As the centerpiece of California’s climate strategy, the law known as AB 32 gets all the attention. But a little-known component of the state’s plan to mitigate climate change, Executive Order S-3-05, is even more ambitious. A new report from the independent California Council on Science and Technology (CCST) takes aim at its aggressive greenhouse-gas-reduction goal for 2050, and shows just how difficult it will be to reach it.

Signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in June 2005, EO S-3-05 calls for the state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 (a target also written into AB 32 and passed the following year), and to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 — effectively a 90% per-capita decrease when population growth is factored in. The 2020 goal sounds easy enough — especially if a third of our electricity generation is renewable by then — but existing efforts, including cap-and-trade, still won’t be enough. In other words, the state has got to come up with even more reductions in the next eight years.

What happens when we project all the way out to 2050? A business-as-usual scenario would put our emissions at double the 1990 level. But the new report — coauthored by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Jeffery Greenblatt — found that with existing technologies (that means currently commercially available or in demonstration) and for “reasonable” rates and costs, we could reduce our emissions to 60% below 1990 levels. This equates to about 170 million metric tons in total emissions: a considerable achievement, but still double the 85 million-metric-ton limit established by the 80% goal.

Reducing emissions to 60% below 1990 levels hinges on continued advances in energy efficiency and widespread electrification of all energy sectors, including light-duty vehicles, trucks, buses, trains, buildings, and industrial-process heating, the researchers found. To meet our future electricity needs and still keep emissions down, a variety of energy mixes could work.

A technology-neutral “median case,” for example, posits that we could get there with roughly:

• One-third natural gas
• One-third nuclear
• One-third renewables

Greenblatt says some zero-emissions strategies would also be needed to to keep the state’s power grid in “balance,” like batteries or voluntary reductions in electricity use, known in the industry as “demand response” programs.

That, plus aggressive deployment of biofuels to meet about half of our projected demand for fuel, is the researchers’ best guess for how California could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 170 million metric tons by 2050. And Greenblatt is fairly confident it’ll work: “It’s feasible if the state aggressively pursues the policies to make that happen,” he said.

Once you start looking at dropping that last 85 million to hit the 80% mark, however, you’re talking about technologies that don’t yet exist — or that exist only in the most theoretical sense. To reach its goal, Greenblatt said the state must, in essence, address two major challenges: 1) switching to entirely emissions-free load-balancing technologies, eliminating the use of backup natural-gas “peaker” plants; and 2) reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from fuels through advanced technologies like hydrogen fuel, carbon sequestration in biofuel development, or the use of artificial photosynthesis to produce hydrocarbons from sunlight, a cutting-edge technique being tested now at CalTech.

A self-labeled optimist, Greenblatt says this study — and the four other reports in the CCST’s “California’s Energy Future” project, plus two more to come — is a crucial first step in supporting the development of policies and technologies that California will rely on through 2050 and beyond. The CCST already has the ear of the governor’s office, the Air Resources Board, the California Public Utilities Commission, and the California Energy Commission.

“Because of the long lead times, we felt it was really important to highlight these longer-term challenges so that the state can start planning now,” Greenblatt said. “If we can show that something is possible, it’s largely up to will to make it happen.”

By Nicholas Christen and Craig Miller

Craig Miller / KQED

Even tomatoes can only take so much heat. A belt from Bakersfield to the northern Sacramento Valley produces a third of the nation's canning tomatoes.

Autumn is here, so says the calendar. Living on the coast, it might be easy to think that California escaped the heat wave suffered by much of the nation this summer. While that may be true for most of the large coastal population centers, it was a different story for much of the state’s interior farm belt.

Throughout June and July, even Central Valley spots escaped much of the heat felt by the Great Plains, though Cal Expo officials blamed the heat, in part, for tamping down attendance at the state fair. Then things heated up quickly — especially in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys — through August and into September.  Valley towns including Redding, Red Bluff, Sacramento, Merced, Madera, Fresno, and Bakersfield, have been on the order of three-to-five degrees above normal for the duration of August and September.

