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This summer, California experienced its largest fire in state history—the latest disaster in a growing trend towards hotter, larger, and more destructive fires. Without urgent action, wildfires will be even deadlier and costlier in years to come. The Forest Resilience Bond (FRB), developed by Blue Forest Conservation (BFC) in partnership with World Resources Institute (WRI), raises private capital to finance forest restoration today, to reduce the risk of severe fire tomorrow. With financing secured from The Rockefeller Foundation, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, Calvert Impact Capital, and CSAA Insurance Group, private capital will now fund the upfront costs of forest restoration, while multiple beneficiaries share in the cost of reimbursing investors over time.
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The investment will kick off a forest restoration project protecting 15,000 acres of forestland in the North Yuba River watershed using ecologically based tree thinning, meadow restoration, prescribed burning, and invasive species management—all specifically designed to reduce the risk of severe fire, improve watershed health, and protect water resources. The restoration treatments are prescribed by the Forest Service, benefit from public comment, and rely on the work of existing restoration crews.
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The Yuba Water Agency, a utility provider that recognizes the benefits of restoration to local water and power resources, has committed $1.5 million over five years to reimburse investors. In addition, the state of California has committed $2.6M in grant funding to the project from the state’s Climate Change Investment program. The Tahoe National Forest will provide in-kind support and services and has provided all the resources associated with planning and permitting the project. The National Forest Foundation serves as one of the project’s primary implementation partners, leading much of the forest restoration work on the ground. “The financing provided by the FRB provides us with the financial flexibility to accelerate the pace and scale of restoration treatments at a time when this work is needed most”, said Marcus Selig, Vice President of Field Programs for the National Forest Foundation.
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The FRB also makes a compelling case to investors. “The Forest Resilience Bond provides diversification while also benefitting our communities by making them safer,” said Linc Walworth, vice president of investments at CSAA Insurance Group, a AAA insurer offering insurance to AAA members in Northern California. “We earn a good return while helping the environment and our policyholders. What a great combination in a single investment.” As the prescribed forest management techniques are applied in the North Yuba River watershed, researchers from the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at UC Merced and the Natural Capital Project at Stanford University will monitor the impacts on water supply and other ecosystem services, providing data to quantify the benefits of restoration activities undertaken. Findings from this research could help catalyze future investment in forest restoration by showing how healthy landscapes can reduce fire risks —and by identifying the best possible interventions.
Investment manager New Forests has announced its latest acquisition under the firm’s growing US timberland investment program, with the purchase of 10,400 acres of Humboldt County timberlands from Soper Company. The estate is known as the Pine Creek Timberlands and completes the placement of an investment fund focused on high carbon value forests in California.
“New Forests is pleased to acquire these high-quality Northern California timberlands,” said Jon Loevner, Manager of US Investments for New Forests. “The Pine Creek Timberlands are an excellent fit with New Forests’ investment strategy in the US, whereby we manage forests to optimize revenues from a combination of timber harvest and carbon offset sales. This strategy enables us to lengthen harvest rotations to create higher value, larger logs while at the same time delivering a measurable, verifiable climate benefit through California Carbon Offsets.”
New Forests is one of the world’s largest forestry investment managers and has solidified a leading position as a developer of forest offset projects for California’s cap-and-trade market. Earlier this year, New Forests was awarded the 2017 Project Developer of the Year award by the Climate Action Reserve. New Forests currently has 23 US carbon projects in development and operation.
“The world’s forests are a critical resource for climate change mitigation, with forests and land use offering up to 30% of mitigation potential through 2030,” said Brian Shillinglaw, Executive Director of New Forests Inc. “New Forests’ US timberland investment program responds to this challenge by applying New Forests’ deep forestry and carbon asset investment expertise to the US timberland market, delivering market-rate climate impact investment solutions to institutional investors.”
