This is chapter 7 of my book, A Natural Language, which exposes the environmental narrative as propaganda and puts bottom-up solutions in front of the actual problem.
Scandinavian researchers have long been studying the amount of emissions that forest clear-cuts produce. They do this with instrument towers that measure greenhouse gas flows. Their findings give a good sense of the scale of what is going on. A publication by Mika Korkiakoski and colleagues in 2018, for instance, measured around 3 and 2 kilograms of CO2 emissions per square meter during the first and second years after a forest clear-cut, plus a small amount of methane and nitrous oxides. If we extrapolate this and assume that the CO2 emissions drop by another 1/3 each year for another year or two, the total jumps from 5 to 7 or so kilograms of CO2 per square meter. That works out to around 30 tons per acre. Swedish forestry interests express yields in cubic meters. US forestry numbers are more helpful for our purpose. They suggest that clearing a pine tree forest yields an average of 86 (natural forest) or 99 (plantation) short tons of roundwood per acre. Roundwood is a tree minus a good chunk of slash, so we’re going to round this down for simplicity, and assume that harvesting a tree results in about a third of its total weight in carbon emissions over time.
To clear out potential confusions, this one third number does not mean that one third of the tree’s weight in soil carbon ends up in smoke. Rather, it means that, for a few years until a freshly cut forest becomes a carbon sink again, the balance between new sugar inputs from young trees above ground and forest respiration overall will result in net CO2 (includes the weight of two oxygens) equal to about a third of the weight of the trees (includes the weight of water, etc.) that got cleared. Caveats apply, such as the fact we used research done in wet boreal forests rather than the temperate rainforests or the subtropical wetland forests where Drax is sourcing wood. Still, we merely want to give a sense of what soil emissions tied to forestry harvests look like, and for this purpose our simplifying assumptions are good enough.
A last point that we need to address is whether it is fair to attribute part or all of these excess soil emission to Drax. It is not commissioning the logging, so at minimum we should be distinguishing between the total emissions tied to forestry and those tied to burning wood pellets. Better yet, Scandinavian forestry researchers have shown that selectively harvesting trees demonstrably eliminates the excess soil emissions: nearby trees soak them up. As such, we should make sure that Drax is not taking steps to avoid them. Drax says it is sourcing wood from working forests, so it actually is taking such steps. At the same time, corporations are pragmatic, Drax only recently got into biomass, and the page about working forests only appeared on Drax’s website around late 2021, which at the time of writing this was weeks ago. It therefore seems safe to assume that Drax has burnt and continues to burn a lot of wood sourced from cleared tree plantations. We are as such going to compute the emissions for perspective while saluting Drax’s good intentions.
With this in mind, we have everything we need to compute an estimate. A third of the 36.85 million tons of standing trees we computed earlier gives us 12.28 million tons of CO2 tied to soil emissions tied to logging activities. A third of the wood harvest ends up in wood pellets, so Drax’s share is 4.09 million tons. We can now add this to the 13.51 million tons that we had computed earlier. That gives us 17.6 million tons of CO2 counting Drax only, out of a total of 25.79 million tons of CO2 total (including Drax). Both numbers are trending downwards since Drax is sourcing wood from working forests. This is behind the Bełchatów power station in Poland, and it still puts Drax squarely on a list of Europe’s largest carbon emitters.
Three important remarks are warranted at this point. The first is that these numbers are based on simplifying assumptions. This should not distract us from the actual point, which is that excess soil emissions tied to harvesting trees are in the same ballpark as the emissions tied to burning the pellets made from the associated forestry waste. The next remark is that, despite their magnitude, forestry math keeps these soil emissions out of climate change conversations. This impeccably illustrates how propaganda is as much about shaping what an audience thinks as it is about shaping what that audience is thinking about. The last remark is that, by virtue of keeping trees around to soak up these excess soil emissions, Drax’s working forest practices will soon prevent these emissions from escaping into the atmosphere. That conveniently gets the salient point across for us: these emissions are avoidable.
The fact that soil emissions rival with and indeed surpass fossil fuel emissions is well documented. Soil emissions are so much larger than fossil fuel emissions that you can tell when farmers are busy on NASA’s daily atmospheric carbon dioxide visualizations. You can see plumes of CO2 that erupt from farmlands in the autumn and in the spring, more continuous plumes in areas where rice farmers get several harvests per year, and occasional plumes in developing countries where indigenous locals are using fire to clear fields or hunting grounds. Fossil fuel emissions are so minuscule in comparison to those that even the most densely inhabited regions of the planet don’t pop out. It does not necessarily follow that burning fossil fuel is not causing the carbon hockey stick, but it should invite us to take a cold hard look at the fossil fuel hypothesis.
