Jonathan Kusel owns three pickups and a 45-foot truck for hauling woodchip bins. He operates a woodchip yard and a 35-kilowatt biomass plant that burns dead trees, and he runs a crew marking trees for loggers working in national forests. Those are a lot of blue-collar credentials for a University of California, Berkeley Ph.D sociologist known for his documentation of how the decline of the timber industry affects rural communities.
是什么驱使库塞尔成副业 - 登录小枯树和生物质锅炉燃用他们 - 是怕火。2007年，65000英亩的月光一泻千里火燃烧的余烬到他泰勒斯维尔附近，加州的草坪，他准备好他的家人撤离。九月份，沃克火烧焦54614英亩刚刚起来的的办公室山谷塞拉利昂学院为社区与环境非营利组织研究organization Kusel founded in 1993. In that 12-year span, wildfires burned 690 square miles in the northern Sierra Nevada.
Drought, a warming climate and树皮甲虫出没的。also have killed 147 million California trees since 2013, most of them along the Sierra spine running south from Kusel’s home base past Lake Tahoe and Yosemite National Park to Tehachapi Pass, 75 miles north of Los Angeles. Scientists say these trees are poised to burn in California’snext round of megafires, threatening the range with blazes so intense they will leave some places unable to establish new forests.
库塞尔，63岁，越来越多的公民和官员恨不得把那些树和他们的灌木丛生，以利用他们点燃大规模野火之前的一个，污染空气呛人的浓烟，并释放大量的二氧化碳。他的学院已投入测井设备供应木屑群落生物设施，它们刻录到生产热和电。这是低价值的植物，将自然火灾在一个世纪以前已经烧毁之前，美国森林服务开始抑制火灾。
If we can’t figure out what to do with the lowest-value material, we will fail at restoring our forests.
Along with thinning trees in overcrowded forests, Kusel says, biomass projects help rebuild rural communities by creating jobs, all while preventing the massive carbon emissions released in wildfires. The Moonlight Fire alone spewed the annual CO2 equivalent of 750,000 gasoline-power cars.
"If we can’t figure out what to do with the lowest-value material, we will fail at restoring our forests," says Kusel.
Biomass projects such as Kusel’s are controversial, especially in the southeastern U.S., where states have rushed to convert forests into pellets for export to power plants in Europe. That market opened up after a much-criticizedEuropean Union decisionto categorize biomass energy as a form of renewable energy.
由于生产几乎已经从弗吉尼亚州到佛罗里达州的设施增加了一倍，大规模伐木已经有了南部森林生态系统产生重大影响, among the most diverse in the country. More than 35 million acres of天然林have been lost, replaced by 40 million acres of single-crop pine plantations; local species extinctions doubled between 2002 and 2011, according to the山茱萸联盟, an environmental organization protecting Southern forests. The American Lung Association and numerous health organizations blame biomass burning for a sweeping array ofhealth harms, from asthma to cancer to heart attacks.
库塞尔等人抗衡，但是，西方的火灾多发的生态系统使生物质能根本的不同。库塞尔的项目中使用死亡，患病和烧毁的树木，与小直径的绿树一起，他说，过度拥挤的森林和助长火势的危险。但是，在Kussel看到生态系统效益，就业机会和更清洁的空气，一些环保主义者看到过切，破坏野生动物栖息地，通过燃烧它们去除碳储存的树木，并释放更多的碳。“对于气候这是一个双重打击，”沙耶狼，对于生物多样性中心气候科学主任。
Above: A worker manages a biomass-fed heat-power system in Quincy, California. The facility and several others managed by the Sierra Institute are powered using wood sourced from nearby forests. Source: The Sierra Institute
As the Sierra fire season approaches, the threat of wildfires raging across John Muir’s "Range of Light" is driving a re-examination of biomass burning. The state that has made reducing carbon emissions a top priority is embracing the use of woody debris as part of sweeping policies that includethinning经过一年的活的和死树百万英亩。库塞尔等人认为这是朝向森林弹性和碳中的路径 - 一种方法来减少野火的程度和强度而产生电力。在内华达山脉，会发生什么可能整个西方影响森林的政策。
企业家已经将树木和林下植被电力自20世纪50年代。除了在东南亚的大型木质颗粒操作，超过其他25个州从缅因州到夏威夷的生物质发电厂通过燃烧木材发电。密歇根州和缅因州各有15.华盛顿有12个州和俄勒冈州7。
In California, the state with the most biomass power plants, the nearly 70 facilities operating in the early 1990s dropped to about 24 after government incentives waned. The current enthusiasm began around 2015, when drought-killed trees began transforming Sierra forests from shades of green to bright orange. That was a tipping point, "a sober realization that we really do have a forest health issue," says Andrea Tuttle, former director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (now CalFire). Today, a century of fire suppression, poor forest management and climate change have contributed to far larger and more destructive wildfires. Removing some of those dense and dead trees to biomass plants seemed a sound approach to reducing fire risk in a useful way, she says.