Shillinglaw continued, “New Forests’ in-house geospatial analytics and carbon valuation skills, combined with a track record of responsible forestry investment, drive investment value while at the same time securing carbon storage and capturing the climate benefit of ongoing carbon sequestration in sustainably managed forests. This differentiated approach to investing in the US timberland market presents a unique opportunity for institutional capital to make a meaningful contribution to climate mitigation while also meeting investors’ portfolio needs for higher risk-adjusted returns in real assets.”
The Pine Creek Timberlands include Douglas fir, mixed hardwoods, and redwood stands. The property has historically been managed for high value Douglas fir timber. The estate complements the recent acquisition of a predominantly redwood and Douglas fir forest with parcels located near Eureka on behalf of the same fund. New Forests also announced the acquisition of approximately 170,000 acres of mixed conifer forests in Northern California in early 2018, now operating as Shasta Cascade Timberlands LLC. The settlement on Pine Creek Timberlands brings New Forests’ US timberland assets under management to 186,000 acres.
The company also manages more than 500,000 acres of forest carbon offset projects throughout the continental United States and Alaska. Globally, New Forests manages around 2.3 million acres (915,000 hectares) of forests and conservation investments with assets under management of approximately USD 3.7 billion.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said climate change had "nothing to do" with California's wildfires, as he visited neighborhoods hard hit by the massive Carr Fire over the weekend.
“I’ve heard the climate change argument back and forth. This has nothing to do with climate change. This has to do with active forest management," Zinke told Sacramento station KCRA.
It's a tone the Interior secretary struck throughout his visit to Redwood, Calif., where, alongside Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, he met with local officials and fire crews battling the wildfire.
Zinke echoed President Trump in his assertion that active forrest management -- including logging -- is the key to stopping the forest fires.
"It doesn’t matter whether you believe or don’t believe in climate change. What is important is we manage our forests," Zinke told reporters while visiting the Whisteytown National Recreation Area Sunday. “This is not a debate about climate change. There’s no doubt the (fire) season is getting longer, the temperatures are getting hotter.”
The Interior secretary blamed environmentalists for having their own agenda in keeping officials from logging -- a method he said would remove much of the fuel fed to fires.
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Zinke's argument runs counter to a number of California officials and environmentalists who say the underlying factor responsible for the state's expanded fire season and acres burned each year is drought caused by global warming.
“California has some of the strongest environmental laws in the country, but the impact of extreme drought conditions caused by climate change are intensifying wildfires,” Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Calif.) wrote in a op-ed for The Hill on Friday. “Contrary to his tweets, the Trump administration’s anti-environment policies, not California’s pro-environment reforms, will make matters worse and hurt our planet for generations to come.”
California Gov. Jerry Brown and former Vice President Al Gore lead the list of those blaming climate change for Southern California’s devastating wildfires, calling them “the new normal,” but others insist the science just isn’t there. That includes climate scientists such as University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass, who moved to extinguish the “now normal” narrative by arguing that the data “strongly suggests there is no credible evidence” that global warming is fueling this fall’s California coastal wildfires, and that claims to the contrary are “baseless, if not outright wrong.” “The bottom line of all this is that observations and the best scientific reasoning do NOT suggest that global warming is enhancing CA coastal wildfires through effects on temperature and precipitation,” Mr. Mass said Monday in a post on his weather and climate blog. He and others have pointed to the heavy precipitation earlier this year in California after five years of drought, which resulted in high vegetation growth that feeds the flames. “The destructive fires in California are not unexpected given the wet winter last year and resultant plant growth, followed by hot and dry weather since then in which the vegetation dried out,” University of Colorado Boulder meteorologist Roger A. Pielke Sr. said in an email. *** “An important issue is the extent humans have deliberately or inadvertently started the fires,” Mr. Pielke said. “If these were not started by people (including sparks from power lines), how many fires would there have been naturally? Probably none.”
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“This is the new normal,” Mr. Brown said at a news conference after surveying damage in Ventura County. “We’re about ready to have firefighting at Christmas. This is very odd and unusual.” Mr. Gore conveyed the same message last week during his Climate Reality Project’s “24 Hours of Reality,” listing “more destructive and widespread wildfires” as one of the consequences of climate change and specifically the damage caused by the Southern California blazes.
