El Dorado National Forest. (Photo: Katy Grimes for California Globe)
Ringside: The Case for Carbon Sequestration via Forestry and Mass Timber
We can harvest more lumber while saving our forests
By Edward Ring, August 7, 2025 3:05 am
There are at least two massive opportunities to engage in cost-effective carbon sequestration. Neither would require subsidies and both could be performed exclusively by the private sector. They are controversial, but for different reasons.
This week, building on last week’s report on the topic, we focus on the opportunity to responsibly manage every degraded forest on earth, starting with America’s neglected nearly 800 million acres of forest (not including Alaska). The mistake that was made, perhaps in California more than in other states but everywhere nonetheless, was to engage in increasingly effective suppression of wildfires at the same time as we put a stop to sustainable logging.
The reasons for this made sense at the time. Logging was not always practiced sustainably, and in the interests of species and habitat preservation, a multi-decadal, massive slowdown in timber harvests was enforced by the federal government. Now we have a situation that is even more unsustainable: forests that are either massively overgrown with tree densities that ensure poor overall tree health, or forests that were so overgrown with stressed and dried out trees that massive wildfires have burned them down to the dirt.
There is only one solution: a revival of responsible logging that employs the latest techniques: uneven age management (once simply called “selective logging”), judicious use of monocultures and clear cuts where appropriate, along with prescribed burns, brush clearing, and grazing. This requires replacing single species management with a total ecosystem approach, which is a proven innovation. Forests that are logged and managed in this way are restored, with higher species counts and healthier trees.
The upside as well, for those millions who put stock in such metrics, is the perpetual and sustainable extraction of sequestered carbon in the form of lumber. The potential is gigantic. For example, why aren’t we replacing concrete – a stupendous carbon culprit – with mass timber?
Mass timber (also called “cross laminated timber”) is where strips of wood are pressed together into large beams and panels, with each layer of grain running perpendicular to the layer above and below it. Able to replace reinforced concrete as a building material, it is economically competitive and aesthetically superior. It is perhaps the most profound innovation in building materials since the invention of reinforced concrete over 150 years ago. Why isn’t California at the forefront of mainstreaming this magnificent new construction product?
In the United States in 2020, about 370 million cubic yards of concrete were produced. About 40 percent of that went for commercial real estate construction. Meanwhile, throughout the Western United States, rates of forest mortality have risen in direct proportion to the enforced reduction in timber harvests, and now actually exceed rates of growth. It’s time to try a new approach. We can harvest more lumber while saving our forests. If we grow the market for mass timber, not only will our lumber sequester carbon, but it will reduce demand to produce carbon spewing concrete.
America’s forests sequester an estimated 866 million metric tons per year. If our nation’s forests were restored and managed, a significant percentage of that carbon could be removed each year in the form of wood products that would decay over centuries. As for concrete, estimates vary, but according to the International Energy Agency, 0.6 tons of CO2 are emitted for every ton of manufactured concrete. Offsetting 74 million cubic yards of concrete (at 1 ton per cubic yard) with mass timber would take another 44 million tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere each year. For comparison, the United States emitted 4.8 billion tons of CO2 in 2022.
The appeal of reviving the logging industry and exploding the market for mass timber goes well beyond the potential for carbon sequestration or carbon offsets. Even individuals who view the climate “emergency” with hardened skepticism must acknowledge that logging and mass timber offer appeal for a completely unrelated set of variables that are unambiguously positive. Save our forests. Stop cataclysmic wildfires and nurture wildlife populations. Create jobs and tax revenue. Introduce an aesthetically superior and economically competitive product into the construction market.
It’s a win, with or without the carbon sequestration argument, and when it comes to carbon sequestration schemes, it is therefore the best in class. Next week, we will consider another carbon sequestration opportunity, somewhat more controversial, but with equally promising economic benefits.
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This is a win win win. The lumber companies will pay the government to log the forest thus saving millions and create jobs and tax revenue. By clearing the forests we will not have the large forest fires thus saving millions for fire fighting. The pollution from the smoke that is said to cause more pollution than we eliminate from all other sources would be reduced.