Fresno saw 27 days above normal during August and most of those days were at least three degrees above normal, a string one meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Fresno called, “pretty amazing.”

Even Central Valley farmers, who are used to triple-digit days, were taken aback.

“Yeah, this summer has been one of the hottest that I remember,” said Don Cameron, who runs 7,000 acres of crops for the Terranova Ranch, southeast of Fresno. He’s been farming the Valley for 30 years.

“Our tomatoes have taken a little bit of a beating from the 110 degree weather we’ve had, but with the drip irrigation we’re able to keep them a little fresher, a little cooler when it does get hot like that.”

On the day we visited Cameron, the fever seemed to have broken. “Yeah, we’re in the low 90s today,” he snorted. “It’s like — like a spring day.”

“We had just a couple of weeks on end where we were 109, 110, 111 degrees. Just brutal. The nights don’t cool down, it’s hard on the plants, it’s hard on the people.

There has been a plus side to all this.

“I can remember we used to get a lot of real severe frosts during the spring growing season,” recalled Cameron. “I can’t remember the last time we had one that was actually a killing frost during April.” That’s created an opportunity of sorts for growers. “We’ve been able to plant our tomatoes earlier in the year for earlier harvest, which extends the, the season for the cannery.”

The roast continued well into September, bringing with it an unusual late-season streak of 90-plus-degree days in downtown Sacramento. This year could eclipse the September record of 20 days, set back in 1899.

August was more than four degrees above average in Sacramento.

See more on how climate change is challenging California farmers on the documentary, Heat and Harvest. It premieres Friday evening on KQED TV.

New pests, a shrinking water supply and rising temperatures will alter agriculture in California.

Craig Miller

Tightening water supplies, encroaching pests and dwindling winter "chill hours," vital to many crops, are just some of the climate challenges facing California farmers.

Heat and Harvest, a new series from KQED Science and the Center for Investigative Reporting looks at the multiple climate challenges confronting California farmers. It’s no trivial matter. California’s Central Valley is widely known as “the nation’s salad bowl,” and there’s more than bragging rights at stake. Ag contributes more than $30 billion a year to the state’s economy.

Previously, Climate Watch has focused on efforts in the ag sector to conserve water or lower the carbon footprint. Some farmers are trying new technologies, others are experimenting with renewable energy. But meeting climate challenges on multiple fronts will, for some farmers and ranchers, be a matter of survival.

Here are links to some previous reporting from Climate Watch, from ag’s potential role in California’s emerging cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions, to innovation on the renewable energy front and new conflicts over land use.

Planting the Seeds for Greener Farms
Supporters of sustainable agriculture are looking forward to some “sustenance” of their own, after an eleventh-hour win in Sacramento. The new bills lays out an approach for ensuring that all proceeds from the sale of cap-and-trade permits be used to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Among the eligible activities listed in the bill are farming and ranching practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon.

Satellites Help Save Water on California Farms
Engineers at NASA and CSU Monterey Bay are developing an online tool that can estimate how much water a farm’s field might need. Satellites orbiting the earth take high-resolution pictures which are combined with on-the-ground data from farms.

Making Hay While the Sun Shines: A Flap over Solar Panels in Farm Country
Sun and open land make the San Joaquin Valley ideal for growing crops. But they’re also attracting an increasing number of large-scale solar power developers to the region. And that’s generating debate over whether farming the sun is really farming.

Making Renewable Energy from Farm Waste
California is just a few votes away from changing the rules to allow farmers to connect machines that create bioenergy to the electrical grid, a privilege that has thus far been reserved for farm-generated wind and solar energy.

New Map for Gardeners Won’t Help California’s Green Thumbs
It’s been more than two decades since the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its Plant Hardiness Zones Map, used by gardeners across the country to determine what will grow in their yards. The new GIS-enabled map unveiled this week is a boost to people who live in places that get a lot of cold weather and may be seeing slightly warmer average winters now. Despite the new level of detail in the map, gardeners in California and the Bay Area in particular, won’t learn much from it.