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The articles cite California’s record summer heat, but Mr. Mass argued that hot weather driven by greenhouses gases would not have made a difference because “grasses, shrubs and other fuels will be dry by the end of summer and during fall, no matter what.” “So even if the summer/fall temperatures rose and the conditions dried further under global warming, IT WOULD NOT MATTER,” he said. “Without any additional warming, the fuels in late summer and fall are dry enough to burn over coastal California and always have been.” John Abatzoglou, associate professor of geography and climate at the University of Idaho, said the prolonged Santa Ana winds whipping up the wildfires would not have made news if the rain came first. Did global warming play a role? “We don’t have any mature science [that I’m aware of] that would implicate climate change as being behind the delay in the autumn rains,” Mr. Abatzoglou said in an email. *** Mr. Abatzoglou cited “documented increases in fire activity and the length of the fire season across the western U.S. (and globally) over the past 3-4 decades, with some of this tied to climate change,” which is consistent with the National Climate Assessment’s finding of more large forest fires since the 1980s.
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Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, compiled data from 1926-2017 showing that the acreage burned by U.S. wildfires has dropped fourfold since peaking in the 1930s, which was posted on the skeptics’ website Climate Depot. David B. South, emeritus forestry professor at Auburn University, told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2014 that eight of 10 “extreme megafires” in the lower 48 states since 1850 occurred during cooler-than-average decades. “These data suggest that extremely large megafires were 4-times more common before 1940 (back when carbon dioxide concentrations were lower than 310 ppmv),” Mr. South said in his written testimony. “What these graphs suggest is that we cannot reasonably say that anthropogenic global warming causes extremely large wildfires.” Mr. Mass pointed to a 2014 research paper in the American Geophysical Union journal showing that major coastal California wildfires have declined since 1984.
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If there is any point on which there may be a scientific consensus, it’s that the relationship between Western wildfires and rising greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere is nothing if not complicated. “As to whether this is a ‘new normal,’ it is easy (and inaccurate) to blame climate change just from added CO₂,” said Mr. Pielke, “when in reality the reasons for the fires and the damage they are causing are more complex.”
A new study examining the efficacy of paying to preserve forests finds that carbon offsets do produce genuine emissions reductions. The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment by three Stanford University researchers, examines California's carbon offset program. It allows businesses to fund forest preservation in lieu of turning in some of their allowances under the state's cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases. The market currently lets businesses use offsets for up to 8 percent of their total emissions under the cap, although that percentage is set to decrease after 2020 under the cap-and-trade extension bill, A.B. 398, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown (D) last month. In California's program, offsets from forests totaled 1 percent of emissions under the cap in 2015, or roughly 4.7 million metric tons of carbon, according to the study. The credits were distributed among 39 forestry projects, 16 of them within California. The study evaluates the “additionality” of the projects: whether their emissions reductions would have occurred without the financial incentives provided by the sale of offset credits. It points out that most projects are owned by profit-seeking entities, rather than conservation-minded nonprofits that might be expected to have preserved the forests anyway. Nonprofits own 26 percent of forestry projects, while timber companies own 36 percent, investment firms 15 percent, individuals 13 percent and Native American tribes 10 percent. The study says 64 percent of projects are on land that is or has been actively logged just prior to the project's start date, indicating that the projects would indeed not have happened without the financial incentive of offsets.
Two deadly Northern California wildfires that scorched more than 140,000 acres, ravaged homes and devoured firefighting resources in September have amounted to at least $1 billion in insured losses so far, according to a state insurance department report.
The Valley and Butte fires took a devastating toll on the region as flames chewed through homes, farms, vehicles and personal belongings, and eventually gave rise to a large number of claims, the California Department of Insurance reported. The preliminary $1 billion loss estimate did not include damage to roads and utilities, so the total figure for insured losses is likely to grow.
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In Lake, Napa and Sonoma counties, the Valley fire consumed 1,958 structures, resulting in $700 million in insured losses. Because the blaze destroyed many homes and buildings, it became the third most damaging wildfire in California’s history.
