What’s Driving the Conflict in Sudan

 APRIL 24, 2023 BY ALEX DE WAALFacebook

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Dozens have been killed in armed clashes in the Sudanese capital Khartoum following months of tension between the military and the powerful paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Behind the tensions is a disagreement over the integration of the paramilitary group into the armed forces – a key condition of a transition agreement that’s never been signed but has been adhered to by both sides since 2021.

General Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, better known as Hemedti, is the leader of the RSF. He is a key mover in the fast-escalating civil war, as he has been in other key moments in Sudan’s recent history.

Hemedti’s Rapid Support Forces is led by Darfurian Arabs known as Janjaweed. The term refers to the armed groups of Arabs from Darfur and Kordofan in western Sudan. Drawn from the far west of the country’s periphery, they have – in a mere decade – become the dominant power in Khartoum. And Hemedti has become the face of Sudan’s violent, political marketplace.

I have been a scholar of Sudan for decades. During 2005-06, I was seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur and from 2009-11 served as senior adviser to the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan, in the lead-up to the independence of South Sudan. My most recent book, co-authored with Justin Lynch, examines Sudan’s unfinished democracy.

Hemedti’s career is an object lesson in political entrepreneurship by a specialist in violence. His conduct and (as of now) impunity are the surest indicator that politics of the mercenary kind that have long defined the Sudanese periphery, have been brought home to the capital city.

Coming in from the periphery

Hemedti is from Sudan’s furthest peripheries, an outsider to the Khartoum political establishment. His grandfather, Dagolo, was leader of a subclan that roamed across the pastures of Chad and Darfur. Young men from these camel-herding, landless and marginalised group became a core element of the Arab militia that led Khartoum’s counterinsurgency in Darfur from 2003.

A school dropout turned trader, Hemedti has no formal education. The title ‘General’ was awarded on account of his proficiency as a commander in the Janjaweed brigade in Southern Darfur at the height of the 2003-05 war. A few years later, he joined a mutiny against the government, negotiated an alliance with the Darfurian rebels, and threatened to storm the the government-held city of Nyala.

Soon Hemedti cut a deal with the government. Khartoum would settle his troops’ unpaid salaries and compensation for the wounded and killed. He got promotion to general and a handsome cash payment.

After returning to the Khartoum payroll, Hemedti proved his loyalty. President Omar al-Bashir who ruled Sudan from 1993 to April 2019 when he was deposed became fond of him, sometimes appearing to treat him like the son he had never had.

But, in the days after Bashir was overthrown, some of the young democracy protesters camped in the streets around the Ministry of Defence embraced him as the army’s new look.

A country in his pocket

Back in the fold, Hemedti ably used his commercial acumen and military prowess to build his militia into a force more powerful than the waning Sudanese state.

Al-Bashir constituted the Rapid Support Forces as a separate unit in 2013, initially to fight the rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North in the Nuba Mountains. The new force came off second best. But, with a fleet of new pickup trucks with heavy machine guns, it soon became a force to be reckoned with, fighting a key battle against Darfurian rebels in April 2015.

Following the March 2015 Saudi-Emirati military intervention in Yemen, Sudan cut a deal with Riyadh to deploy Sudanese troops in Yemen. One of the commanders of the operation was General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan who has chaired the Transitional Military Council since 2019. But most of the fighters were Hemedti’s RSF. This brought hard cash direct into Hemedti’s pocket.

And in November 2017, Hemedti’s forces took control of the artisanal gold mines in Jebel Amer in Darfur — Sudan’s single largest source of export revenues. This followed the defeat and capture of his arch-rival Musa Hilal, who rebelled against Al-Bashir.

Suddenly, Hemedti had his hands on the country’s two most lucrative sources of hard currency.

Hemedti is adopting a model of state mercenarism familiar to those who follow the politics of the Sahara. The late President Idriss Déby of Chad rented out his special forces for counter-insurgencies on the French or U.S. payroll in much the same manner. One can expect to see RSF troops deployed to Libya some day.

