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COMMENTARY published online in the Alaska Beacon, 9/21/2023

Gov. Dunleavy’s carbon math is bad

 The Interior boreal forest is seen on Sept. 20. 2022, from an overlook along the Parks Highway on the edge of Fairbanks. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)

Gov. Mike Dunleavy persuaded Alaska’s Legislature to create a carbon offset program that monetizes the carbon dioxide that trees on state land breathe in and the carbon they store through photosynthesis. His 10-year budget plan relies heavily on filling gaps from dwindling oil revenues with carbon credit cash. Speaking with journalist Nathaniel Herz, he made it clear that the program had nothing to do with climate change mitigation. 

As Herz wrote of Dunleavy: “Rubbing his thumb and forefinger together, he said the growing markets for carbon storage offer the state something it needs: money … ‘A lot of people’ believe that carbon emissions are driving global warming.” Herz wrote that Dunleavy is not one of them, but he wrote that the governor added, “Alaska is here to help them.”

People who do believe aren’t fooled into thinking that Alaska’s program will be helping to move toward the goal of zero net carbon by 2050 that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned will be necessary to prevent ecosystems from unraveling and severe weather from becoming catastrophic. The credits are a pay-to-pollute mechanism for offsetting “new” carbon emissions (including from the combustion of “old” fossil fuel carbon) or a greenwashing opportunity for companies to claim virtue while avoiding using less energy or the shift to clean, renewable energy sources.

Dunleavy projects that the state will receive billions of dollars in revenue by comparing the 145 million acres of state lands to the $100 million that the Sealaska Corporation was paid to “leave trees standing” on 165,000 acres for 100 years. Of the state’s 145 million acres, however, only about 125 million are inventoried forest lands. Four and a half million are classified commercial forestlands. Legislators were assured by Dunleavy the state will have its forest cake and eat it too; timber harvests won’t decrease. The threat to trees that are storing carbon which the state must prove for certification of carbon credits comes credibly only from the state itself. It’s more of a hostage bluff situation.

The Dunleavy administration is unlikely to leave a lot of trees standing for 100 years except for the ones they actually never planned to harvest. Alaska Department of Natural Resources Commissioner John Boyle wants to manage for more merchantable trees in Interior Alaska for future harvests. Where scientists see spruce bark beetles moving into Interior Alaska as a consequence of climate change, Boyle sees opportunities to harvest fire-prone, beetle-killed trees and live trees that might potentially be attacked by the beetles. The carbon offsets would presumably be sold on the regrowing trees. A preemptive cut-first approach will remove carbon storage that has to be recaptured through photosynthesis, setting back a carbon “break-even” point by decades.

The state can’t trade in the California mandatory cap-and-trade market. The voluntary international forestry carbon market is proving ineffective at actually offsetting emissions. A series of investigations reported by the nonprofit Guardian news outlet in January 2023, found “phantom” offsets in more than 90% of tropical forest projects certified by the industry’s leading standard and overestimates of the actual forest saved from removal by 400% per project. In August, they reported that since many of the offsets were “worthless,” demand had slumped. A whistleblower fraud and misconduct warning was issued in June 2023.

In the context of the goal of zero net carbon by 2050, the state carbon offset program has a good chance of complete irrelevance. The only reason for hope lies in the 10% of revenues the new law requires go into a renewable energy fund.

People who believe that carbon emissions are driving climate change can do the math. Companies who are greenwashing their continuing and new emissions don’t care. Dunleavy usually fails to mention that BP was on the other side of the Sealaska deal, offsetting 100 million tons of emissions from not only the Prudhoe Bay oilfield but also future development BP hoped to do within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Australian oil company Santos’ website announced the forestry carbon offsets they purchased will make the Pikka oil field net zero for operations. It’s the use of the oil by consumers that will generate new emissions that won’t be offset.

In the context of business as usual in Alaska, carbon credits are a moneymaking scheme in the tradition of Soapy Smith. Money may well change hands in the flawed carbon market. Alaskans should expect more from Dunleavy, who taught math and science among other subjects. The only green math he’s doing is in units of cold, hard cash which might prove to be phantoms. It’s likely to be a big fat zero for the planet unless the 10% of carbon offset revenues that go into a renewable energy fund are wisely spent.

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The COVID pandemic and the cancellation of a traveling exhibit provided me with an unexpected opportunity to work with my local museum – the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska – to co-curate an exhibit about natural history collecting in the local area. Museum curator Savanna Bradley and I selected objects from the 24,000+ specimens in the museum’s natural history collections to illustrate and explore the theme of shifting baselines in societal attitudes and museum practices on the collection, curation, and uses of natural history specimens. The exhibit opened on July 9 with COVID precautions in place and ran through September.

The exhibit focused on the “western” museum tradition that began as private “cabinets of curiosities” owned by European aristocrats. These became the nucleus of national public museums which received the scientific specimens collected by Russian and other European naturalists who first reached Alaska in the late 18th century through “voyages of discovery” by colonizing nations. After the U.S. purchased Alaska, American naturalists and scientists organized collecting expeditions on behalf of U.S. national museums to the territory of Alaska, including to Kachemak Bay, in the late 19th century. The Pratt’s collections began with the donations of private collections in the 1950s and they now serve the mission of a place-based community museum. Savanna, a talented artist, provided whimsical drawings of the “cabinets” typical of museum displays of different eras and additional artwork to tie the displays together.We gave museum visitors opportunities to ponder the future of natural history museums, as attitudes have shifted toward conservation of species once collected in large numbers and collections are beginning to serve as baselines to monitor changes related to a rapidly-changing climate.