Four people were killed during the 76,067-acre blaze, which started Sept. 12 in southern Lake County and lasted a little more than a month.
The 70,868-acre Butte fire ran through grasslands and timber in California’s Gold Country – Amador and Calaveras counties. The blaze is the seventh most destructive wildfire in the state’s history, destroying 818 structures and resulting in $300 million in insured losses. Two deaths were attributed to the Butte fire.
A swath of coveted timberland near the town of Gualala is being sold to a Northern California family whose existing forest product interests include the Redwood Empire sawmills in Philo and Cloverdale, where logs from the site have been processed for some 30 years.
The Roger Burch family, owner of Redwood Empire and its parent corporation, Pacific States Industries Inc. in San Jose, is expected to close escrow on the property in June, taking possession of nearly 30,000 acres of mixed redwood and Douglas fir at the mouth of the Gualala River currently owned by Gualala Redwoods Inc.
Burch, who has long had timber holdings in Sonoma and Mendocino counties as well as the Bay Area, said he intends to continue what he called GRI’s intelligent management of the site.
“We think that property has been managed as well as any property in California — better than any property that we’re aware of elsewhere — and it’s our intention to practice the same forestry that’s been practiced there,” he said.
Reaction to the sale has been mixed, however, with some expressing disappointment the land will remain in the hands of a commercial timber company rather than conservation interests that made an unsuccessful bid for the property.
Round Valley and New Forests on Tuesday announced the regulatory approval of the first forest carbon offset project developed on Native American trust land for the California carbon market.
Carbon offsetting, according to carbonneutral.com, “is the use of carbon credits to enable businesses to compensate for their emissions, meet their carbon reduction goals and support the move to a low carbon economy.”
The offsetting provides funding for renewable energy, forestry and resource conservation projects that generate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
The Daily Astorian reports that Carbon-dioxide emissions are the most prevalent greenhouse gas from human activity and are tied to global warming.
The Round Valley Indian Tribes Improved Forest Management Project earlier this month received approval from the California Air Resources Board (ARB) for more than 540,000 ARB offset credits – these credits can be used for compliance in the California greenhouse gas cap and trade program.
The tribe’s forestry programme is one of more than two dozen operations across California that have generated offsets for the state’s growing carbon market.
This winter, Yurok tribe forestry crews will be four-wheeling down muddy fire roads, hiking through steep, slippery brush and trekking across more than 8,000ha of forest to count and measure trees.
Instead of preparing to sell lumber, as it has in the past, California’s largest Indian tribe is taking stock of its firs, redwoods and tanoaks to make money in a cap-and-trade programme. By managing its forest near Redwood National Park for carbon storage instead of timber harvest, the tribe is generating credits to sell to oil companies and other businesses that must reduce greenhouse gas emissions as part of the state’s effort to slow climate change.
When trees are allowed to grow, they absorb more carbon dioxide from the air and store it in their trunks, branches and roots. That sequestered carbon, which would otherwise contribute to global warming, is now a valuable commodity for landowners like the Yurok.
The Yurok tribe has sold millions of dollars’ worth of carbon credits, known as offsets, to some of the state’s biggest polluters. The tribe’s forestry programme is one of more than two dozen operations across the nation that have generated offsets for California’s growing carbon market. The initiative is giving the Yurok tribe a new way to make money while it improves wildlife habitat, grows its forestry staff and acquires land in its ancestral territory near the mouth of the Klamath River in Del Norte and Humboldt counties.
The incendiary legal battle over responsibility for the Moonlight wildfire, which scorched 65,000 acres in the Sierra Nevada seven years ago, has flared anew with charges of corruption and cover-up leveled at federal prosecutors, and state and federal investigators.
The allegations are contained in hundreds of pages of documents filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Sacramento seeking to wipe out a 2012 settlement calling for timber giant Sierra Pacific Industries to pay the federal government $47 million and deed it 22,500 acres of its land to compensate for the devastation of more than 40,000 acres in two national forests in Plumas and Lassen counties, as well as the U.S. Forest Service’s firefighting costs.