On the other hand, with the routine deployment of paramilitaries to do the actual fighting in Sudan’s wars at home and abroad, the Sudanese army has become akin to a vanity project. It is the proud owner of extravagant real estate in Khartoum, with impressive tanks, artillery and aircraft. But it has few battle-hardened infantry units. Other forces have stepped into this security arena, including the operational units of the National Intelligence and Security Services, and paramilitaries such as special police units — and the RSF.

Reaping the whirlwind

But there’s also a twist to the story. Every ruler in Sudan, with one notable exception, has hailed from the the heartlands of Khartoum and the neighboring towns on the Nile. The exception is the Khalifa Abdullahi “al-Ta’aishi” who was a Darfurian Arab. His armies provided the majority of the force that conquered Khartoum in 1885. The riverian elites remember the Khalifa’s rule (1885-98) as a tyranny. They are terrified it may return.

Hemedti is the face of that nightmare, the first non-establishment ruler in Sudan for 120 years. Despite the grievances against Hemedti’s paramilitaries, he is still recognised as a Darfurian and an outsider to the Sudanese establishment.

When the Sudanese regime sowed the wind of the Janjaweed in Darfur in 2003, they least expected to reap the whirlwind in their own capital city. In fact the seeds had been sown much earlier. Previous governments adopted the war strategy in southern Sudan and southern Kordofan of setting local people against one another. This was preferred to sending units of the regular army -— manned by the sons of the riverain establishment — into peril.

Hemedti is that whirlwind. But his ascendancy is also, indirectly, the revenge of the historically marginalised. The tragedy of the Sudanese marginalised is that the man who is posing as their champion is the ruthless leader of a band of vagabonds, who has been supremely skillful in playing the transnational military marketplace.

A version of this article was first published by the World Peace Foundation. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Alex De Waal is a Research Professor and Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation at The Fletcher School, Tufts University

Seriously Auditing the Rich Makes Sense. Seriously Taxing the Rich Can Save Us.

 APRIL 24, 2023 BY SAM PIZZIGATIFacebook

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Photograph Source: John Englart – CC BY-SA 2.0

Back in 1974, almost a half-century ago, any ordinary income over $200,000 — the equivalent of just over $1.2 million today — faced a 70 percent federal tax rate. A deep pocket today faces just a 37 percent top rate at that same level. The impact of this striking plummet? Households in America’s richest 0.01 percent have since 1974 more than quadrupled their share of our nation’s wealth.

But that stat doesn’t do anywhere near full justice to the abject failure of our contemporary federal tax system. We’re not just taxing our richest at significantly lower rates. We’re letting huge chunks of the dollars our wealthiest pocket go totallyuntaxed. Our wealthiest are simply not reporting all their income, and the IRS simply doesn’t have nearly enough staff to find the income the rich are hiding.

Some numbers, courtesy of a just-published Wall Street Journal analysis: Back in 1974, the IRS had a staff about 84,000 strong. The sheer size of the U.S. economy, ever since then, has quadrupled, and the overall population of the United States has jumped by 120 million people. Yet the IRS — after suffering years of budget cuts — has no more staff today than the agency had back in 1974.

America’s rich and the corporations they run like things this way. Almost all “complex and opaque” business tax returns now go unexamined, the Journal notes, and audits of mega-millionaires and billionaires have gone “tumbling” by 80 to 90 percent.

That “tumbling” began during the Ronald Reagan years, and Republicans have kept up the defund-the-IRS pressure ever since. Their current target: the $80 billion in new funding — over the next ten years — that the Inflation Reduction Act enacted last year has earmarked for re-energizing how the IRS operates.

This past January, Republicans took over control of the U.S. House of Representatives. The first bill this new GOP majority passed eliminates most of that $80 billion, under the bogus rationale that the IRS will be using this new cash infusion “to target American working-class families.”

In fact, under a directive from U.S. treasury secretary Janet Yellen, the IRS will not use any of the new funding enacted last year to up audit rates in taxpayers making less than $400,000 a year. The nation’s tax agency, IRS commissioner Daniel Werfel has added, will focus “on enhancing the IRS’ capabilities to ensure that America’s highest earners comply with applicable tax laws.”

