Climate has become more central to global politics because manmade emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are amplifying the greenhouse effect and raising average temperatures. The problem – that of reducing and, in time, reversing, the net emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, is simple enough.
Politics are anything but simple. Want to put a price on carbon? Gas prices will go up and that ends up being a somewhat regressive tax. What’s worse, your constituents will be furious. It’s not an easy thing to convince an entire group of legislators that they should risk their job for something that has no immediate returns. The obvious answer is to redistribute proceeds from auctions for carbon credits to citizens in order to engender goodwill, but that can be a tough sell for politicians whose state or district produces fossil fuels.
By the same token, large logging companies hold remarkable sway for their minuscule impact on the US economy. It, along with a shortage of sawmills to process the supply of trees coming from lumber farms, has created an odd collection of incentives. Prices on felled trees have plummeted while lumber skyrockets to all-time highs. Lumber farms are electing not to sell their trees for lumber, but instead to sell carbon offsets that prevent them from ever harvesting those trees. Before we can get too deep into that, though, we need to step back.
The US Forest Service surveys our national forest land, creates roads, and essentially does all of the leg work that any company would be doing if they were logging land. Every year, chunks of the forests are sold off for logging purposes. All of this is done at a steep loss. We are, effectively, subsidizing the logging of old-growth forests. More on that soon. At the same time, carbon offsets are being sold when tree farms, instead of selling their stock of lumber trees, decide to allow those trees to just grow indefinitely. They are doing this in increasing numbers because the prices they are getting for harvesting those trees have been plunging. We are subsidizing the logging of old-growth forests while we subsidize the lumber farms to become new forests.
Sounds senseless, right? It gets worse. Trees, unlike humans, grow faster as they get older, which means old-growth logging is ending the sequestration of much more CO2 than we are subsidizing by allowing lumber farms to turn into new woodlands. Forests, meanwhile, are incredibly complex ecosystems that, in many ways, act as a single organism. The genetic diversity in forests allows them to stay healthy even in the face of new diseases or pests. For context, the DNA of two trees of the same species often diverges much more than the DNA of two mammals of different species. The root systems of trees in forests are connected by fungi (mushrooms) so they can share nutrients and electrical impulses in root systems travel along much like those in the neurons of our brains (albeit much, much more slowly). When a tree dies, it is recycled into the soil, so much of the carbon stored in the tree is returned to the ground, nourishing future generations. This barely scratches the surface of what is happening in old-growth forests, but not a lick of it is true in the managed woodlands of lumber farms.
Lumber farms are laid out to grow trees as quickly as possible and make harvesting said trees as easy as possible. A single species of tree, often cloned, is laid out in neat rows. This is great if you want to use the trees to make houses, but it is not great if you want a healthy forest. Lumber farms are an effective tool for carbon sequestration because we are turning CO2 into buildings. Cross-laminated timber, a method of gluing lumber in a woven pattern, can even make wood panels as strong and fire-resistant as concrete. It’s lighter, too.
To summarize, we are subsidizing the destruction of old-growth forests and the conversion of lumber farms into unhealthy woodlands. Forests house some of the most diverse life on the planet and use all sorts of undiscovered methods to do things that we will probably find useful as a society at some point in the future. More importantly for the problem at hand, they are much, much better at sequestering carbon while lumber farms are better for creating building materials.
On the other hand, there are some promising developments. Some innovations in farming use the same principles of topsoil creation present in forests to increase yields over time, sequester carbon in the ground, and decrease the use of costly – and dangerous – pesticides. Companies like Indigo Ag and Nori are helping farmers market these sustainable practices as carbon offsets. Another company, Kiverdi, is capturing carbon from the air to create aquafeed used for aquaculture (farming shrimp, fish, etc). Many more are coming up with innovative ways to create value from carbon capture.