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The company contends federal prosecutors sat by in pretrial depositions and knowingly allowed the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and U.S. Forest Service investigators to “repeatedly lie under oath about the very foundation of their investigation.”
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One of the documents Sierra Pacific filed is a declaration from a veteran former assistant U.S. attorney, who says he was forced to give up his position as the government’s lead lawyer in the Moonlight case, apparently because he rebuffed pressure from a superior to “engage in unethical conduct as a lawyer.”
The declaration from E. Robert Wright says he was bounced out of the case by his boss, David Shelledy, chief of the civil division in the U.S. attorney’s office, and replaced by a prosecutor with no previous experience in wildland fire recovery cases.
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Although Sierra Pacific agreed to a settlement in 2012 to end its legal fight with federal authorities, it has always contended the fire investigation was flawed and that investigators manipulated evidence and lied under oath about where and how the blaze began.
According to Sierra Pacific, the government could reach into the company’s deep pockets for a big recovery only if it could blame the company for the fire, and that is what motivated investigators to move the blaze’s place of origin to the area where the bulldozer was working and then falsely deny they had originally settled on a different location.
Shell Energy has agreed to buy 500,000 carbon offsets sourced from a forestry project in Michigan as soon as regulators approve the credits for use in California's cap-and-trade program. The credits come from a project by carbon offset developers Blue Source to improve forest management in a swatch of land in Michigan's upper peninsula.
"The transaction represents a significant step in carbon market development since actions from large compliance entities like Shell are necessary to help spur investment in greenhouse gas reduction projects," Blue Source said in a press release.
Blue Source, which also brokered the deal, said it would not disclose how much Shell agreed to pay for the credits.
The Bishop property where the project resides consists of over 200,000 acres of land, making it one of the largest offset projects in development that can generate credits eligible for California's carbon market.
Idaho's private forestry companies want to buttress their protections against federal wildfire lawsuits that they say have been costly for companies elsewhere. *** Sierra Pacific Industries paid nearly $50 million and donated 22,500 acres to settle a lawsuit over a 2007 wildfire that prosecutors said was caused by unsupervised, bulldozer-riding employees on a red-flag warning day.
A proposed tax on timber came back from the dead early Saturday, passing after Gov. Jerry Brown's aides muscled votes in the final minutes of a legislative session that stretched past midnight. The bill would place a 1% tax on lumber sales to fund oversight of the timber industry. It also would limit companies' liability for legal damages in cases of wildfires caused by their practices, restricting how much government agencies could sue for negligence. ... Democrats hailed the plan's passage. "We needed critical reforms to ensure sustainable forestry management and to protect jobs in impoverished parts of our state," said Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield (D-Woodland Hills).
Federal prosecutors and Obama administration officials oppose the limits on damages out of concern that they could make it more difficult to secure money to pay for recovery from destructive blazes. The timber industry argues that prosecutors routinely sue for much more than the relevant land is worth.
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A U.S. judge struck down a California law challenged by the Trump administration that aimed to give the state power to override the sale of federal lands.
The law unconstitutionally regulates the U.S. government and discriminates against people seeking to buy federal public land, Judge William Shubb in Sacramento ruled Thursday.
State lawmakers who passed the law — SB50 — last year cited concerns that the Trump administration would allow more logging, oil drilling or development on some of the 46 million acres owned by the federal government in California.
Gov. Jerry Brown signed the law a year ago, and it went into effect in January. The U.S. Department of Justice filed its lawsuit in April — one of several the administration has filed against California as the state seeks to thwart President Donald Trump’s policies.
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The law sought to give the commission the first right to purchase federal lands or to arrange for a specific buyer and included fines for failing to do so.
The DOJ argued in its lawsuit that California had no power to interfere with federal land sales, citing the Constitution and the 1850 act of Congress that admitted California to the union.It said the state law was delaying land sales — even for projects that had been in the works for years — and was depressing their value.
