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New research shows that California’s climate policy created up to 39 million carbon credits that aren’t achieving real carbon savings. But companies can buy these forest offsets to justify polluting more anyway.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-climate-solution-actually-addin
g-millions-of-tons-of-co2-into-the-atmosphere

Along the coast of Northern California near the Oregon border, the cool, moist air off the Pacific sustains a strip of temperate rainforests. Soaring redwoods and Douglas firs dominate these thick, wet woodlands, creating a canopy hundreds of feet high.

But if you travel inland the mix of trees gradually shifts. Beyond the crest of the Klamath Mountains, you descend into an evergreen medley of sugar pines, incense cedars and still more Douglas firs. As you continue into the Cascade Range, you pass through sparser forests dominated by Ponderosa pines. These tall, slender trees with prickly cones thrive in the hotter, drier conditions on the eastern side of the state.

All trees consume carbon dioxide, releasing the oxygen and storing the carbon in their trunks, branches and roots. Every ton of carbon sequestered in a living tree is a ton that isn’t contributing to climate change. And that thick coastal forest can easily store twice as much carbon per acre as the trees deeper inland.

This math is crucial to determining the success of California’s forest offset program, which seeks to reduce carbon emissions by preserving trees. The state established the program a decade ago as part of its efforts to combat climate change.

But ecology is messy. The boundaries between forest types are nebulous, and the actual amount of carbon on any given acre depends on local climate conditions, conservation efforts, logging history and more.

California’s top climate regulator, the Air Resources Board, glossed over much of this complexity in implementing the state’s program. The agency established fixed boundaries around giant regions, boiling down the carbon stored in a wide mix of tree species into simplified, regional averages.

That decision has generated tens of millions of carbon credits with dubious climate value, according to a new analysis by CarbonPlan, a San Francisco nonprofit that analyzes the scientific integrity of carbon removal efforts.

The offset program allows forest owners across the country to earn credits for taking care of their land in ways that store or absorb more carbon, such as reducing logging or thinning out smaller trees and brush to allow for increased overall growth. Each credit represents one metric ton of CO2. Landowners can sell the credits to major polluters in California, typically oil companies and other businesses that want to emit more carbon than otherwise allowed under state law. Each extra ton of carbon emitted by industry is balanced out by an extra ton stored in the forest, allowing net emissions to stay within a cap set by the state.

As of last fall, the program had produced some six dozen projects that had generated more than 130 million credits, worth $1.8 billion at recent prices.

While calculating the exact amount of carbon saved by preserving forests is complicated, California’s logic for awarding credits is relatively straightforward.

The Air Resources Board establishes the average amount of carbon per acre stored in a few forest types spanning large regions of the United States. If you own land that contains more carbon than the regional average, based on a survey of trees on your site, you can get credits for the difference. For example, if your land holds the equivalent of 100 tons of CO2 per acre, and the regional average is 40 tons, you can earn credits for saving 60 tons per acre. (This story will refer to each ton of CO2-equivalent as a ton of “carbon.”) You must also commit to maintaining your forest’s high carbon storage for the next 100 years.

These regional averages are meant to represent carbon levels in typical private forests. But the averages are determined from such large areas and such diverse forest types that they can differ dramatically from the carbon stored on lands selected for projects.

Project forests that significantly exceed these averages are frequently earning far more credits than the actual carbon benefits they deliver, CarbonPlan found.

This design also incentivizes the developers who initiate and lead these projects to specifically look for forest tracts where carbon levels stand out above these averages — either due to the site’s location within a region, its combination of tree species, or both.

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