How much new revenue could that focus collect? The IRS last October put the overall “tax gap” at $496 billion but cautioned that “the tax gap estimates cannot fully account for all types of evasion.” So we just don’t know exactly how much in taxes our richest are evading.

We do know that in 2019 — the most recent year with data available — only 0.4 percent of taxpayers with reported incomes over $500,000 ended up getting audited.

Two years ago, analysts at ProPublica took a crack at dramatizing just how colossally little the richest among us pay in taxes. Over the five-year stretch that led up to 2019, these analysts noted, our nation’s 25 richest paid a mere $13.6 billion in federal income taxes. Over those same years, our top 25 fortunes grew by $401 billion. Our richest paid, in effect, what “amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4 percent.”

Subjecting the wealthiest among us to serious audits would certainly help raise that true tax rate. But those among our wealthiest who belong to the Patriotic Millionaires fair-tax group believe we need to do much more than up the rate for audits on our richest. Earlier this week, meeting in Washington, D.C., activists with Patriotic Millionaires unveiled a bold new gameplan — Crack the Code — for thoroughly overhauling how we treat the rich at tax time.

“Money is money is money, whether it comes in through birth into the right family, an investment gain, or a paycheck,” Crack the Code explains, and “should all be taxed at the same rates” at upper income levels. That means everything from taxing capital gains and ordinary income at identical tax rates to replacing the estate tax with an income tax on inheritances equal to the same rate imposed on other types of income, subject to a $1 million exclusion per person.

And how high should the tax rate on high incomes go? Our tax code, Patriotic Millionaires believes, ought to give every American a full “cost of living” exemption from income tax and then impose above that basic cost-of-living benchmark “progressively higher marginal rates of tax” that rise all the way up to 90 percent on annual income over $100 million.

To complete the tax picture, Crack the Code calls for a special new tax to “constrain undue wealth concentration.” Grand fortunes from 1,000 to 1,000,000 times the nation’s median household wealth, Patriotic Millionaires believes, should face an annual wealth tax that ranges from 2 to 8 percent.

“If our economy and our democracy are to survive, we must fundamentally reimagine our tax code,” sums up the Patriotic Millionaires gameplan. “For our future, our grandchildren’s future, and our country’s future, we must tax the rich.”

Sam Pizzigati writes on inequality for the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest book: The Case for a Maximum Wage (Polity). Among his other books on maldistributed income and wealth: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970  (Seven Stories Press). 

Capital Punishment Should Be Abolished, Not Expanded

 APRIL 24, 2023 BY BENJAMIN AYANIANFacebook

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Photograph Source: Felton Davis – CC BY 2.0

The death penalty remains a dark blight on the United States’ criminal justice record, and unfortunately, it’s not going away any time soon.

Ron Desantis just signed a troubling law to end the requirement that juries must vote unanimously to recommend the death penalty. Now Florida juries can recommend capital punishment as long as eight out of twelve jurors concur. Executions have been in steady decline in the U.S. as many states move away from the death penalty, but some Republican-lead states have continued their ardent support of putting inmates to death.

States and the federal government ought to end this inhumane and risky form of punishment, not expand its practice.

Capital punishment is not always a seamless process, and botched executions lead to horrific complications in the death penalty. In Oklahoma in 2014, for example, a 38-year-old death row inmate was left “writhing, clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head off the pillow” after being administered what was then a new three-drug-combination for executions, according to an AP News report. The execution proceedings were halted, but the man died of a heart attack 43 minutes from when the execution procedure began.

After three consecutive flawed execution processes, Oklahoma implemented a moratorium on executions in 2015, but in 2021, Oklahoma resumed executions with its three-drug-combination. That same year, John Marion Grant started convulsing and vomiting after the administration of the first of the three drugs which was supposed to knock him unconscious before he ultimately died.

These mishaps render capital punishment more akin to torture than the administration of justice. Drug companies, seeking to avoid association with the death penalty, are blocking the use of their products for death penalty proceedings, causing a nationwide shortage of lethal injection drugs. As a result, states are now looking to experiment with novel means of putting inmates to death.

