Forests Caught in Tug-of-War Over Biofuel Rules

When the House Committee on Agriculture opens its hearing on climate legislation this afternoon, its chairman will be pushing another bill aimed at changing the government's biofuel rules. His arguments on behalf of ethanol have drawn the most attention, but the bill would also open federal forests for biomass production.

That effort is pitting agriculture interests against environmentalists – and it could hold up the climate bill.

Representing the environmentalist perspective is the National Resources Defense Council’s Nathanael Greene, who writes that the bill is an attempt by timber and agriculture interests to weaken “the safeguards designed to ensure that we don’t burn irreplaceable forests for energy.”

He predicts that if it passes, Rep. Collin Peterson's proposal will encourage deforestation and reduce the climate bill's 2020 target of a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 6%.

On the other side, Andrew Yost, forest ecologist at the Oregon Department of Forestry, and the Society of American Foresters argue that the impact of Peterson's changes on the greenhouse gas reductions would be minimal.

The Peterson plan would, among other things, open up forest areas currently restricted from biomass production, such as National Forest roadless areas, wilderness areas and national monuments.

Such areas were designated off-limits to biomass production in the 2007 Energy Bill, which contained a Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) designed to ensure that renewable energy contributes less to global warming than gasoline and diesel. The RFS allows plant material from privately owned natural forests and tree plantations but not from national forests. 

NRDC’s Greene believes that two new policies will drive up demand for biomass: a proposed renewable electricity standard, which will require utilities to obtain a certain percentage of their power from renewable sources, and the Renewable Fuels Standard, which mandates an increasing minimum amount of biofuels to be used in future years.

“I estimate that these two policies, combined with the price signal created by the cap itself, could lead to a biomass demand equal to nearly twice our average annual timber harvest for the past two decades (15.5 billion cubic feet of green wood),” Greene writes.

The American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) climate bill proposed by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) includes biomass safeguards "to ensure the federal government does not incentivize deforestation, destruction of protected federal forest lands, and increased global warming from biomass," Greene said.

Supporters of the Peterson bill argue that opening those lands and cultivating biomass from forests will help preserve the health of the nation's forests by removing diseased and bug-infested wood.

Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) repeatedly made that argument in the House Energy and Commerce Committee during hearings last month on the ACES bill. In a video, he argues that opening up federal forests to biomass production would also reduce forest fires:

“We in this country have had catastrophic fires on our forests – nine million acres a year go up in flames, 47percent of forest budgets are consumed fighting fires. But if you want to do what the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] says we should do – and that is effectively manage America’s forest lands – then you need to adopt this amendment to fix this one problem in the biomass definition.”

Deforestation is a climate concern because natural forests absorb and store about a fifth of global carbon emissions. However, Yost at the Oregon Department of Forestry says Peterson’s proposed changes to the biomass definition would not greatly help or hinder efforts to forestall climate change for two reasons.