Craig Miller

Oakland aims to shrink its carbon footprint by more than a third. But what about preparing for impacts already on the way?

The City of Oakland is forging a comprehensive Energy and Climate Action Plan aimed at mitigating climate change. Even by California standards; it’s ambitious, calling for a 36% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2020 (statewide emissions decreased 5.3% between 2005 and 2009, the most recent year for which numbers are available). It also lays out the policies and programs needed to make it happen. What the plan doesn’t answer is how the city will cope with the climate change that has already been set in motion.

Enter a study prepared by Oakland’s Pacific Institute for the California Energy Commission, published in July but not widely circulated until this month. It fills in the holes in the city’s approach by advancing “climate adaptation planning,” in which local governments prepare for dealing with climate change on a short-and-long-term basis and across all segments of the population.

“Our concern was that we’re already down the road a bit on climate change, and we’re going to see significant impacts no matter what you do with greenhouse gases,” said Brian Beveridge, co-director of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, which helped prepare the report. “So we were looking at how will people react to climate change over the next fifty years, because we’re definitely going to see it happen to us.”

Not that the city itself is blind to the issue. A chapter of its plan entitled, “Climate Adaption and Increasing Resilience” dedicates five pages out of 81 to the idea that a certain amount of climate change is inevitable and beginning to occur now — and that in addition to avoiding future impacts by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we’ve got to learn to live with it.

The chapter lays out a nice little suite of looming climate challenges for the city:

“…significantly decreased snowpack in the Sierra Mountains (the source of most of Oakland’s potable water supply); rising Bay and Delta waters; increased fire danger; greater frequency and intensity of heat events; added stress on infrastructure; pricing and quality of life impacts; and ecological impacts.”

The plan offers some potential solutions but leaves the details for another day.

The Pacific Institute teamed up with the Oakland Climate Action Coalition, a 50-member consortium housed at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, to nudge the city along. Its report identifies more than 50 specific strategies for building resilience and adaptability into local communities, organized by climate disaster. A sampling of the (admittedly intimidating) recommendations:

Extreme heat

• Develop early-warning systems for extreme heat events
• Open air-conditioned buildings to the community during extreme heat events
• Install cool pavement
• Install green roofs

Flooding

• Limit development in floodplain
• Preserve or restore wetlands
• Raise existing structures above flood level
• Build levees and seawalls

Wildfires

• Replace flammable vegetation with less-flammable options
• Limit development in fire-prone areas
• Ensure adequate shelters are in place

Rising utility and food costs

• Promote energy and water efficiency
• Develop and support local food systems
• Programs to reduce financial hardship on residents
• Create green economy and workforce

Poor air quality

• Insulate/seal homes
• Create “safe rooms” with HEPA filters
• Develop warning system for air-quality

“We don’t have a very prepared society for these events,” Beveridge said of Oakland. “There are still places in the hills that are very hard to get to with a firetruck. In my neighborhood in the flatlands, our storm system and sanitary sewer system is 100 years old.

“We have not spent the time on infrastructure maintenance to prepare us for what could be coming in the next couple decades.”

An aspect of its plan entitled “Climate Adaption and Increasing Resilience” dedicates five pages out of 81 to the idea that a certain amount of climate change is inevitable and beginning to occur now — and that in addition to avoiding future impacts by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we’ve got to learn to live with it.

This post has been revised. An earlier version misstated the number of pages that the Oakland plan devotes to adaptation.

NC State University

The U.S. has lagged behind other developed countries in capturing offshore wind for electricity..

The U.S. has lagged behind European countries in capturing offshore wind for electricity, but a spate of recent studies suggest that a bigger push might be in order.

The latest, from Stanford civil & environmental engineer Mark Jacobson concludes that off the East Coast alone is enough moving air to meet a third of the entire nation’s energy needs.

Running out the string quite a bit further, studies from Stanford and Lawrence Livermore National Lab point to a breezy bounty offshore and at higher altitudes that could theoretically power the planet, perhaps as soon as 2030.

Of course, that would take four million powerful turbines.