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Shubb rejected the state’s argument that the law regulated land buyers, not the federal government.
The law “trespasses on the federal government’s ability to convey land to whomever it wants,” the judge said.
It also singles out people who do business with the federal government, Shubb said, subjecting them to a “level of uncertainty and potential delay that all others are spared from.”
Faced with the worst summer fire season in 10 years, Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing broad new changes to California’s logging rules that would allow landowners to cut larger trees and build temporary roads without obtaining a permit as a way to thin more forests across the state.
The proposal — which has the support of the timber industry but is being opposed by more than a dozen environmental groups — would represent one of the most significant changes to the state’s timber harvesting rules in the past 45 years.
The legislative session ends for the year next Friday. On Thursday, the details were still being negotiated by legislative leaders and the governor’s office behind the scenes and had not yet been formally introduced in a bill or put up for a vote.
“They are trying to get to some kind of a deal,” said Rich Gordon, the president of the California Forestry Association, a timber industry group. “They are looking at what can get done politically.”
Under Brown’s proposal, private landowners would be able to cut trees up to 36 inches in diameter — up from the current 26 inches — on property of 300 acres or less without getting a timber harvest permit from the state, as long as their purpose was to thin forests to reduce fire risk. They also would be able to build roads of up to 600 feet long without getting a permit, as long as they repaired and replanted them.
Timber industry officials say the changes are needed to cut red tape and increase incentives for landowners, particularly in the Sierra Nevada, to thin pine and fir forests that have become dangerously overgrown after 100 years of fire fighting.
In his first remarks on the vast California wildfires that have killed at least seven people and forced thousands to flee, President Trump blamed the blazes on the state’s environmental policies and inaccurately claimed that water that could be used to fight the fires was “foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean.” State officials and firefighting experts dismissed the president’s comments, which he posted on Twitter. “We have plenty of water to fight these wildfires, but let’s be clear: It’s our changing climate that is leading to more severe and destructive fires,” said Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director of Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency. He and others said that Mr. Trump appeared to be referring to a perennial and unrelated water dispute in California between farmers and environmentalists. Farmers have long argued for more water to be allocated to irrigating crops, while environmentalists counter that the state’s rivers would suffer and fish stocks would die. The president first addressed the fires late Sunday, writing on Twitter, “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amount of readily available water to be properly utilized.” He also referred to a debate in forest management about the effectiveness of removing trees and vegetation as a fire control method.
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William Stewart, a forestry specialist at the University of California, Berkeley, said he believed Mr. Trump was referring to the battle over allocating water to irrigation versus providing river habitat for fish. That debate has no bearing on the availability of water for firefighting. Helicopters lower buckets into lakes and ponds to collect water that is then used to douse wildfires, and there is no shortage of water to do so, Cal Fire officials said.
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Mr. Trump raised another issue when he wrote that officials “must also tree clear to stop fire spreading.” Scientists and forest experts said the president was referring to a valid and continuing debate. The timber industry has argued that “thinning” forests — removing certain trees to improve the health of the remaining ones and diminish the plants and underbrush that fuel fires — reduces the risk of wildfires. Republicans in Congress have sought to loosen environmental restrictions to allow more thinning. Democrats and environmentalists argue the practice will open the door to expanded commercial logging and threaten wildlife.
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The president in the past has dismissed climate change as a hoax and his top cabinet officials have questioned the established science that rising global temperatures are caused by human activity. Michael F. Wehner, a senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said it was not possible to quantify precisely the likelihood that climate change is having an impact on forest fires, as can now be done with other extreme-weather events such as heat waves. And, he said, it’s not easy to weigh how much of the problem can be laid at the feet of forest-management practices. *** California fire officials on Monday said the Carr Fire in Shasta County had ravaged more than 160,000 acres while the Mendocino Complex fires grew overnight and had charred more than 273,000 acres across Mendocino, Lake and Colusa counties.
Roseburg Resources Co. today announced an agreement to sell its California timberlands to a timberland investment vehicle managed by New Forests. The transaction includes 170,000 acres in northern California, largely in Siskiyou and Shasta counties.
