Wildfires are destroying California's forest carbon credit reserves, study says

Note that most of the carbon offsets offered by airlines are forestry-related. Any time you see offsets for less than $50/ton, proceed with an abundance of caution.

I do think the general state of offsets is improving. There are more high-quality offsets hitting the market every day. They're much too expensive, but I'd rather see "real" offsets at a high price than the complete make-believe we've had up until recently.

The grift is even bigger than that. Scapegoating a naturally occurring gas for all of the world's problems is a huge opportunity for grifters, greenwashers, & con artists. I wonder if theres a study of scientists who add "the effects of global warming on..." to their paper titles for some career sustaining $$$. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of great work out there...however the incentives seem to invite unethical behavior.

Nice idea but surely all the chainsaws, loaders, trucks, diggers would burn so much diesel it isn't worth it?

In the SF area, the redwoods are dying off from heat/drought. The pines and oaks are being hit with disease. On balance, the oaks seem to be replacing the redwood forests, but everything is thinning out.

The mountain forests in Southern California (near Yosemite, etc) have been burnt out hellscapes for years.

Of course, this is all rounding error vs. the loss of 90% of the kelp forest, which many people didn't notice, since it's underwater. The kelp biomass the has been lost in the last few years is equal to 100% of the redwood forests.

As I like to shout from the rooftops, gasoline could be made carbon negative with a ~ $1/gallon direct air carbon capture tax. (And similar for the other fossil fuels.). I recently saw $7.99 / gallon, so that's a bit over a 10% tax in some areas.

Yes, poor people need gasoline too. We should tax new ICE vehicles at some astronomical rate and plow the money into steeper EV subsidies.

Alternatively, we could tax ICE new vehicles so (assuming they run for 250K miles) the purchaser pays 100% of the carbon recapture cost up front.

We could also allow for community net metering so poor high density areas could establish nonprofit solar/wind farms that lower their electricity bills.

As far as I can tell, all these plans are deficit neutral and would also boost the economy.

Aren't there also invasive beetles that kill the trees?

surveying the actual forests is ongoing, with certain old-fat-bureaucracies trying to control the budgets, with over-caffeinated do-gooders on their backs. However some good news is that an individual researcher got a Nature publication credit for a drone+machine learning method to detect dead trees, a few years ago.

The majority of pine-beetle related deaths are in the southern range of the Sierras, south of Yosemite, but it occurs well into the North, as mentioned. Even conservatives, cant-be-bothered people have noticed the huge stands of dead trees, because you see them when driving to Yosemite for vacation. Meanwhile greens have been flipping out amongst themselves for years.

The forest carbon studies executed on Azure cloud mentioned here, have agenda and suffer from ordinary capitalist-picked experts problems, but generally we should all support more quantitative, fact-based decision making.

The dunce cap here definitely goes to the US Forest Service, and cronies, who have for 100 years, exercised their extensive muscle to prove without a doubt that they are in fact, red-neck badge-wearing troglodytes from a Robin Hood movie, for the most part; dramatic exceptions within the ranks noted.

To add to others' comments about timber harvest: Logging operations in burned areas can greatly accelerate erosion. Dead trees have ecological value as habitat and food (woodpeckers are a textbook example). Dead trees have ecological value in the long term as they ultimately become soil (both the volume and contour). Check out Tom Wessels (example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcLQz-oR6sw)

I have not studied or worked with bio-oils, but on biochar: As a soil amendment, many soil types are incompatible with addition of biochar. Biochar tends to retain water, which is a problem if you add it to already poorly draining soils. Biochar also shifts soil pH. In some cases this is good, in other cases it is bad. I think it is the minority of soils that are actually improved by adding biochar. I am not aware of any studies that show that biochar is a suitable carbon storage scheme. The last time I reviewed the research, the behavior of carbon in soils is as yet poorly understood and appears to be quite complex. It may be a decade or more before we understand what biochar does when added to different soil types, and we might learn that the majority of it ends up as CO2 within a couple years.

Finally you mention burying trees: it may be that this accelerates the release of Carbon. Depending on climate, standing timber often lasts longer. Dead wood on the ground (or buried) is often wetter, which favors decomposition.

I am not trying to sound negative here. You bring up a lot of points that are being actively researched and worked on. But there are not any clear easy solutions. We need to work on this problem. I wish we (as a society) were putting a lot more into this effort.

Burying trees seems like a huge effort.

Is there a fundamental reason you can't treat the wood to make it non flammable and non digestible, and just stack them in big piles somewhere?

Wiping out 20% of the buffer in 10% of the time it was meant to last is an issue, especially when the things wiping out the buffer are accelerating.

I mean, even if the trees lock up carbon for 50 years, it would be a huge benefit.

There is no one solution to climate change.

Growing forests is one of many things that can be part of fixing this.

I agree that a living tree is not much of an offset. Trees are short term (and small) carbon stores when compared to fossil fuels. However I do not think that burying a tree solves the problem. Unless we find a way to prevent fungus from breaking down lignin, I am not sure that burying a tree is a viable long solution for carbon sequestration. It is outside of my area of expertise, but I can find at least one paper that suggests that coal deposits formed before the evolution of fungal species that could break down lignin (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1221748). It is extremely difficult to turn CO2 back into coal. I am in favor of reducing forest loss (and ideally increasing forest area), but I am unconvinced that it will have any meaningful effect on atmospheric carbon in the near, mid, or long term.