Our present state leadership does not appear to be interested in doing anything but setting all of California on fire so they can publicly and nonsensically blame it on “climate change,” or so they can abscond with the burned and ravaged land for their own underhanded and apparently money-making purposes. Thus they are probably not interested in the common-sense, often repeated win-win-win solutions that Edward Ring and others have so compellingly put forth for the state “leadership’s” — and our — success and relief.
But who knows? Maybe with a new and sensible CA governor we can begin to address this? And Edward Ring’s good proposals applied? We can always hope, can’t we, even if we have become extremely cynical from enduring our scoundrel CA “leadership” for what has become many years and even decades now.
I’m old enough to remember the ‘good old days’, when the Forest Service allowed the cutting of enough timber on federal land to somewhat approach a volume equal to tree mortality in the various National Forests. During those years, timber receipts provided the funds to support schools and roads in the rural counties that grew the timber that was logged. This all changed after the Northwest Forest Plan under the Clinton administration began, as a result of the Northern Spotted Owl hysteria. Then, when the timber receipts disappeared, Congress had to, and still does, fund rural counties with what they call ‘Payments in Lieu of Taxes’ funds. It’s printed money that does nothing but increase the national debt and leaves counties that used to be self-sustaining into counties beholding on federal government largesse.
In the ’70s, Sierra County schools were so flush with cash that Downieville High School would bus kids to Boreal Ridge to ski on Thursdays in the winter. The trips were credited to the PE requirement of the kids that chose to go.
I’m not counting on ‘good old days’ to ever return, but I sure wish they could.
Ah, the good old days before the Democrats took over to make everyone’s lives miserable. Cost of living was low, the roads were smooth, water was in abundance, gas was cheap, taxes were low, the winds could blow without the power being shut off or starting fires, criminals and drug addicts were off the street, you could buy a single family house with single family zoning, and the houses were affordable. California has turned into Commiefornia, and we have lost our way of life.
Nothing will be done to manage the forests by the Communist Democrats. They don’t manage anything. They want to tear down this state, not build it up. They want poverty, not affluence. They have been told about the need for forest management for years, and have done nothing.
PF and Ted, how true.
California did function as the Golden state.
But, there were changes,….when Prop 187 passed in 1994 by 60% of voters. It started a political activist movement to over turn the will of the people.
AB 1461 in 2015, sealed the fate of the state by Motor Voter. The result since then has been 60% plus Democrat super majorities in both the state Assembly and the state Senate and the Governorships.
Since that time, I have sensed a decline, would you all agree?
Old Man, I agree with you, whole heartedly, but unfortunately, the current state of politics require such emotional coded language to even bring ideas to the table. The problems lay solely at the feet of the Democrats.
Carbon sequestration….please! Why not just by an expensive machine like the ones military industrial contractors Raytheon or General Dynamics are offering. What a joke! I can’t believe modern humans are so full of hubris to think we can control the atmospheric conditions- short or long term.
P. S. We no longer have the money , ability or will to do anything grand -even if it could make a difference. The West is on a sustained decline and this kind of climate control jazz is either rent seeking or just plain dopey dreamy unicorn hunting.
Establish a rotating clear cut sanctuary and logger occupation each summer on every U.S. forest in the state. Beginning with protective sections of lands just outside a carefully selected NPS boundary with special needs.
forest.
We just returned from a trip to the Black Hills in South Dakota (Mt. Rushmore), and they have implemented “common sense” forest management with 8 feet separating trees The forest has been commercially thinned out and what is unusable for commercial reason was offer to locals for personal use. What is left from those processes has been piled up in small piles and will be burnt once there is adequate snow on the ground to prevent a forest fire. California knows the science of managing a forest we just have to have leaders that want what’s best for all aspects of society.
forgot to mention that they have been struggling with the bark beetle as well.
Hal
I often observed that the PBB seem to infest he trees that lined along edges of meadows then radiate outward. Also in the steep drainages at hairpin turns on logging roads.
BTW, did you have eggs and bacon by the fire at Wall’s Drugs?
We heard about Walls Drugs before we went out there and saw the broadside of a barn painted with an advertisement for Walls Drugs but did not see one. I did have some good eggs and bacon at Bear Paw diner in Saint George Utah.
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