets can take the form of forests that go unlogged for a period of time, meaning companies like Microsoft are now paying millions of dollars to timber companies, which then let their trees grow, sucking carbon dioxide out of the air. But here’s the paradox: our ever hotter world is also making massive wildfires more likely, including in some of those forests that have been set aside. That’s exactly what happened two years ago when the Bootleg Fire burned through nearly 20% of the Green Diamond timber company’s offset project in Klamath County. Reporter Hal Bernton has written about environmental issues for decades for the Seattle Times and the Oregonian. His new article for OPB is focused on the viability of carbon offsets in our increasingly fire-prone world. Hal Bernton, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Hal Bernton: Yeah. Thank you for inviting me.
Miller: Can you describe what this forest land near Bly, which is in Klamath County, looks like right now?
Bernton: This is a landscape in a more arid area of Oregon. Not too far further east you reach the desert. It was heavily logged for decades by a succession of owners. So the forest that stood before the Bootleg Fire arrived, it wasn’t like huge trees or something, it was regrowth, some from clear cuts that had been replanted sometimes very thickly and densely, so they were kind of spindly and many of them competing for the moisture. And then some had been selectively logged of the bigger trees, and had sort of grown into these scraggly forests.
So when we arrived, what you saw was a lot of very charred black snags, thousands upon thousands of them that cover this landscape. Some areas the ground was so scorched from the fire that [there] was still kind of a powdery white soil. Other areas there was some greenery that had started to come back in some places on the ground.
Miller: This was an area that was supposed to be growing trees and storing carbon for 100 years. What are the estimates for how much CO2 was released because of the fire there?
Bernton: Well “released” is a tricky word. What happened, and what was reported in the documents that Green Diamond filed, was that more than 3 million metric tons of carbon were released. But actually what happened was this carbon was stored in live trees, and many of these trees died. And so while some carbon went up with the smoke during the fire, most of it really remains in the forest in the form of all these dead trees.
And why that matters for this project was that the project was really keyed to live trees that could act like worker bees and grab carbon dioxide out of the air, and then create wood through the process of photosynthesis and store this carbon dioxide.
Miller: That’s an important point. So this is more about the lack of the forest’s ability to add carbon going forward, as opposed to all of the carbon being released when it burned. Most of it is still there, but no more carbon is gonna be added until real live trees start bulking up again.
Bernton: Yeah. With every little bit of greenery that comes back, of course there’s a little bit of carbon. But the big foundation of this project were these trees 30, 40, 50 years old that we’re going to fix carbon each year. The rules that this project was developed are California rules, they have a state board that allows companies to use investments in carbon offset projects to basically offset some of their fossil fuel emissions. Under the rules that California set up, the carbon loss had been severe enough that they needed to terminate the project.
Miller: What would termination mean for the company like Microsoft that bought the offsets?
Bernton: This project is pretty much scrapped, and the carbon credits they thought they would get from investing in this project won’t be provided.
Now, there’s a broader insurance pool that the California State Board has set up. It’s a little bit wonky here, so excuse me. But basically, there’s more than 120 of these forestry offset projects that the state of California has certified across the country, they all provide a little bit of carbon credits to this insurance pool so that it can pay out when something goes wrong.
Miller: It sounds like an offset for an offset. I mean, the whole point of this, stepping back for a second, is in places where because of regulations companies either have to or want to say that they are reducing their own emissions, they can either do that, or they can pay to have carbon sucked up somewhere else. It seems like California has set up a kind of an excess place, or literal acreage of forests that aren’t being cut down that could be used if carbon offset forests burn up?
Bernton: Well, they’ve got an insurance pool that’s basically set up. What happens if a company goes bankrupt for example, and decides to log much more heavily than they said? What happens if disease happens, and kills many of the trees that were supposed to be storing more carbon? Or what happens with fire? And they created these three different risk scenarios, and then everybody donated for each of those. And so then they will pay out.