But all means for carrying out the death penalty have the potential to be botched or induce unnecessary suffering. Even death by firing squad, which some states have recently approved as an alternative to lethal injection, can possibly leave a prisoner conscious and in excruciating pain for a whole 10 seconds if bullets do not hit the right spot.

In addition to the risk of torturing a prisoner, the most problematic element of the death penalty is the possibility of sentencing innocent people.

Since 1973, 191 death-row inmates have been exonerated of all charges. For every 8 inmates executed, 1 death-row inmate is exonerated, and there is strong evidence that numerous individuals have been wrongfully put to death over the past few decades. Unfortunately, prisoners’ cases tend to die with them and receive little attention or investigation once their death sentence is carried out.

The stories of those exonerated, however, conspicuously illuminate how the cards can be stacked against a defendant, resulting in a wrongful conviction. Walter Ogrod, for example, was convicted of murdering a young girl in 1996 and was sentenced to death. Ultimately, decades later, his case was reviewed and re-investigated by the Philadelphia County District Attorney’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit. Patricia Cummings, the unit’s chief, and Assistant District Attorney Carrie Wood wrote in 2020, “At trial, Ogrod found himself adrift in a perfect storm of unreliable scientific evidence, prosecutorial misconduct, Brady violations, and false testimony.” In addition, the detectives handling his case had a knack for employing unscrupulous means to produce wrongful convictions.

Ogrod was exonerated in 2020.

The torture inflicted upon defendants during some botched executions illustrates the inhumanity of the death penalty. But the risk of putting innocent men and women to death should alone be enough for the federal government and the 27 states that still have capital punishment to abolish the practice.

Benjamin Ayanian is a contributor for Young Voices, a PR firm and talent agency for young, pro-liberty commentators. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Yahoo News, and more. Follow him on Twitter @BenjaminAyanian.

TV Writers Flex Their Union Power

APRIL 24, 2023  BY SONALI KOLHATKAR

Photo by Nabil Saleh

Television has been experiencing a boom in the United States, the likes of which has never been seen before. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there were 532 scripted TV shows that were broadcast or streamed the year before—an all-time high. In 2022, there were 599. In fact, according to FX Network Research, since 2012 there has been a steady increase in the number of scripted shows, except for a small dip due to the lockdown-related production halt in 2020.

These new heights in television production can be attributed largely to streaming services such as Netflix—a company that has been offering up tantalizing on-screen fiction for the past decade since “House of Cards” first debuted as an exclusively streaming show on the platform. But the primacy of streaming is also the reason why TV writers are now threatening to go on strike. For years, streaming services have slashed residual payments, which writers rely on, prompting the Writers Guild of America (WGA) to vote to strike.

The turnout for the WGA vote strike, which took place on April 17, broke records, with nearly 80 percent of the union’s members casting ballots. Of that number, nearly 98 percent voted to strike. These numbers are significantly higher than in 2007, the last time WGA members voted to strike and actually carried out their threat (a 2017 strike was narrowly averted). The union, which represents more than 11,000 writers, has the potential to bring the TV industry to a screeching halt if negotiations with media companies, represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), break down by May 1, the last day of WGA’s current contract.

Three major unions dominate Hollywood’s television industry, representing writers, directors, and actors: the WGA, the Directors Guild of America (DGA), and the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), respectively. Both DGA and SAG-AFTRA will also start negotiations shortly with the AMPTP ahead of their contracts ending on June 30. There is potential for multiple overlapping strikes in the coming months, leaving Hollywood’s television industry on edge, even as most of the nation enjoys the fruits of its work, blissfully unaware of the tensions brewing between creators and corporate producers.

The stakes are high. Already Netflix is boasting that it can rely on foreign labor to weather a potential WGA strike. The company’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos said a day after the strike authorization vote that if writers went on strike, “we have a large base of upcoming shows and films from around the world,” adding, “We could probably serve our members better than most.” Networks are also stockpiling scripts in preparation for a potential writers’ strike.