“If we put half over the ocean and half over land, we’d need about 0.6% of the world’s land for turbines,” Jacobson told listeners to KQED’s Forum program this week. “But all of that land, almost, is open space between the turbines, that can be used for multiple purposes, including rangeland, cropland, pasture land or just plain open space. The rest is over the water.”

Offshore turbines have several advantages over the wind farms that we’re used to seeing from the freeway. They can be mostly out of sight and earshot, for one thing, and are also likely to be a steadier source of power than most land-based “wind energy resource” areas. Looking at one area off Cape Mendocino, a Jacobson study from 2010 noted that offshore winds were “consistently fast throughout the day and night during all four seasons.”

“California has a tremendous offshore wind resource,” said Habib Dagher, who joined Jacobson and other experts on the program. Dagher, who runs the DeepCWind Consortium at the University of Maine, calculates that within 50 nautical miles of the California coast is about 587 gigawatts of untapped energy, the equivalent of more than 500 commercial nuclear power plants. The tricky part will be tapping it. The ocean depths off of California would likely require a whole new generation of turbines that ride the waves like big buoys.

In March, Dagher’s group will place an experimental floating turbine off the Maine coast. The scale-model test will offer insights into how giant six-megawatt turbines would perform offshore. He says research & development funding doesn’t support a bigger push right now, that the DOE wind research budget hovers between $70-80 million per year, “very small” compared to what much smaller countries are spending. Dagher says the U.K., for example, is aiming to get a quarter of its electricity from offshore wind farms by 2020.

North American Offshore Wind Project

Different approaches to offshore wind turbines could include "floating" turbines, which might be combined with tidal or wave energy.

“The offshore component opens up significant areas, added Dan Kammen, who heads the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab at UC Berkeley. “The marine environment is challenging and to make [those] systems work, we’re gonna need to really invest in it. The U.S. has been a bit slow in this regard.”

Dagher says that while conventional onshore wind farms are already cost-competitive with some fossil fuels, offshore development is about twice as pricey.

“These technologies, on a resource basis, are very much ready to compete,”said Kammen. “We just need to give them that shot.”

National Center for Atmospheric Research

A new study from the National Academy of Sciences advocates for more detailed and interconnected climate models.

In the effort to better understand the dynamics of the Earth’s changing climate, a recent report from the National Academy of Sciences calls for scientists to collaborate on a “new generation” of highly detailed and integrated climate change models.

According to the NAS release:

With changes in climate and weather . . . past weather data are no longer adequate predictors of future extremes. Advanced modeling capabilities could potentially provide useful predictions and projections of extreme environments.

Those “useful predictions and projections,” according to the report, could come in various forms — supplying farmers with better information about what to plant, year-to-year, say, or giving local officials greater insights into future flood risk, or providing climatologists with better information about specific parts of the country most susceptible to extreme heat.

Currently, a wide array of public and private entities – universities, cities and state governments – have embarked on their own climate models. In many cases, according to the NAS committee, this has resulted in a duplication of effort.

To encourage greater sharing and collaboration, the study proposes “a framework in which software, data standards and tools, and even model components are shared by all major modeling groups across the country.” The committee, made up of climate scientists from across the country, has also called for adopting “a common software infrastructure.”

In some ways, the NAS report mirrors some recent efforts here in California, where agencies and researchers have attempted to stitch large, disparate swaths of information into single, comprehensive reports – “news you can use,” as it were. A study released in July by the California Energy Commission, entitled “California’s Changing Climate,” offers up a portfolio of studies on a wide range of topics, from the effects of higher average temperatures on crop yields to the changing distribution and frequency of fires in a warmer climate.

According to Chris Bretherton, an atmospheric science professor at the University of Washington and chair of the NAS committee, this infrastructure can be thought of as a new open-source operating system, designed to tie together various regional models together into a larger — even global — framework.

“It’s a software engineering issue,” Bretherton told me. “The idea is to share the same key models and to have them talk to one another.” The more fine-grained and interconnected the climate models become, says Bretherton, the more powerful they will be in terms of guiding policy and decision-making.

