For as long as climate change legislation has been debated in Oregon, the forestry sector has been the ghost in the room.

If policymakers bothered to discuss it at all, they assumed the sector was carbon neutral, with the greenhouse gas emissions from logging offset by replanting and forest growth each year. But no one really knew; the data didn't exist for Oregon. And in a state where big timber exercises outsize political clout relative to its economic importance, the politics of including it in any potential regulation or strategy to increase carbon stocks was simply a nonstarter.

Until now.

As lawmakers gear up to make another attempt to pass a climate change bill in 2019,

suggests that the forest sector is not only a factor in Oregon's carbon picture, it is THE factor and one of national and even international importance as lawmakers look to reduce the concentration of heat trapping gases in the atmosphere.

"Anybody who makes the point that Oregon doesn't count in global emissions, I think they're wrong on the energy side, but they're even more wrong on the forest side," said Angus Duncan, chair of Oregon's Global Warming Commission. "They're a very big deal."

Forest carbon accounting is a notoriously complicated and controversial subject. Even studying the subject is a fraught proposition that opens a new front in the sometimes bitter debate over forest management that has been ongoing for three decades.

The Legislature has tasked the Department of Forestry to undertake a three-phase study on the carbon flows in Oregon's forests and wood products industry, and develop potential strategies to increase carbon storage. The agency, advised by a stakeholders group, is redoing the forest carbon inventory that the Global Warming Commission just finished - reportedly because some legislators, urged on by industry players, didn't like its methodology or contributing scientists.

A coalition of conservation groups, meanwhile, believe the Forestry Department is the industry's handmaiden, and say it's unlikely its studies will provide the public with accurate, comprehensive information. They are urging the agency and Gov. Kate Brown's carbon policy adviser to implement measures to protect older, carbon-rich forests, curb clearcutting and lengthen harvest rotations on private "tree plantations," converting them back into climate resilient forests.

They also want the climate change bill, which thus far has exempted forest product emissions from regulation, to put forestry at the center of the policy.

"The entire climate debate in Oregon is based on a false premise," said Steve Pedery, conservation director at Oregon Wild, a Portland-based conservation advocacy group. "The only thing Oregon can really do to address carbon is flip the model on forestry."

Industry is having none of that. The Oregon Forest & Industries Council says the academic research that the conservation groups and the Global Warming Commission are drawing on is seriously flawed.

The industry's narrative is that wood is the ultimate green building material: It's renewable, recyclable and the only one that actually stores carbon. Anything that reduces harvests, they say, would be bad for rural communities and the climate, as it would simply push wood production elsewhere and reduce the use of lumber as an eco-friendly substitute for more energy-intensive materials such as concrete and steel.

"The only universe in which one could conclude the forest products sector isn't part of the solution to many big societal challenges like climate change, thriving rural communities, and affordable housing, is in an abstract academic one with contrived calculations that don't add up in the real world," said Sara Duncan, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Forests & Industries Council.

For their part, the sponsors of the state's climate legislation are trying to avoid the academic crossfire, as it could jeopardize their entire bill.

"A lot of these analyses are based on assumptions that are still in controversy," said Sen. Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, one of the bill's sponsors. "The science would have to be a lot more settled than it is now to get political consensus to regulate the industry."

LOTS OF STORED CARBON

Oregon forests represent a good news story on the carbon front, particularly in the forests west of the Cascades, where they can store as much carbon per acre as the tropical forests that are typically considered the planet's lungs.

Altogether, Oregon's forests sequester some 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, and annually withdraw 23 million to 63 million additional tons from the atmosphere, according to the Global Warming Commission's figures.

The high end of that range is equivalent to all the annual emissions from the state's transportation, utility and industrial sectors. In other words, Oregon could quickly become carbon neutral if it reduced emissions in other sectors or increased carbon uptake in the forests.

That's an awkward proposition for backers of the Clean Energy Jobs bill, as they don't want to see everyone declare victory and go home. But the larger point is that Oregon's forests remain the only sector that delivers a net carbon benefit, and research suggests they may be able to do a lot more if Oregon elevated carbon capture as a forest management priority.

"You can clearly see the star quarterback of all the discussion of carbon is your forests," said Catherine Mater, a Corvallis engineer who worked on the Global Warming Commission's forest carbon reporting effort. "They're really the story of where Oregon needs to go."

