Oregon's Walden Challenges Gore's Opposition to Federal Biomass

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Oregon's Congressman, Greg Walden, has gone on the warpath in his effort to get federal woody biomass included in energy tax legislation now working its way through Congress. Walden, who represents Oregon's largely rural second district, has demanded to know why the Obama Administration has excluded federal woody biomass from pending energy legislation.

Congressman Walden repeatedly pressed hearing witnesses, including former Vice President, Al Gore, for an explanation of the administration's scientific rationale for excluding biomass from federal lands from their energy initiatives. Not a single witness was able to answer his question. Gore would only say that he believes the West's forest health crisis is the result of climate change, but he could not produce any scientific evidence to support the administration's apparent decision not to include biomass from federal lands from its pending legislative package, despite the well documented fact that federal forests are dying and burning by the millions of acres annually. Nor would Gore concede that forests are too dense and decadent to sustain themselves ought to be thinned before insects, diseases and fire overtake them.

"This legislation on Page 8 says woody biomass is not renewable if it comes off federal ground, period," Walden told Gore during one of their tense exchanges. "On the Freemont-Winema National Forest, we have more than 200,000 acres of bug infested federal forestland. When that material comes out, why the devil do we say it's not renewable and can't be turned into energy to reduce carbon emissions from coal?"

 Gore either could not or would not answer Walden's question.

For reasons that also lack scientific basis, the Obama Administration has chosen to ignore the widely heralded "Billion Ton Report," a 2005 study published jointly by the U.S. Forest Service and the federal Department of Energy. The report estimates that more than 1.3 billion dry tons of biomass could be removed from federal lands - an amount sufficient to meet one-third of the nation's biofuel transportation requirement by 2030.

What is rarely discussed beyond scientific circles is the fact that western federal forests - by their very nature - lend themselves to perpetual thinning of a kind that would produce enormous quantities of woody biomass. In such a scenario, biomass becomes a byproduct of stand tending programs that are specifically designed to promote forest growth, wildlife habitat and biological diversity.

Unfortunately, no such projects currently exist in western federal forests, nor has the Obama Administration signaled its interest in them, despite their well publicized interest in so-called "green job" initiatives.

In a March 30 letter to President Obama, Congressman Walden pointed to the tremendous disparity between job impacts in rural areas and those in urban centers. He cited a 2007 Oregon Employment Department study indicating that the loss of just 200 sawmill jobs in rural eastern Oregon has the equivalent economic impact as the loss of 26,400 jobs in the Portland, Oregon metro area. Faced with such a disparity, Walden asked the President how he could justify the fact that the U.S. now imports nearly 40 percent of its lumber from less environmentally-conscious countries while ignoring diseased and dying U.S. federal forests that once provided about 14 percent of the nation's lumber supply.

U.S. lumber production - the principal source of residual wood chips - was also down substantially in the fourth quarter of 2008 - off 23 percent compared to the same period in 2007. In the U.S. West, sawmill production was own another 35 percent in January 2009.

The good news for pulp manufacturers is that wood costs - which normally account for about 45 percent of manufacturing cost - have fallen substantially since last fall - 20 percent for softwood chips and 42 percent for hardwood chips in both the U.S. Northeast and Northwest, but - inexplicably - only about 10 percent in the U.S. South.

Kate Albert Read, Secretariat for the Alliance and Director of Harvest Certification and Research for the Trust to Conserve Northeast Forestlands, reports the Alliance recently participated in a three-day field testing dialogue involving several family forest landowners in Wisconsin.

"Family forestlands represent more than half of all forests in the United States and call for unique attention from the FSC program," she said. "We are pleased to have been involved in the standard development process, especially at this critical stage of testing the proposed standards' effectiveness."

Although third-party certification has become the norm for North America's industrial timberland owners, it has long been too expensive for small private forestland owners. But the more recent development of group standards is slowly bringing costs down to a point where smaller landowners can afford to consider it.

A recent University of Madrid study, conducted under the direction of Dr. Gabriel Calzada, suggests that for every government-funded green job created in Spain in recent years, 2.2 private sector jobs were destroyed. Moreover, each "green" megawatt of power installed destroyed 5.39 jobs in non-energy sectors. Worse, the Calzada study reveals that only in 10 jobs created by the Spanish government proved to be permanent. Two-thirds were in temporary construction, fabrication and installation jobs.

"The study results demonstrate how much 'green jobs' policy clearly hinders Spain's way out of the current economic crisis, even while U.S. politicians insist that rushing into such a scheme will ease their own emergence from the turmoil," Calzada wrote in his study's introduction. He went on to predict that if the U.S. experiences the same result Spain has experienced, the U.S. could kill somewhere between 6.6 million and 11 million jobs while it creates about three million mostly temporary jobs.

Since 2000, the Spanish government has spent about $774,000 on each green job it created, including more than $1.3 million per wind industry job. It found that creating these jobs destroyed about 113,000 jobs elsewhere in the country's economy, about 2.2 jobs destroyed for each green job crated. Job losses were greatest in metallurgy, tobacco, beverages, food processing and non-metallic mining.

The study's conclusion: the price of a energy in Spain would have to be increased by 31 percent to compensate for the government's investment in green jobs. Failing that,

Spain's taxpayers will be saddled with the bill. Ironically, the Obama Administration cites Spain's investment in green job creation as the model it hopes to emulate.

The Calzada study is one of several published recently that suggest the cost associated with creating government-subsidized green jobs may be difficult to justify in light of the damage it apparently does to competing free markets that produce lower cost energy without taxpayer subsidy. To read one such report, titled "Green Jobs: Fact or Fiction? An Assessment of the Literature," by Robert Michaels and Robert Murphy, CLICK ON "PDF" BELOW

Green Jobs Report