But do such systems yet exist? Or are they, like the future climate events they aim to predict, merely hypothetical? Bretherton says there are some successful blueprints, pointing to an effort called the Community Earth System Model, an integrated climate model developed in the 1980s by the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

One California study released earlier in the year, dubbed C-Change.LA, seems to fit the mold of these “next-generation” regional models — the kind that one day could be folded into larger, more comprehensive ones. Touted by its developers as “the most sophisticated regional study ever developed,” C-Change-LA offers a neighborhood-scale assessment of future climate conditions between the 2041 and 2060 for the Los Angeles Metro Area.

Craig Miller

Reducing tillage is one technique farmers are trying out to cut carbon emissions.

Supporters of sustainable agriculture are looking forward to some “sustenance” of their own, after an eleventh-hour win in Sacramento. Just as the state’s last legislative session was drawing to a close, Assembly Bill 1532 passed by a vote of 51-28, sending to the governor’s desk a system for allocating cap-and-trade auction revenues, which are expected to reach into the billions of dollars by the end of next year.

AB 1532, authored by Assembly Speaker John Pérez, lays out an approach for ensuring that all proceeds from the sale of permits be used to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Among the eligible activities identified in the bill are farming and ranching practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon, such as reducing soil tillage, improving energy and water efficiency, and reducing synthetic fertilizer use through compost, cover crops, and crop rotation.

“A lot of these practices also have a number of co-benefits such as reducing air and water quality, reducing erosion, and improving soil quality,” said Renata Brillinger, executive director of the California Climate & Agriculture Network (CalCAN), which lobbied to have sustainable agriculture included in the bill.

In addition to promoting specific farm practices, AB 32 auction revenues could also go toward researching and developing new approaches, providing technical assistance to farmers, offering financial incentives to help them transition to climate-friendly methods, and helping to shield California’s farmland from urban development. A study released in July by the California Energy Commission and the California Natural Resources Agency and performed by researchers at UC Davis found that urban land accounts for 70 times more greenhouse gas emissions per square acre than cropland.

CalCAN has been angling to secure sustainable farming’s piece of the AB 32 pie since 2010, when Senator Lois Wolk (D-Davis) introduced a bill that offered guidelines for spending cap-and-trade revenues on agriculture. The bill got held over in committee, and CalCAN and Wolk tried again in 2011 — with the same result.

The legislature preferred to take a more comprehensive approach toward appropriating cap-and-trade revenues, said Brillinger, and that’s just what happened with AB 1532. Now Brillinger and her colleagues — along with their partners at Community Alliance with Family Farmers, Ecological Farming Association, and California Certified Organic Farmers — hope that Governor Jerry Brown will take the next step and sign it into law.

If he does, the law will go back to the legislature next year for further tinkering, then be passed along to the state Air Resources Board for implementation. Only then will we get any sense of just how much money could go to sustainable agriculture, or even begin to calculate the sort of greenhouse gas emissions that could be achieved statewide. “Everyone wants to have those hard numbers, but it’s proving elusive,” Brillinger said.” For now, the basics will have to do.

“It’s a sector that is very susceptible to climate change impacts, and has some potential that some of the other sectors don’t. It’s one of the only sectors, forestry being the other, where there’s some carbon sequestration possible. We’ll continue to plug away at that message.”

Look for in-depth reporting on how climate change is affecting California’s farm economy in the upcoming multimedia series, Heat and Harvest, a joint project of KQED and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

State agencies are bracing for the public health threat from extreme heat. Heatwaves can have devastating effects on public health; in a 2006 heatwave in California, hundreds of people died [PDF]. And scientists predict in the future, heat waves will be longer, hotter and more frequent.

In the future, heat waves will be longer, hotter and more frequent.

To try to keep the health costs to a minimum, the California Climate Action Team, led by the California Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Public Health, is developing a plan to prepare for extreme heat[PDF].

The state’s plan addresses building codes and urban planning, state and local emergency response plans, health care system preparedness and worker safety. The recommendations include making sure the most vulnerable people can be protected from high temperatures, protecting key parts of the power grid from air-conditioner overload and planting more trees in cities.