Another piece of good news, Mater says, is that the net carbon gains are taking place in all regions and forest ownership categories. More than three-quarters of the new carbon is acquired on national forests, where there is very little harvest these days, resulting in bigger trees and more efficient carbon uptake. But it's also true on private, industrial woodlands, which are closer to neutral but still positive.

Among some of the other, and more controversial findings in the commissions draft report:

Wildfire is not a big factor in global warming emissions. Few forest fires burn hot enough to release significant amounts of carbon to the atmosphere, versus the water vapor and soot that hang in the sky but dissipate fairly quickly when a fire is put out.

Thinning – removing snags, underbrush and small trees – can help forest health and enhance wildfire resilience. But the heavy thinning that occurs when the Forest Service is selling commercial grade trees to finance restoration work removes so much carbon that it takes 50 to 100 years to recover the carbon that's is lost. Hence from a carbon uptake perspective, it's not a good strategy.

Wood products store carbon, in some cases for many years, but they result in net carbon losses to the atmosphere compared with leaving trees in the forest. Longer rotations on industrial forests could increase carbon storage.

From the perspective of some conservation groups, those carbon consequences ought to be built into the state's policies on harvesting, fire management and forest restoration. In their letter to the Forestry Department last week, they urged the state to cap and ramp down emissions on industrial forests as part of the state's emissions pricing scheme, and establish carbon storage targets for industrial forest lands.

"If the state passes a bill that locks in the status quo, it will make the problem worse," said John Talberth, senior economist at the center for Sustainable Economy."

HOLES IN THE BUCKET

Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist of the Geos Institute, an environmental group in Ashland, likens Oregon's forests to a big bucket, and what's going into the bucket is carbon. He agrees that more carbon is going into the bucket than comes out each year. The problem, he says, is that the size of the bucket has been radically reduced by heavy logging of the state's carbon-rich old-growth forests. And "we're still putting more holes in the bucket every year."

"The status quo is doing an okay job," he said, "but we need to go beyond that. We need additionality, not business as usual, otherwise the state is not going to hit its emissions targets."

That's problematic to industry, which contends that most of the Global Warming Commission's conclusions suggest that lowering harvests would be a good thing. Lengthening harvest rotations from the current 40-year average to 80 years, they maintains, is not economically practical for forest owners. It would be ineffective from a carbon standpoint, as it would simply push wood production elsewhere and cause builders to use more energy-intensive products. Meanwhile it would devastate rural communities.

"If anything, where we might be missing the boat is not taking full advantage of the opportunities to store more carbon in wood products, like mass timber," said Lawson Fite, general counsel at the American Forest Research Council.

At present, there is no discussion of regulating the wood products industry or changing forest practices under the state's climate change bill, said Dylan Kruse, policy director for Sustainable Northwest, a Portland conservation group. The last thing the state should do, he said, is create a disincentive to keep existing forestlands in production.

"What the legislature is realizing is that there is a role for working lands to play in helping to meet our carbon goals," he said. "Just because they're not covered under the cap doesn't mean it can't play a role, but it has to be voluntary and incentive based."

That means either carbon offsets – an incentive forest owners can earn for, say, planting more trees or allowing their existing stands to grow longer – or direct investments of revenue from the carbon cap and invest program in forest projects.

Both are included in the climate legislation, though it's not yet clear how either would work, and many are skeptical that carbon offsets work at all. The Carbon Policy Office has formed another workgroup with representatives from the farm, nursery, and forestry industries, as well as environmental groups and experts in carbon offset market to examine the issue.

Mater says she's particularly concerned with the ongoing loss of family forestland in Oregon, Washington and California – about 400,000 acres a year in total.

"One of the key drivers to the loss of family forestland is the price of health care," she said. "As prices go up, many families sell their forests. How can we connect those dots? Can we create a mechanism where we pay for additional carbon they store on their lands, and pay for it in deposits into a health care account?"

Mater said environmental groups are correct that forests are where the focus needs to be, but she doesn't want to get lost in the academic arguments and miss the forest for the trees.

"There's lots of opportunities to do this right, but I want to focus on the incentive side because that's where were going to get the biggest bang for the buck."

- Ted Sickinger

503-221-8505; @tedsickinger