Several high-priority actions in California have embraced removing excess forest fuels as part of an aggressive climate policy. Former Gov. Jerry Brown’s 2018executive orderaddressing tree mortality included a component directed toward small biomass generation. CalFire’s commitment to thinning a million acres a year is backed by $2 billionapprovedby the legislature. And last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared astate of emergency，快速跟踪35个高优先级的伐木和细化在火灾易发社区的项目。状态旨在通过削减CO2的由森林大火的发光量由2045减少碳排放到零，在一部分。
Opponents see little difference between the push for biomass burning and the destructive logging of the past.
Some of this government largesse is funding Kusel’s biomass energy projects, almost entirely subsidized by grants. The Sierra Institute’s first venture was a small-scale facility that uses wood chips to boil water, heating a 55,000-square-foot building owned by Plumas County. It also produces enough electricity to power the plant. Kusel designed the project to demonstrate how local materials and labor can help restore fire-prone forests. As the institute secured 400 tons of bone-dry wood chips, it found itself lurching into the logging business. It has acquired a small fleet of used trucks and become partners with Jared Pew, a local third-generation logger providing the chips. Some are coming from community projects removing live trees and small vegetation around houses to protect them from fire. Other sources for chips include Forest Service thinning sales and trees burned in the massive 2018 Camp Fire near Paradise.
The Plumas County project has inspired a Tahoe ski area and El Dorado County to explore facilities that use local forest fuels to heat and supply electricity to numerous buildings. The Sierra Institute is planning a 3- to 5-megawatt biomass plant on a site where local operators make wooden posts and mulch, and use chips to heat greenhouses. The institute has funded feasibility studies for biomass heating systems at six public buildings in Plumas County, including two high schools and two hospitals.
人类已经有来自内华达山脉的生态系统不包括火了巨大的冲击马尔科姆北，一个美国森林服务研究的科学家说。“如果我们什么也不做，以扭转人满为患的森林，我们已经创建，我们很可能失去敏感的动物，例如加州斑点猫头鹰和太平洋渔民火灾，”他说。收获小绿树和枯木是为了防止一个方式，北说。
But Wolf, of the Center for Biological Diversity, sees little difference between Kusel’s push for biomass and the destructive logging of the past. Government contracts for biomass removal include commercial logging — not just dead trees and woody debris, but larger diameter trees, too, she says. Even dead trees sequester carbon, contributing to California’s carbon neutrality goals.
仅在2018年，加州的野火发布的4550万公吨的二氧化碳，超过一半多在一年国家的产业界发出。
As to the threat of fire, Wolf says, the most important work communities can do to protect themselves is to prepare their homes with fireproof roofs, vent screens and pruned vegetation. Beyond towns, fire is a natural and necessary component of forest ecosystems and should not be suppressed, she says: "It’s a kind of hubris that humans think they know better than the forest. Forests did fine for millennia without us."
在所有的投诉，提出对生物质发电，排放量可能是最响亮的。森林燃烧燃料排放1.5倍的碳煤和三倍之多天然气乍得汉森，约翰·缪尔项目的联合创始人说。即使是小规模的电厂排放的污染物，其中包括汞，铅和有害微粒。
然而,对于许多环保人士来说,这样的争论pale in the face of wildfire emissions. In 2018 alone, California wildfires released 45.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, more than half as much as the state’s industrial sector emits in a year. "Catastrophic fires are completely swamping the types of gains that California is making by regulating tailpipes and all the other good work we’ve been doing," says Graham Chisholm, senior policy adviser with the Conservation Strategy Group, a natural resources consulting firm.
这一现实导致奇泽姆的组织工作，劳伦斯·利弗莫尔国家实验室开发改进林业做法和废弃生物质转化为燃料。A键，一个说报告由实验室，是确保废弃生物质的数量不断增加不会进一步促进加州的碳排放。这可能意味着将生物质转化为可再生生物燃料或使用碳捕获和储存它燃烧。
Kusel welcomes the innovative focus on both fire and carbon. Electricity is a byproduct of his biomass projects; it helps fund the work but it’s not the reason to do it. "You do it for jobs, yes, but you do it for cleaner air, the ecosystem, and climate change benefits," he says. "That has to be seen as the critical component."