TV producers hold massive financial power in an industry whose cultural influence sweeps across the world. While writers, directors, and actors are the ones whose creativity powers the direction of new, innovative content, their bosses—executives at Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, and Disney—have driven down the costs of labor to maximize profits.

Residuals, which are extra payments made to creative workers each time their shows re-air, used to provide stable incomes for TV workers in between jobs. Streaming services negotiated minuscule residuals years ago when they were minor players within the TV landscape. Now, although they dominate the scene, streaming producers are continuing to pay their workers insultingly low residuals. Worse, many creators are finding that platforms will disappear their projects altogether in order to get a tax write-off and avoid having to pay them.

TV producers are also cutting costs by canceling shows abruptly—a move that could disproportionately impact diversity on-screen. Television is one of the world’s most powerful narrative-setting industries, influencing culture in ways that can determine day-to-day policies. According to GLAAD, “For many Americans, it was television shows that gave them their first images of same-sex couples, and a chance to recognize the commonalities with their own lives.” This in turn helped lay the foundation for the legalization of same-sex marriage within years.

Television has the potential to do the same for racial justice issues. According to the latest Hollywood Diversity Report, “people of color have made tremendous advances among broadcast, cable, and digital leads in recent years,” and “Black and multiracial persons exceeded proportionate representation among leads in 2020-21 for cable and digital scripted shows.” Still, the report concludes that there is not enough parity overall.

Now, in search of profits, TV producers are cutting costs by canceling already green-lit projects. “[T]he streaming explosion has lost steam,” declared MarketWatch. TV networks and streaming platforms ordered nearly a quarter fewer shows in the second half of last year compared to the year before. John Landgraf, chairman of FX Networks, who is credited with coining the term “Peak TV,” worries that cost-cutting will impact the representation of racially diverse communities.

It appears as though, in addition to using foreign-sourced projects and stockpiling scripts as leverage, TV’s corporate executives plan to approach union negotiations by touting the notion that television output is peaking and therefore costs such as baseline pay and residuals cannot be increased.

Yet, media companies have enough money to buy one another, spending billions on mergers and acquisitions. A year ago, Amazon acquired MGM Studios for $8.5 billion; and Warner Brothers, which owned HBO Max, merged with Discovery to the tune of $43 billion. Earlier this year, Showtime announced a merger with Paramount+. Predictably, these companies are announcing cuts to their workforce to pay for such consolidation.

But workers still have leverage. David Slack, a WGA union member and a writer and consulting producer on “Magnum P.I.,” told the Washington Post, “The power to withhold our labor is the only tool we have to get the studios to pay us what’s fair.” He added, “Our products are the foundation for all the billions of dollars of revenue that these entertainment companies generate, and we need to be compensated for that.” Los Angeles Times columnist Mary McNamara distilled the dynamic succinctly: “If studios and platforms want to be in the original scripted content business, they need to make that business work for the people writing those scripts. It’s that simple.”

The last time TV writers went on strike, it lasted a whopping 100 days and cost the economy of Los Angeles more than $2 billion. If writers go on a prolonged strike, there will be a ripple effect, putting actors and directors out of work as well. There can be no scripted television if no one is writing the scripts.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates. 

What’s Wrong With Biomass Burning? Everything!

BY GEORGE WUERTHNER  APRIL 25, 2023

 APRIL 25, 2023

Biomass plant, Boardman, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Presently around the West, the Forest Service, timber advocates, and far too many conservation organizations are promoting biofuels and biomass energy as “Green Energy.” The FS and its allies want to cut more wood (which they term fuels or “waste” while I call it wildlife habitat and carbon storage) from the forest and use it to produce some products that society values, like jet fuel or even heating buildings.

But the only thing “green” about biomass energy or fuel is the subsidies that government agencies bestow.

Those promoting the biomass fuel and energy juggernaut suggest that burning wood is “clean energy “and carbon neutral. However, biofuels and biomass energy are not clean, not carbon neutral, and not sustainable.

