The Oregon Global Warming Commission (OGWC) on Wednesday moved to wrap up a draft proposal to set targets for sequestering carbon in the state’s natural and working lands.
“It was very gratifying to see how much interest there is in this topic and how much engagement we were able to get,” OGWC Chair Catherine Macdonald said Wednesday during a meeting on the proposal. Macdonald, director of natural climate solutions for North America at The Nature Conservancy, noted that the draft plan generated 444 pages of public comments.
The commission includes representatives from Oregon’s Native American tribes, environmental groups, farmers and ranchers, gas and electric utilities, manufacturers and local agencies. The group was directed to develop the proposal under Gov. Kate Brown’s Executive Order 20-04, which last year required state agencies to establish measures to regulate and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in their regulatory areas. It will submit a final proposal to the governor later this month.
The draft proposal discussed Wednesday sets a tentative goal for Oregon to sequester “at least” 4 million to 7 million tons of CO2e per year in the state’s working lands and waters by 2030, over and above a 2010-2019 “business-as-usual” baseline. The target would grow to 5 to 8 MMT/year by 2050.
Those targets are tentative because of uncertainty around how much CO2 is being sequestered under current practices.
“The challenge for me is we don’t really have a clear baseline, so we don’t know whether 4 million metric tons is aggressive or not aggressive at this point, to be honest,” said OGWC member David Ford, a senior fellow with the American Forest Foundation. “I mean, we have some sense, but not really, so it’s going to be critical that, as we set a goal … [we] recognize that this isn’t the final goal, right?”
Ford said he favors creating a blue-ribbon commission to examine the issue in more depth, “because the potential might be much greater; I don’t know. But I’m looking forward to getting to that answer.”
Establishment of a blue-ribbon panel to develop an all-lands strategic plan for incentivizing climate-smart forestry “while maintaining or enhancing Oregon’s harvested wood products infrastructure” is among the recommendations in the proposal.
Finding Funding
The proposal’s key recommendations are aimed at the Oregon legislature. The OGWC advises lawmakers to position the state “to leverage federal lands and investments in climate-smart natural and working lands practices.” (More than half the land in Oregon is federally owned.) It notes “growing support” in Congress for such investments, including bills to increase funding for reforestation, incentivize farmers to carry out climate stewardship practices, “de-risk” private investments in climate-smart management practices and establish a “blue carbon” to conserve marine and coastal ecosystems.
The proposal also asks legislators to “fund and direct state agencies to take actions to advance key natural and working lands strategies.” It specifically seeks funding for the Department of Land Conservation and Development to conduct an analysis of Oregon’s statewide planning goals and “the assistance the agency provides to local governments to determine how the statewide planning goals and their implementation and support mechanisms should be enhanced to best facilitate the protection and restoration of natural and working lands to increase sequestration.”
The proposal additionally urges lawmakers to “create a sustained source of funding” to increase sequestration in state lands and waters.
At Wednesday’s meeting, commission members expressed concern that Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) will not make sequestration projects eligible for funding from its Community Climate Investments (CCI) program.
That’s because the bulk of CCI funding will be used to reduce the state’s consumption of fossil fuels, DEQ Director Richard Whitman explained.
“Our rural areas of Oregon are more dependent on fossil fuel vehicles and drive further than the rest of the state,” Whitman said. Transitioning those areas to cleaner transportation will require tax credits for zero-emission vehicles, as well as investments in electric vehicle charging infrastructure, green hydrogen and alternative modes of transportation.
“We can see the pathway, but it’s going to be tough,” he said.
Whitman said the DEQ is also “frankly worried” about the state’s reliance on natural gas, which is used to heat about 40% of homes — “and that number has been growing and continues to grow.” The state’s commercial and industrial sectors are “even more dependent” on the fuel, he said.
“The main point I want to make right now is we feel responsible, given the duties that we’ve been given by the governor, for helping to make the transition [to cleaner fuels] possible and practical, and working with rural communities to help them figure out how to get off of gasoline and diesel to some degree and get more efficient and figure out cleaner ways of getting around.”
Bold, Ambitious, Practical
While the proposal found broad support in the 444 pages of submitted comments,” former OGWC member Angus Duncan said his “two antennas” went up when he saw the document’s use of the words “bold” and “ambitious” in combination with “practical,” prompting him “to wonder if words are being substituted for deeds.”
“I looked to see if the immediacy of the moment is captured in the recommendations, and while there is much to like in this draft, it does not yet to me meet the test of urgency and scale,” Duncan said Wednesday. “While there’s analytic basis in the commission’s record for a natural and working lands annual carbon-capture goal of 9.5 [million] to 15 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, the draft discounts these excessively by 25 to 75%.”
Duncan said the commission should at least settle on an initial sequestration goal of 9.5 MMT and adjust “down or up as the science and circumstances warrant.”
“The commission should also recommend an accelerated ramp rate to reach this goal on or before 2030, reflecting the science that says there’s no decade more important for reducing atmospheric greenhouse gases than the one we’re now entering,” Duncan said. “This would not preclude continued [timber] harvest, but we’d clearly assert that blunting climate change effects has priority over present harvest level.”
Chair Macdonald later noted that the proposal recommends that the state re-examine the sequestration targets at a minimum of every four years. “I don’t think we’re setting anything in stone, because we said that we need to update them frequently. I think if we say ‘at least,’ that indicates that we want to be more aggressive.”
“We would encourage you to be practical over being ambitious,” said Mary Anne Cooper, vice president of policy at the Oregon Farm Bureau. “Oregon cannot solve the climate crisis ourselves, and it sounds like some earlier commenters believe that we can. But if we don’t manage this right, we can effectively eliminate our ability to produce food and fiber in a sustainable way for the world, which would effectively export our industries to areas with less stringent environmental [regulations], resulting in a net negative for global climate change.”