The numbers in carbon cycle models are a good place to start. Take these numbers with a fistful of salt. Taken at face value, they suggest that fossil fuel emissions are an order of magnitude lower than land and ocean emissions. This is error prone in that it is based on stocks and flows that are themselves tied to carbon stock estimates, which is to say forestry math. Consider that a single mature shihuahuaco tree sequesters about as much carbon as a third of a hectare (.8 acres) worth of typical rainforest, and what a few shihuahuaco trees on a plot might do to the margin of error of a researcher tasked with producing statistics over a large area. Another issue is that these numbers invite throwing double-entry bookkeeping rules out the window. To wit, breakdowns of emissions by sector (energy, cement, etc.) capture land use emissions as net flows, like on the Our World in Data website. That amounts to evaluating a business’ net income without also looking into its revenues, expenses, assets, liabilities, and market outlook.
In its defense, the numbers that Our World in Data uses for its visualizations are pillars of rectitude in the field of climate science communication. Contrast that with the IEA’s early 2021 report about “the largest-ever decline in global emissions.” Climate social media erupted in celebration, making it bare to the world how oblivious it was to the wave of suffering, suicides, child trauma, and lonely deaths that Covid-19 lockdowns and economic meltdown had brought about. The IEA report itself made it clear that it was about energy-related emissions, but no one reads beyond headlines nowadays. Not even climate experts. They could easily have spoiled the party at the time, because atmospheric CO2 concentrations had increased like clockwork that year. It was exactly like the researchers who had looked into the effects of Covid-19 lockdowns had raised a few months earlier. It was basically as if fossil fuel emissions did not matter.
Out-of-touch “findings” like this are all too common in climate science. CO2 emissions expressed in gigatons typically betray findings that derive from models, forestry math, or economic data, rather than actual observations. This is a problem because of biases in models. Some of these derive from a siloed understanding of how things work, like soil or water vapor. Other biases derive from preconceived ideas about what matters, like fossil fuel or meat. Yet other biases are more technical, like how large an area you average out and treat as identical in atmospheric models. The climate models that result attract all sorts of criticisms. You might know about authors who criticize the models as climate science deniers or critics depending on your politics. Elaborating on these criticisms would serve little useful purpose besides fueling division, so we won’t. Two issues nonetheless warrant our attention.
The first issue is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) doesn’t seem to have much interest in what peak oil or an economic meltdown might do to its predictions. In its 4th report, a short blurb basically rules out peak oil. In its 5th report, peak oil is ongoing, but gets dismissed as irrelevant. One of the cited sources explains that peak oil and gas behavior shows in models “not because of the assumed physical scarcity of hydrocarbons, but because of the limited carbon emission budgets under, for example, the 2°C target.” Fair enough, but that is circular. Citing explanations like that in a report to dismiss peak oil is an insult to the intelligence of readers. What a reference would need to explain is why peak oil would not stop CO2 concentrations from reaching new milestones. You don’t get to just dismiss peak oil because we need to reduce fossil fuel emissions. IPCC report authors who wrote this, reviewers who let that in, and reporters who went along with it should all be ashamed of themselves for terrifying the public. The 6th report wasn’t yet available at the time of writing.
In reality, peak oil and the ongoing supply chain breakdowns in 2022 make the fossil fuel hypothesis a self-defeating one. Among the nuggets of economic findings from the past few decades is the fact that traditional pricing mechanisms fly out the window in times of scarcity. Low supply leads to price volatility because of the fear of missing out and the like. Think toilet paper hoarding. This overwhelms supply and demand signals, and that leads to chaotic price fluctuations. An immediate corollary is that, because oil is becoming scarce, a carbon tax would make little difference to oil consumption. It would just be a cruel consumption tax. Another corollary is that volatile oil prices would make producing locally more predictable and more competitive. That would lead to a more local economy, which is incidentally what the degrowth crowd suggests that we do to solve climate change. In other words, the hockey stick problem would solve itself if the problem actually was fossil fuel to begin with. It follows that the IPCC predictions, which are all based on effectively unbound oil supply with continued economic growth, are dubious.
The other issue is that the atmosphere contains only half of the CO2 that the models suggest we should find given the fossil fuel that we’ve burnt to date. This is an open secret among climate specialists. A researcher or journalist who tells you otherwise is disingenuous or incompetent. NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 (OCO-3) mission is literally tasked with locating the other half. Paradoxically, the mission seems to be based on the very models that it’s trying to fix. It basically hinges on fossil fuel CO2 being the problem, and purports to find the elusive carbon stocks that are soaking it up. The mission may end up being a wild goose chase, because a 2022 paper by Kenneth Skrable and colleagues found that only 12% of the CO2 in the atmosphere can actually be traced to fossil fuel.