Now there’s some question whether with climate change intensifying, whether there’ll be enough, totally set aside to cover all these losses. And the fire part early on has certainly grown more rapidly than the projections might have earlier estimated, because there have been not just losses from the Bootleg Fire, but also in central Oregon with the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs. The Lionshead Fire, which some people may remember that flared in 2020, that hit quite heavily and burned through a carbon offset project that the tribe had developed. Another one that the Colville tribe had developed in northeast Washington.
So there is a broader debate: can these offset projects really deliver what they’re promising?
Miller: You included a damning quote from the head of a timber company, which itself has put together carbon deals. He said that these deals often pay land or landowners quote “to not do what they were not going to do.” What does he mean?
Bernton: There are some instances where logging really wasn’t ever anticipated to happen on the scale that was set forth as the commercial baseline scenario. And yet that allows them to claim this big reduction. There is one example here in Oregon where the Warm Springs tribe had an area that was not part of their commercial timber base, it was an area that was not scheduled to be logged. It was valued for other things like gathering and hunting. And yet that area was really the heart of the carbon offset.
Miller: Because technically they could have logged there, even if for cultural reasons they had no intention to do so. But they could still take advantage of the fact that theoretically it was possible for them to log there, and then by not logging there, they can actually reap the financial benefits because somebody can pay them to not log there.
Bernton: That’s the way the rules work, which has helped to fuel the debate. There’s another terribly wonky word, “additionality.” Do you really get additional carbon savings with these investments?
Miller: So turning back to fires, I’m curious what kinds of rules govern the management of forests that are sold as carbon offsets? Could landowners do prescribed burns or any kind of thinning if the focus is on wildfire protection? Is that allowed?
Bernton: Yeah, there is a third party verification process. California, to their credit, has worked very hard to set up a program that it’s not just going with what the landowner says. But there are normal types of activities that you might see on commercial timber lands that still go on. For example, in the carbon project that Green Diamond developed within the Bootleg fire burn zone prior to the fire, they were very aggressively thinning because they said that basically these stands were very much overcrowded, that would inhibit the growth of the individual trees to bigger timber diameter and also pose a fire risk because there were so much ladder fuels.
Miller: So that was allowed?
Bernton: That was allowed, in some places they reduced the density of the trees by 70%, and chipped up these smaller trees and took them to a chipboard plant. And those areas actually survived the fire. They took us to some. The Green Diamond Vice President called this a kind of silver lining to the fire, that they felt that those areas even without a prescribed burn, actually many more of the trees survived.
Miller: In other words, the thinning worked. That was their argument?
Bernton: They think so, yeah. Green Diamond was very encouraged by the results of the thinning.
Miller: Massive fires in the West obviously are projected to become more likely over the course of this century, not less likely. Who is taking that into account when it comes to forest carbon offset markets?
Bernton: Well, there’s quite a vigorous debate about whether the “insurance pool” is being done on a big enough scale. And the California board is going through a review process to see, do we need to maybe make bigger set asides for this insurance pool to cover all the fire losses? Right now, they do say that there’s plenty of credits in the overall pool to cover these losses. It’s not in danger of going broke, so to speak. But there is a review process.
And on the ground, you see that Green Diamond is very much thinking about what it’s gonna be like to try to get this forest to mature. Now we’re talking, at least in the burn zone, many decades away. They planted more than 4 million tiny seedlings under the shade of these dead snags that they’re hoping will grow to maturity, and that there won’t be some other big fire that comes through and burns the snags and maybe takes down on the little trees. They’re creating more fire breaks on the land. And also the stands that are still alive, they’re gonna proceed with that thinning.
Miller: Is Green Diamond and other large timber holding owners interested still in carbon offset sales?
Bernton: Green Diamond is a big booster of these projects. They have developed projects in Oregon, California, and Alabama. There is now some 300,000 acres of lands in Montana that they’re proposing to develop these carbon offset projects. So they are very much looking to the future [with] this as part of their revenue stream.
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