Roseburg’s California timberlands are investment-grade with a long history of professional management.
“The sale of our California timberlands would not be possible without the contributions of our California resource team,” said Scott Folk, Roseburg’s Senior Vice President of Resources. “Thanks to the team’s work, these lands will remain working forest timberlands under the new management of New Forests, a leading timberland investment organization focused on long-term growth.”
Founded in 2005, New Forests manages more than 2 million acres of land and forests around the world, with assets under management of more than $3 billion. Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, New Forests has offices in San Francisco, Singapore and New Zealand. The sale is expected to close in early 2018.
“The sale of this property allows Roseburg to pursue strategic growth opportunities in regions with stable markets and strong demand for timber,” Roseburg CEO Grady Mulbery said. “This transaction is part of a larger effort to expand Roseburg’s national footprint, which now includes our engineered wood plant planned for Chester, S.C., and our recent purchase of timberland in Virginia and North Carolina.”
Roseburg Forest Products will retain ownership of its veneer facility located in Weed, Calif.
The water that gurgles from a spring on the edge of Weed, a Northern California logging town, is so pristine that for more than a century it has been piped directly to the wooden homes spread across hills and gullies.
To the residents of Weed, which sits in the foothills of Mount Shasta, a snow-capped dormant volcano, the spring water is a blessing during a time of severe and prolonged drought.
To the lumber company that owns the land where the spring is, the water is a business opportunity.
Roseburg Forest Products, an Oregon-based company that owns the pine forest where the spring surfaces, is demanding that the city of Weed get its water elsewhere.
“The city needs to actively look for another source of water,” said Ellen Porter, director of environmental affairs for Roseburg who led the company’s negotiations with the city. “Roseburg is not in a position to guarantee the availability of that water for a long period of time.”
For the past 50 years, the company charged the city $1 a year for use of water from the Beaughan Spring. As of July, it began charging $97,500 annually. A contract signed this year directs the city to look for alternative sources.
Roseburg has not made public what it plans to do with the water it wants to take back from the city. But it already sells water to Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring, which bottles it in Weed and ships it as far away as Japan. Crystal Geyser is looking to increase its overall supply.
More than 10,000 acres of scenic meadows, forests and trout streams in the Sierra Nevada 10 miles west of Lake Tahoe have been preserved in a deal in which environmentalists hope to prove that thinning out overgrown forests can increase California's water supply.
The Northern Sierra Partnership, an environmental group based in Palo Alto and founded by longtime Silicon Valley leaders Jim and Becky Morgan, joined with the Nature Conservancy and the American River Conservancy to buy the land for $10.1 million from Simorg West Forests, a timber company based in Atlanta.
The deal, which closed Aug. 5, preserves a landscape south of Interstate 80 in Placer County adjacent to Granite Chief Wilderness in the Tahoe National Forest. The land contains more than 20 miles of blue ribbon trout streams.
California raked in $1 billion in first cap-and-trade auction of the year, and since they take place every quarter, it can look forward to raising about $4 billion this year.
December's auction brought in $400 million, so why so much more now? As of January 1, transportation fuels are included in the program.
This is a big deal. Until now, the program applied to a few hundred major stationary polluters - utilities, manufacturers and food processors. Now, it includes mobile sources - transportation fuels - which accounts for 40% of California's emissions, expanding it dramatically.
Refineries and fuel wholesalers have to pay for emissions tied to fuel sales. They passed the cost to motorists, raising gas prices about 10 cents a gallon at the pump.
Even with the number of permits raised substantially, prices held steady at $12.21 per carbon credit, which gives companies the right to emit 1 ton of carbon this year.
Last year, Quebec joined the program, so the province will get a share. When Quebec on board the program became the Western Climate Initiative.
Federal prosecutors in Sacramento accuse the state's largest timber company of deception in its efforts to reverse a $100 million settlement it agreed to pay over a wildfire that destroyed more than 100 square miles of forest in Northern California.