That result invites the question of what might be making fossil fuel contribute so much of the CO2 in the atmosphere. 12% points to a very limited correlation between what gets emitted in a given year and what ends up in the atmosphere. The fact that thinning a forest soaks up the soil emissions that clearing it would have released points in the same direction. So do urban centers that don’t exhibit plumes of CO2 in spite of human activities. It stands to reason that vegetation will soak up CO2 that stays around it for long enough. The CO2 that escapes into the atmosphere would as such need to occur in places where vegetation is unable to absorb it before wind blows it away. Intuitively, that points to aircrafts and high chimneys like those of industrial facilities or ships. It also points to looking for fossil fuel and soil emissions in open spaces.
All of this paints an environmental narrative that is very different from the fossil fuel one, so let’s pause to sketch out what a counter-narrative might look like. Miners began to dig open pit mines and blow up mountains. Loggers began to use chainsaws and clear-cut forests. Farmers began to get rid of hedgerows that got in the way of tractors. Each in their own way, they rip up the earth and create wide open spaces. They leave no natural windbreaks to keep soil emissions from getting blown away, and no canopy to soak up those emissions.
That makes it a story of topsoil loss, but a very specific type of topsoil loss. Harvesting or plowing a field in the past would have resulted in soil emissions too, but hedgerows were around to soak up enough of it that it did not matter. Modern topsoil loss is different. Hedgerows are no longer slowing down the flow of water and helping it soak in, so rainfall can take topsoil downhill and into streams, with nutrients joining in for the ride. Harvesting, tilling, mineral fertilizers, and biocides all hurt soil life. The associated topsoil life makes soil lose its structure and compounds the erosion issue. The topsoil loss is thus altogether more significant, and some of it ends up in the atmosphere because harvests and tilling create open fields with no photosynthesis.
This topsoil loss causes desertification. Organic matter increases soil water retention capacity by dizzying amounts. An extra 1% of organic matter allows soil to soak up a huge amount of extra water. How much depends on who you ask and other conditions, but it’s basically on the order of 100,000 liters of water per hectare. That corresponds to a 10mm rainfall event, or 10-liter watering can per square meter in a veggie patch. Conversely, 1% less organic matter means less water for use by plants. Irrigating with groundwater to compensate for the loss of water retention can further harm soil by salting it. The latter is especially troublesome in drylands, because dry soil will act like a sponge and soak up the water that is below it. That will eventually create a build-up of salt that makes the field unusable. Lower water retention also means more water runoffs that cause yet further erosion and topsoil loss.
Plantations compound all of these problems by creating drier landscapes. At issue is the significant amount of soil microbiology and plant roots that are normally present in the topmost soil layer. This is because a mulch of dead organic matter is normally feeding decomposers while keeping the surface cool and moist. Tiling and the lower plant density on plantations make it so that sunlight and wind will hit bare soil instead. This heats and dries it up. Rain compacts it to boot. Spraying toxins on it doesn’t help either. That stresses plant roots and soil microbiology. The topmost soil layer ends up serving as a dry, lifeless, de facto mulch. The added soil evaporation goes on to affect local microclimates. Bare soil acts as a heat mass that releases warm water vapor when the sun dries it up. See for instance irrigated drylands like California’s Central Valley. Also, water evaporates far more easily when it is spread across as a thin layer or using drip lines than it does in a shady swale that helps soak water underground.
The water cycle ramifications need attention too. Isotopic analysis of rainwater makes it clear that land-based evaporation is instrumental to inland rainfall: wind from bodies of water carries the rain that falls on shores, and land-based evaporation then creates the rain that will fall deeper inland. Plants transpire a lot of water. Bare soil lets water on its surface evaporate as we’ve just discussed. Soil’s sponge-like properties then brings deeper water closer for more of the same. Conversely, plants and animals also help condense water. For instance when fog drips on trees, dew on grass, or when rodents gather pebbles around their burrows to harvest water from dew. Trees are especially important in this respect. As large plants, trees transpire and condense a lot. They act as windbreaks and create shade that prevent evaporation. Their deep roots help water soak underground. Water eventually fills aquifers and escapes as springs. Animals like beavers are also important ecosystem engineers. They hydrate lands, which creates springs and rain. These processes slow down or crumble in monoculture plantations.
Summary | Next: Environmental Fairytales.