For instance, the City of Prineville, Oregon, promotes the construction of a 20 MW biomass burner. In their promotional literature, the city says: “The City and County will utilize the PREP to reduce the risk of severe wildfires, reinvent jobs in the natural resources/forest products industries, diversify energy supplies, reduce CO2 emissions, and reinvigorate the community and local economy, all while offering a clean, renewable energy source.”

In announcing its intention to construct biomass burners, Mount Bachelor  Ski Resort makes the same happy talk about the benefits of wood-burning biomass.

And just this week in California, another biomass burner is about to be constructed in Birney–with the same delusional remarks about “clean” energy and how it will convert “waste” wood into electrical power.

Prineville, Mount Bachelor, and other promoters of biomass are feeding the public timber and biomass industry propaganda. I am sure they believe what they are saying but ignore contrary information.

SUBSIDIES AND ECONOMICS

Most biomass burners are not economical. They often receive massive subsidies of two kinds—direct funding from government agencies and the environmental damage they promote.

In most cases in the West, the wood source or “fuel” for biomass operations results from deforestation. These deforestation projects destroy biodiversity, pollute the land and air, and worsen climate change. And like almost all Forest Service logging projects, they also lose money, so they are yet another form of subsidy.

The other subsidies are direct grants and funding that biomass projects receive from government sources.

Recently the City of Prineville received a million-dollar grant from the Forest Service to help construct its proposed biomass burner.

The biomass burner being constructed in Burney, California received a $5 million dollar grant.

Like other projects, Mount Bachelor’s proposed biomass burner is subsidized with state and federal government grants. So why should taxpayers be funding a private business?

An even worse waste of tax dollars is the Red Rocks Biofuel plant in Lakeview, Oregon which has received over $350 million in public funding. Making these subsidies all the more disastrous is that the Red Rocks plant has never opened and recently went bankrupt.

The Red Rocks proposal was supported by a $75 million funding award from the Department of Defense, more than $2 million in infrastructure improvement from the town of Lakeview, and about $300 million in tax-exempt economic development bonds issued in 2018 through the state of Oregon. Unfortunately, all of these taxpayers and bondholders are losers.

The only good thing about the demise of the Red Rocks Biofuel project is that it means fewer trees will be logged to supply the plant with its biomas from the Fremont National Forest.

Due to the cost of transportation, cutting trees for wood burner operations typically is only economical for a 25–35-mile radius. Two things occur as a result.

First, biomass burners must bring fuel from more distant sources, which adds to their costs, often absorbed by ratepayers or government subsidies. The burner operations put more pressure on federal and state forests to provide more local fuel, which can lead to even more significant deforestation.

Furthermore, they remove funding from less polluting and destructive projects like distributed solar.

POLLUTION

Another problem with the moniker that biomass is “clean” is that they pollute the atmosphere with carbon and toxins that are damaging to health. Participant matter from burner emissions is continuous throughout the year rather than associated with one-time seasonal events like wildfires. People with asthma and other breathing issues are vulnerable to emissions.

Proponents argue that biomass burners operate at high temperatures that eliminate most toxins. But they don’t tell the public that during the start-up and shutdown phase, burners operate at far lower temperatures and emit significant amounts of pollutants during these periods.

Even worse for the atmosphere and human health is that biomass burners often consume the available nearby wood and then start to include building waste, railroad ties, tires, and other materials that contain numerous toxic materials in the mix.

WOOD IS AN INEFFICIENT ENERGY SOURCE

Because wood is less “energy dense” than alternatives from coal to natural gas, it requires more of it to produce the same amount of heat or “work” as producing electricity. So to get the same amount of energy for generators, wood-burning operations release far more carbon per unit of electrical power than alternative fuels. I’m not arguing that we should burn fossil fuels-we need to reduce all forms of carbon fuel sources, but believing that the substitution of wood is better than other fuels is misleading.

Researchers working with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) concluded that a wood-burning plant would have higher net carbon emissions than a comparable coal plant for the first 4 decades or more of operations.

The problem for society is that we must reduce all carbon emissions now. If the ice sheets melt in the next 20-30 years and flood places like Miami or New Orleans, it doesn’t matter if, in 40-50 years, burning wood might have less overall emissions (due to carbon capture by the new growth of trees over decades).

