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I spent more than a decade working and living in California's forests. Most of the "living" part was full of beauty - my own little 5 acres of huge redwoods near Blue Lake; later, 20 acres on the edge of the Van Duzen River. Most of the "working" part was appalling. Behind the veneer of trees along major roads and waterways, public forests were being clear-cut in 100-acre swaths. After that, they were helicopter sprayed with herbicides to stop any vegetation that dared grow back that wasn't commercially harvestable trees. While I lived and worked in the forest - and until this day - observing what goes on between the bureaucrats who manage public lands, timber companies, and politicians is my second journalistic interest next to energy. Late last year, the California Public Utilities Commission gave Pacific Gas & Electric permission to create a new program whereby customers could choose to pay extra toward a forest preservation fund. Under the program, trees in a registered forest would be preserved to create a carbon dioxide "sink" to help lessen greenhouse gas impacts. A "sink" is a place where carbon dioxide may be drawn in and held. Unlike sequestering, the process does not result in carbon being captured and stored. It is just expected to be atmospherically transferred and kept in forests until those forests are burned. It's a big issue; there is little hard information available. Expanding forest land - private forests in PG&E's plan - can't be a bad idea. Circuit will be examining whether that path will work ecologically, and what it means economically, over the next year. Personally, I can't imagine that it will make more than the slightest difference in curbing greenhouse gas effects without a major change in the federal government's forest policies. And I haven't heard anyone in the timber industry suggest that they embrace the idea of becoming planters rather than remaining loggers. The first new acronym in this part of the new CO2 energy policy is LULUCF - land use, land-use change, and forestry. The World Resources Institute developed the Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) Guidance for GHG Project Accounting last year in addition to its protocol for global warming gas management and accounting. It focuses on reforestation, as well as planting forests where none stood before (known as afforestation) and forest management. LULUCF is basically like a framework to describe a toe before building a shoe. Once the shoe is cobbled, a trading system or an offset system is like building the manufacturing plant for a line of footwear. In Europe, where much of the discussion about using forests as a carbon sink has taken place in the last few years, it's been generally agreed that it should help - to some extent. The World Bank has hosted discussions of its efficacy and economic success. However, the current carbon trading regime has excluded it. Quantification of how much a forest can be credited for reducing greenhouse gas damage appears a long way off. In a 2003 report, Tokyo University professor Wangari Maathai noted that up to 40 percent of greenhouse gas mitigation could be provided worldwide through land-use changes and new forests, but his big caveat is that much of that would be attributable to trading "hot air," or thermal pollution, not CO2. Scientists, of course, are a quarreling bunch. They keep picking apart the data and finding new ways to approach them. As of last month, a new study became available that says that not all forests are created equal in their ability to be carbon sinks. Released at the American Geophysical Society's annual meeting in San Francisco, the study concludes that new forests in temperate regions, such as the United States and Europe, may not help control global warming, while new tropical forests may spell greenhouse gas relief. In part, the theory speculates that increasing areas of forests in temperate climates increases the darker areas of the planet, thereby increasing, rather than decreasing, global temperatures. "Assuming that carbon sinks work, you would have to translate it into a carbon price," notes Tom Athanasiou, EcoEquity executive director. "Right now everyone is in denial, talking about prices like $30 a ton of CO2," Athanasiou said. "We need to be talking about a carbon price in excess of $100 a ton. There are few economists that would agree with me that we need something like $300 a ton to really motivate change." Even this one seemingly simple part of creating credible carbon offsets - reforestation - and a market for trading those credits is daunting. It was so much easier the other way around when I lived in the forest. Timber companies and the government figured that a tree wasn't worth much just standing there, so they determined how many "board feet" of lumber it would represent and simply agreed on a price. Then they cut it down. - J.A. Savage

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