As we were developing the exhibit during a period of heightened attention to racist and colonial aspects of institutions, including museums, we decided it was important that the exhibit include an acknowledgement of the broader context of the western museum tradition as one rife with colonialism, racism, and misrepresentation. I also wrote an exhibit guide “Diving Deeper” to provide this broader context, with emphasis on the Indigenous knowledge and languages that were largely ignored until relatively recently and cultural aspects of scientific and common naming conventions.

Exhibit-related programs included:
– A First Friday virtual event in September featuring readings from my book and one by local author Nancy Lord from her book Green Alaska about the famous Harriman Expedition to Alaska in 1899: https://www.facebook.com/prattmuseum/videos/922866088122918/?comment_id=922907694785424&notif_id=1599278252239718&notif_t=comment_mention&hc_location=ufi  
– An on-going radio series “Sound Collections” was kicked off by my interview about my own collections in my “home museum” followed by interviews of a diverse group of other local collectors.

http://www.prattmuseum.org/education/sound-collections/

A veteran biologist and longtime Alaska resident explores the region’s Indigenous and natural history.

In this debut volume of nature essays, Sigman applies the ecology concept of “shifting baselines” – essentially, establishing a new sense of normal after a significant change-to her own life and to Homer, Alaska, and the surrounding Kachemak Bay, where she has resided for many years. The book’s pieces draw on the author’s work as a researcher and environmental educator. They focus on the connections between the changing populations of fish, mollusks, and marine mammals and the shifts in the human population, both the region’s Indigenous communities and the waves of settlers who have migrated from the United States mainland to Alaska for more than a century. The essays are both informative and enjoyable reads, as Sigman does an excellent job of conveying scientific topics to nonspecialist readers. “In the Spirit of the Lamp” shows how the prehistory of a location is deeply connected to its present. In “The Silver Horde,” the author makes an effective comparison between artificially breeding salmon and driving a Prius, each solving one problem while contributing to another. The prose is vivid (“Parents exchanged nest duties with courteous butler-like bows before the
stay-at-home mom or dad flew off to forage along the north shore”), and the essays provide a clear sense of place and belonging. Readers will discover that Alaska’s environmental problems are complex and layered, with competing interests vying for supremacy and outcomes that are clear only in the long term-halibut overfishing, for instance, or the challenges of managing salmon hatcheries. “The Bidarki Story” is one of the collection’s strongest essays, following a graduate student’s shellfish research that succeeds by treating the Indigenous bidarki harvesters as scientific partners rather than passive subjects. Readers who have never been to Alaska will come away with a clear sense of the landscape and the wildlife and people who inhabit it as well as an appreciation for the work of ecologists.

A well-written and deeply intriguing collection of essays on humans and nature in Alaska. – Kirkus Review

I was thrilled to learn that my book Entangled: People and Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay was selected for this award given to one book a year for distinguished natural history writing by the John Burroughs Association! It joins a list of awardees that began in 1926 with William Beebe’s Pheasants of the World and which includes Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, Barry Lopez’ Of Wolves and Men, Loren Eiseley’s The Firmament of Time, and the many other natural history writers who have inspired me in my writing and conservation efforts.  The inspirational Alaskan writers who have received the award include Adolf Murie (A Naturalist in Alaska, 1963), Victor Sheffer (A Year in the Life of a Whale, 1970), the (sadly and recently) late Richard Nelson (The Island Within, 1991) and Sherry Simpson, my teacher and mentor in the UAA Creative Writing and Literary Arts MFA program, for Dominion of Bears in 2015.

The award luncheon originally scheduled on April 6, 2020, at the Yale Club in New York City was postponed due to the COVID pandemic and is tentatively re-scheduled for April, 2021.

“How have we developed our collective salmon narratives, what are these narratives obscuring, and how can we bring these shadows into the light?” This was the call to artists and writers issued by the Alaska Humanities Forum and Alaska Salmon Fellows in March, 2018. “As Alaskans,” the call continued, “we typically tell positive salmon narratives and we often neglect the matching dark sides of our stories, like the struggles for sustainability, equity, and resource management.” The literary submissions and visual art selected will be part a traveling Salmon Shadows exhibit, with publication to follow in  FORUM magazine. 

The “Stray Hopes” essay I submitted that was accepted was an excerpt from the “The Silver Horde” chapter in my book Entangled on the history of Alaskan salmon fisheries and management. The dark side of the story told in “Stray Hopes”  is the potential for ecological consequences on stream and marine ecosystems that shadows the faith placed on hatcheries to boost Alaska salmon production.

 

Robert Hannon interviewed me in Fairbanks and added the interview to his 2018 Earth Day podcast in between conversations with researcher Kimberly Maher on the effects of climate change on birch sap, and with Fairbanks singer, educator, and environmentalist Susan Grace. My conversation with Robert begins about 14 minutes in the podcast at https://northernsoundings.com/2018/05/01/earth-day/.

March 9th 1:32 am | Christina Whiting