CARBON RELEASES

Logging the forest releases stored carbon. Industry shills suggest that burning wood is different from burning natural gas or other fossil fuels because it is “biogenic carbon,” meaning the growth of trees produces it, thus carbon “neutral.”

Logging in Oregon easily contributes far more carbon into the atmosphere than even the worse large blazes. Indeed, 35% of Oregon’s carbon is the result of logging.

An article in Earth Island Institute provides some clarity on wood and carbon. “About 28 percent of tree carbon is contained in branches, which is emitted when burned after logging operations. An additional 53 percent of the carbon in trees removed from forests is emitted as waste in the manufacturing and milling process. Overall, about two-thirds of the carbon in trees that are logged for lumber quickly become greenhouse gas emissions.” Since biomass operations burn an even greater amount of the tree (like branches), the amount of carbon released is significantly greater.

The green piece of the pie represents the amount of Carbon emissions from logging and wood products in Oregon. 

However, this biocarbon has taken decades to centuries to accumulate but is released immediately when burned. Since most biomass operations use whole trees, they effectively release the bulk of all stored carbon.

Even a forest fire does not release most of the stored carbon. Instead, carbon remains on site as snags, down wood, roots in the ground, and charcoal. Though much of this may be released over time as decomposition occurs, it may take centuries to release all the available carbon in a tree.

FLAWED ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT “FUELS” AND FIRES

A further complication is that these projects, often subsidized by state and federal government grants, are based on flawed assumptions about logging projects on public lands. For example, most of these biomass proposals argue that we must reduce the density of trees on forestlands to eliminate or at least diminish major wildfires.

For instance, the city of Prineville, Oregon, is building a biomass burner using a grant from the Forest Service. Unfortunately, similar biomass burners or other facilities like biomass fuel production, including a plant by Lakeview, Oregon, are all heavily subsided by federal grants, not to mention the removal of wood from forest ecosystems.

All of these projects are using wood cut on national forest lands predicted on the premise that logging will preclude or slow wildfire spread and reduce carbon emissions. However, there is an abundance of scientific studies that present contrary evidence. Climate and weather are the primary drivers of large western blazes, not fuels.

For instance, in 2018, researchers from Oregon State University in Ecological Applications reported: “Daily fire weather was the most important predictor of fire severity, followed by stand age and ownership, followed by topographic features. Estimates of pre-fire forest biomass were not an important predictor of fire severity.”

They conclude: “Our findings suggest intensive plantation forestry characterized by young forests and spatially homogenized fuels, rather than pre-fire biomass, were significant drivers of wildfire severity.”

Similarly, another review paper that looked at 1500 fires in ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests across the West concluded that active forest management (AKA logging) resulted in higher severity blazes than areas with no logging or other fuel treatments.

Plus logging emissions are far greater than those resulting from wildfires says OSU researcher Bev Law : “When you have a disturbance such as fire, and when wood is removed and harvested and put into wood products, you have to follow the carbon,” she said. “And it turns out that … harvest-related emissions are five to seven times that of the fire emissions in Oregon.”

PROFORESTATION

One of the best ways we can promote carbon storage is through trees. Proforestation provides a bridge for society that will allow us to move from burning fossil fuels to alternative energy sources (including simply energy conservation through the insulation of structures).

Merely allowing trees to mature and grow can store significant amounts of carbon are nearly no cost. The best use of our national forests is not for wood production but for carbon storage. Of course, this would also have ancillary benefits like providing wildlife habitat, preserving wildlands, and reducing government waste (currently going to promote biomass operations).

Bev Law of Oregon State University along with colleagues advocates creating strategic forest reserves to promote carbon storage and biodiversity protection.

As Bill Moomaw of Yale University suggests: “The most effective thing that we can do is to allow trees that are already planted, that are already growing, to continue growing to reach their full ecological potential, to store carbon, and develop a forest that has its full complement of environmental services,” said Moomaw. “Cutting trees to burn them is not a way to get there.”

George Wuerthner has published 36 books including Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy.