California Carbon Trading Allows Timber Companies to Sell CO2 Credits for Their Worst Logging Practices

Public skepticism of carbon trading schemes is growing and judging by what's happening in California, it is easy to see why. California's race to be the first state to develop a carbon-trading program comes at an unacceptable cost for Sierra forests. This fall the California Air Resources Board (ARB), with prodding from logging companies and the complicity of some environmental groups, adopted a program that allows timber companies to sell CO2 credits for their worst logging practices. But clearcutting has no place in any climate change solution.

Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) is one of the nation's largest logging companies and California's largest private landowner. At a time when other timber companies are moving away from the practice, SPI embraces clearcutting as part of their core business plan – clearing 20 to 40 acre swaths of forest, then plowing the earth and spreading herbicides like Atrazine to kill remaining vegetation. Naturally diverse forests are replaced with uniform, ‘even-aged' tree plantations that increase fire risk, ruin watersheds, and disrupt natural carbon sequestration in soil and biomass. The earth is left scarred with only scattered debris piles and so-called "ecological islands" – twisted solitary trees left standing on the barren tract. California law allows adjacent tracks of forest to be clearcut every five years, leaving a patchwork of homogenous tree farms where once there was an ecologically diverse forest.

Clearcutting, as practiced by SPI, Green Diamond Resource Company and other timber companies, is the North American version of deforestation. Governor Schwarzenegger, in his speech in Copenhagen in December, called for local action and California leadership in finding solutions to climate change. I agree, but I believe that we Californians need to set a higher bar for leadership, and take a long hard look at ourselves.

The state of California is developing a carbon trading policy through a Byzantine complex of government and quasi-government agencies. The Climate Action Reserve (CAR) is a non-profit carbon-trading broker with strong ties to the Governor, CalEPA, and the Air Resource Board (ARB) – the state agency responsible for regulating carbon emissions. The chair of CAR's board of directors, Linda Adams, is Schwarzenegger's Secretary of CalEPA, which oversees the Air Resources Board.

This intertwined relationship between government and a non-government organization limits transparency and public participation, and allowed the timber industry to cut a backroom deal forcing clearcutting into the carbon-trading program. CAR has assumed the very governmental role of developing carbon-trading protocols, a critical piece of the state's implementation of AB 32, California's greenhouse gas reduction law. They've done this with generous input from industry. The most recent version of the forest carbon trading policy, for example, originated on the computer of a timber industry operative. And last fall the Air Resources Board, which is a state agency, adopted the CAR policy – creating de facto state regulations.

How could this happen? The answer is supply. The carbon market, which is being proposed as the solution to climate change, depends on a ready supply of cheap carbon credits. Without the participation of large private landowners (the largest of which are logging companies), the burgeoning carbon market could fail for lack of carbon sequestration supply. Recognizing this fact, the Schwarzenegger Administration, CAR, ARB, and some environmental groups – desperate to get carbon trading online – were ready to compromise to secure the participation of the timber industry. SPI, meanwhile, is in the business of harvesting trees. So CAR, ARB, and the governor cut a deal to pay SPI for business as usual practices; the timber industry gets their cake, and clearcutting too.