Court papers cited by the Sacramento Bee this week (http://bit.ly/1E9lX4r ) show the government contends Sierra Pacific Industries' efforts to overturn the settlement "lack integrity" and are based on false accusations. Prosecutors claim the company "only pretended to settle" the lawsuit it faced.
Officials have blamed the Shasta County company for the 2007 Moonlight Fire.
Last October, Sierra Pacific filed court papers accusing prosecutors of misconduct and unethical behavior in prosecuting the civil suit and said the settlement should be overturned because of "fraud upon the court."
Prosecutors rejected that claim.
In a blistering ruling against Cal Fire, a judge in Plumas County has found the agency guilty of “egregious and reprehensible conduct” in its response to the 2007 Moonlight fire and ordered it to pay more than $30 million in penalties, legal fees and costs to Sierra Pacific Industries and others accused in a Cal Fire lawsuit of causing the fire.
The ruling is the latest twist in an epic legal battle that began not long after the fire erupted on Labor Day 2007, scorching more than 65,000 acres in Plumas and Lassen counties.
Sierra Pacific, the largest private landowner in California, was blamed by state and federal officials for the blaze, with a key report finding it was started by a spark from the blade of a bulldozer belonging to a company working under contract for Sierra Pacific.
But company officials have steadfastly denied responsibility and have accused the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the U.S. Forest Service of conspiring to cover up their own shortcomings that allowed the fire to rage out of control.
Even after Sierra Pacific agreed to settle a federal lawsuit over the devastation in two national forests by paying $55 million in cash and handing over 22,500 acres of land to the government, the company insisted it was undone by an erroneous ruling of U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller, and then was a victim of stonewalling by Cal Fire in that agency’s Plumas County suit, including the alleged withholding of thousands of pages of key internal documents relevant to the legal struggle.
In a 28-page order issued Tuesday, retired Superior Court Judge Leslie C. Nichols essentially agreed with all of Sierra Pacific’s points, adopting a separate, 57-page order proposed by Sierra Pacific and the other defendants almost word-for-word, and excoriating the behavior of Cal Fire and two lawyers from the office of Attorney General Kamala Harris, which represented the agency.
A Plumas County Superior Court judge has dismissed a state lawsuit against California’s largest timber company for a 2007 wildfire that destroyed more than 100 square miles of forest in Northern California.
State and federal officials have blamed Sierra Pacific Industries for the Moonlight Fire, which they said was caused by two unsupervised employees who operated bulldozers on a red-flag warning day with high fire danger.
Investigators had blamed company contractors working on private land for failing to follow fire regulations, sparking the blaze that burned for more than two weeks and consumed 72 square miles of public land in Plumas and Lassen national forests northwest of Lake Tahoe.
A national conservation group has reached an agreement to buy nearly 20,000 acres of timberland in northwestern Sonoma County, a move that derails the long-disputed, forest-to-vineyards conversion project pushed by CalPERS, the giant state workers pension plan.
The $24.5 million purchase of the so-called Preservation Ranch, to be completed by the end of May, is led by The Conservation Fund, based in Virginia. It would contribute up to $6 million toward the purchase. *** The Conservation Fund owns and manages 55,000 acres of forest in Mendocino County and would use the new property for sustainable timber production and possibly for the sale of carbon credits. The purchase would eliminate the threat of subdivision for rural estates and commercial vineyard development.
Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Tuesday enacting a new tax on lumber sales and restricting legal damages for wildfires. ... Previously, oversight of California’s vast timber industry was funded with fees on companies in the state. The bill shifts the costs to consumers by placing a 1% tax on lumber sales.
California timber companies supported the change because it eliminates a financial advantage for out-of-state operations, which didn’t need to pay the fee. ... The bill has been controversial because it limits the amount of money government agencies can seek during lawsuits over wildfires caused by negligence. Members of President Obama's Cabinet and federal prosecutors opposed the change, saying it would make it harder to recoup money needed to recover from wildfires. Timber companies have countered by saying federal prosecutors routinely sue for much more than the land is worth in an effort to boost the government's bottom line.
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