Dusty Gets Woody, Supports UN Trillion Trees Initiative… But Falls for GOP-Corporate Logging/Biofuel Trick?

Back in summer 2019, I mentioned the scientific merits of planting a trillion trees to fight climate change. Now just in time for Christmas, Congressman Dusty Johnson goes globally green and signs on to the Trillion Trees Act:

The United Nations already supports a Trillion Trees Initiative, and a bill in the House of Representatives proposes a way for the United States to help.

It’s called the Trillion Trees Act, and it would encourage tree-planting with national wood-growth targets, a reforestation task force, an award for forest restoration, and other measures.

The bill has 37 cosponsors – three Democrats and 34 Republicans. The latest Republican to join the list is South Dakota’s Dusty Johnson.

“It really avoids the petty squabbling that so often leads us to inaction,” Johnson said of the bill, “and instead gives us an opportunity to take meaningful steps toward something that I think the left and the right can agree on, which is, let’s plant some trees” [Seth Tupper, “Trillion Trees Act Wins Johnson’s Support But Divides Climate Activists,” SDPB, 2020.12.22].

I appreciate Dusty’s willingness to stand up to the conspiracy nuts back home and put his name on a bill that affirms the wisdom of the United Nations. H.R. 5859 opens with the declaration of Congress’s sense that “the Trillion Trees Initiative established by the United Nations Environment Programme should be supported”—great galloping Green Party! The bill even writes the posh Imperial spelling of programme into our laws! It’s Agenda 21 all over again!

But I must mute my enthusiasm for Johnson’s tree-hugging, as the bill doesn’t read as a very passionate hug. Nowhere does H.R. 5859 say, “Plant a billion trees here, a billion trees there….” Congress could pass and President Biden could sign this bill, but the next day not one single federal employee would receive an order to go put a new seedling in the ground. The bill sets no timeframe for reaching one trillion new trees; it sets no numerical threshold for success whatsoever. Instead, H.R. 5859 empanels a task force to help the Secretary of Agriculture come up with “the maximum feasible increase in the total wood volume private, State, and Federal landowners can achieve by January 1, 2030, and every 10 years thereafter through January 1, 2100.” Their target can include natural regeneration, so this bill could result in a task force that concludes that we can’t afford to plant any new trees, so we have to rely on Mother Nature to fulfill the noble goals of this Act.

The Trillion Trees Act does envision enlisting fifth-graders to replant our forests:

(b) Fifth Grade Forestry Challenge.

(1) ESTABLISHMENT.—The National Forest Foundation (in this subsection referred to as “the Foundation”) shall establish an educational grant program, in consultation with the Secretary, to be known as the “5th Grade Forestry Challenge” to make grants to eligible recipients to–

(A) provide 5th grade students with a seedling to plant on Federal, State, or Local lands;

(B) educate students about forestry, forest management, active stewardship, and carbon storage; and

(C) encourage, accept, and administer private gifts of money, technical expertise, and of real and personal property for the benefit of this program.

(2) ELIGIBLE RECIPIENTS.—The following entities are eligible to receive a grant under this subsection:

(A) A local educational agency.

(B) A nonprofit entity that the Secretary determines has a demonstrated history of community engagement and education on natural resource issues.

(C) Other recipients as the Secretary determines to be appropriate [H.R. 5859, text retrieved from Congress.gov, 2020.12.24].

Getting kids involved in reforestation and conservation in general is good policy: involve kids in saving the planet when they are young, and they should be more likely to participate in good planet-saving activities when they grow up. But fighting the greatest threat to humanity requires a programme encompassing more than incentives and fifth-grade trips to the Tinton Trail. It requires at least a few billion dollars and a few thousand Americans employed in a new Civilian Conservation Corps to put trees in the ground wherever they can safely grow.

And alas, as Seth Tupper notes, there’s widespread suspicion that this Trump-backed plan is just a trick to give logging and biomass companies more business:

Touted as a way to control carbon emissions, the bill is instead a Trojan horse for the logging and biomass industries. The latter is an energy source heavily reliant on using wood from trees as a power plant feedstock, seen by climate scientists as dirtier than coal on a lifecycle carbon emissions basis.

In a Feb. 25 letter signed by 95 environmental groups, they denounced the legislation as a “false solution for addressing the climate crisis by misallocating resources to focus on industrial logging rather than on urgently needed steep reductions of fossil fuel emissions.”

“The bill would significantly increase logging across America’s federal forests, convert millions of acres into industrial tree plantations, increase carbon emissions, increase wildfire risk, and harm wildlife and watersheds,” the groups wrote.

The groups also specifically call out bill language promoting biomass.

“The bill’s directive to EPA to reflect the carbon neutrality of forest biomass as carbon neutral is not scientifically supported,” they wrote. “Burning wood to generate energy puts more CO2 into the atmosphere than burning fossil fuels to create the same amount of energy, because wood has a lower energy density.”

The House bill got as far as a committee hearing on Feb. 26, though it has advanced no further.

Like any legislation in Washington, it didn’t advance by accident (see above). Instead, it had the lobbying support of fossil fuel industry groups such as the National Mining Association and Edison Electric Institute and pro-logging entities, such as International Paper, the American Wood Council, and the National Alliance of Forest Owners [Steve Horn, “House Dems Pass Climate Bill Boosting Oil Drilling, Lobbied for by Biden Donor,” The Real News, 2020.10.05].

Evidence of the corporate-profit switcheroo at work in H.R. 5859 lies in Title III, Section 301, which creates the “Sustainable Building and Residence Credit,” which would give tax credits for buying buildings built of wood.

Think about that: the bill seeks to grow more trees to capture more carbon and fight climate change, but it would pay people to chop down more trees to build more houses.

See also Section 302, which declares forest bioenergy to be carbon neutral and encourages private investment in, among other sylvan endeavors, forest bioenergy production.

Again, think about it: how do we get more trees capturing more carbon by encouraging people to chop trees down and burn them for fuel?

Trees are great. More trees are greater. But Dusty’s plan of task forces, tax breaks, and tree harvest don’t  give us a world with more trees.

Dusty, may I suggest a hoghouse to bring the bill back to its titular intent? Strip out everything after the fifth-graders. You can keep the task force. But write in a simple requirement that the Departments of Interior and Agriculture oversee the planting of at least 50 million new trees each year in addition to currently planned reforestation projects. Even that meager quota would only get us to 2.5 billion new trees in 50 years, only 0.25% of our stated global trillion-tree goal, it would still be a woody gain greater than any promised by the Trillion Trees Act in its current form.

And then, since we can’t carbon-sequester our way to climate sustainability, turn to President-Elect Biden’s plan to get us off fossil fuels.