AB32

By Mark Schapiro and Sarah Terry-Cobo

A lawsuit brought by environmental justice groups has put AB 32 on hold. The plaintiffs are from communities located near agricultural and industrial operations and say that “trading” carbon credits will generate more pollution near their homes. The court’s March 17 decision will require California Air Resources Board (CARB) to go back and look at alternatives to the cap-and-trade plan, analyzing options, such as directly regulating polluters. While there has been quite a bit of coverage on the impacts of the “trade” portion of the program on communities located near greenhouse gas emitters, few seem to have been aware that the program also has implications for communities that live near the “offset” locations that aim to reduce these emissions. —STC

California timber firms could emerge as big winners in the state’s fight against global warming, earning millions of dollars through the sale of carbon credits under the set of rules approved by the Air Resources Board on December 16, 2010.

By Sarah Terry-Cobo

As part of the now stalled program, the new regulations from California Air Resources Board (CARB) would allow forest offsets that utilize an industry practice known as “even-age management.” Timber industry experts say this practice of cutting a large tract of trees all at once mimics nature. Some environmental advocates call it “clear-cutting,” noting that this kind of management can actually increase carbon dioxide emitted at the logging site.

Ignoring the carbon emissions that come from these kinds of projects “makes it much more likely to paint a clear-cutting project as carbon-[reducing] positive than a carbon negative,” said Brian Nowicki, California policy director for the Center for Biological Diversity. His organization is one of many that object to these rules.

So far, at least 37 individual projects, which could employ these techniques, have been registered for carbon offset credits. These projects span the country in 11 states—from Washington state to New Hampshire. California has the most, with nine projects, followed by South Carolina with eight, and Maine with six.* However, only one project using “improved forest management” has actually received carbon credits, totaling 9,248 tons offset from 2007 to 2009. The Lompico Forest Carbon Project is located in Santa Cruz County, California, developed by the Sempervirens Fund.

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Frank Lopez: How are the plaintiffs going to ensure that the criteria chosen to evaluate the alternatives are going to be more equitable?
Alegria De La Cruz: Part of what is exciting to us about being able to open this [up], is that there’s a lot more information available around the failures of trading processes in other areas, but also specifically in California. CEQA doesn’t require specific criteria to be used when you’re doing alternatives analysis, but because this is going to be such a highly-watched big-deal process, it is going to put the impetus on CARB to make sure that they are doing something that’s defensible.

Because the judge was so focused on the real failures of CARB to do a good job in looking at an alternative to cap-and-trade, it provides a lot of leeway to address the things that he raised in the order and make sure that CARB is doing that.

Lopez: Is there an alternative that CRPE prefers to cap-and-trade?
De La Cruz: Anything.

Lopez: Anything but cap-and-trade?
De La Cruz: Any time you allow “flexibility” or the “market” to determine the best way forward, that’s when we really see environmental justice communities suffering, no matter where they are located.
At our own advocacy organization, outside of this litigation, the communities that we represent are largely in the Central Valley. We see a lot of challenges to CARB’s lack of regulation of the agricultural industry. [Our communities are located near] oil refineries near Bakersfield and in the South Kern [County] area, so we’re looking at industrial regulation.