THE NET-ZERO BLOG
Climate policy analysis and updates from Sacramento
Reflections on the inaugural California Biomass Workshop
Last week Conservation Strategy Group and the UC Davis Policy Institute for Energy, Environment and Economy co-hosted the inaugural California Biomass Workshop to address the key challenges and opportunities in delivering a sustainable bioeconomy to California. Over 200 attendees met in Sacramento for a deep dive on an issue that is critical to reaching our Scoping Plan goals while protecting California's natural and working lands. In this blog post we summarize the main takeaways from the day.
Inaugural California Biomass Workshop a key opportunity for progress
Workshop Announcement: Conservation Strategy Group and UC Davis Policy Institute for Energy, Environment and the Economy are co-hosting the California Biomass Workshop on January 31st, 2024 at the Citizen Hotel in Sacramento. The purpose of the workshop is to bring together a diversity of stakeholders from around the state to coordinate and advance solutions to address a major resource management challenge - the wood waste crisis.
Recommendations to solve California's biomass challenge
With its world-leading policies on electrification and clean power, California has made important progress towards achieving its climate goals. However, not all emissions are from the energy and industrial sectors. Land-based emissions, including from burning or decaying biomass, must also be addressed to achieve a carbon neutrality goal. In this blog post, we identify potential priority approaches for biomass utilization, including for durable wood products, advanced biofuels and biomass electricity, that can help California meet its climate goals.
State and federal agencies release first-of-its-kind biomass utilization strategy
Biomass management has been a neglected climate problem in California. That is, until recently – when the 2022 Scoping Plan identified both the significant scale of the biomass challenge and importance of mobilizing organic waste to provide clean fuels and carbon dioxide removal in a net-zero economy. In this blog post we briefly recap California’s biomass challenge before summarizing the top-five recommendations from the state’s newest draft wood utilization strategy from the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force.
Op-ed: How forest thinning waste could fund California wildfire prevention
Op-ed announcement: CSG’s Director of Climate and Energy Policy, Sam Uden in partnership with the Sierra Business Council, had an op-ed published in CalMatters that describes how a forest products strategy could help reduce megafires in California.
Missed opportunity: Draft Scoping Plan fails to address biomass pile burning and decay
California recently released a draft version of its main climate plan, finding that it is preferable to open burn or leave to decay in the forest a significant portion of biomass residues resulting from wildfire prevention treatments. This is a missed opportunity: as a robust strategy to collect and convert forest waste into carbon-negative wood and energy products is a promising path to enable the state’s goal of treating one million acres per year and reduce the risk of high-severity wildfire. In this technical blog post, we analyze the role of forest biomass in the Draft 2022 Scoping Plan.