Temperatures this summer broke records across the country. California did get a bit of a heat wave, but, for the most part, it’s been shielded from the extreme heat that hit other states. California’s coastal cities have generally had a cooler-than-normal summer, but a new study says that trend may not hold.

The Scripps study finds that heat waves will come with more humidity, higher night time temperatures and will be stronger in coastal areas. Overnight lows are important, because cooler night time temperatures give people a chance to cool off. Hot nights aggravate the health effects of heat waves. And location makes a difference: as the state’s heat adaptation study points out, buildings in cooler areas often don’t have air conditioners. Plus, people who live in those cooler places just aren’t used to those high temperatures, and may be more susceptible to heat-related illnesses.

The state’s document is a draft: the California EPA is accepting public comments on it until November 1, via email, at climatechange@calepa.ca.gov.

Many state college campuses have "cogeneration" facilities subject to fees under cap & trade.

California universities appear to be in line for some relief from the state’s imminent carbon pollution fees.

Implementation of California’s controversial cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases is only four months away, meaning it’s crunch time for the state’s Air Resources Board. On Thursday, the board will stage a dry run offering likely participants an opportunity to practice bidding on California carbon allowances — and allowing the ARB a chance to test its platform.

Not like it doesn’t already have its hands full. For months, cap-and-trade-eligible emitters including private businesses, military bases, universities, and waste-to-energy power-plant operators have been crying for exemptions under AB 32, arguing that they would suffer undue financial hardships.

The message is getting through in some cases, given the Board’s plan to soften the blow on state universities running combined heat-and-power (also called CHP or cogeneration) facilities, which simultaneously generate electricity and heat.

In an August 24 letter to state assemblyman Nathan Fletcher that was obtained by KQED, Air Board chair Mary Nichols explains that the board doesn’t want to disadvantage the nine California universities covered by the cap-and-trade program (meaning they emit more than 25,000 metric tons per year of greenhouse gases) simply because of emissions from a combined heat-and-power plant.

“California has a long history of supporting CHP,” Nichols writes. “Public and private entities that have taken steps to build or purchase combined heat-and-power facilities should be rewarded for their actions, not penalized.”

Nichols’ plan, as outlined in the letter, is to exempt all steam and waste heat emissions, which qualify as greenhouse gases, from cogeneration facilities at universities until 2015.

Before last week, it wasn’t clear how the board would respond. As the OC Register reported on August 20, the nine cap-and-trade-eligible universities — CalTech, Cal State San Diego, Cal State San Jose, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC San Diego, UCLA, UCSF, and private Loma Linda University — chafed at the idea that they’d be hit with a big bill by the cap-and-trade program. The UC system alone might’ve been on the hook for up to $25 million. For two years, at least, that weight would appear to have been lifted.

“The universities are somebody we want to make sure they can handle what we’re sending them,” ARB spokesman David Clegern said in an interview.

Flighty businesses, too. On August 13, The Sacramento Bee reported that the Air Board was considering easing the burden imposed by cap-and-trade on companies deemed to be at risk of fleeing the state: what’s known as the “leakage” effect.

“Obviously we don’t want industry to leave the state, but we want them to meet the emissions requirements,” Clegern told the Bee. One potential solution he offered is for the Air Board to hand a finite number of free carbon credits to high-flight risks, potentially saving some companies millions of dollars a year — and presumably preventing a move to Nevada. But to critics who already consider the system ripe for manipulation, that could sound a bit too easy to game.

California Energy Commission

A wood-burning power plant in Northern California. In 2007, "biomass" energy accounted for roughly 2.1 percent of California energy production. A new state bioenergy plan seeks to substantially increase that percentage.

Wood scraps, animal manure, household garbage and other wastes may soon fuel a sweeping “clean energy” initiative in California, if the collective vision of several state agencies comes to pass.

This week, the state announced its 2012 Bioenergy Action Plan [PDF], which promotes an array of organic materials as a large and untapped fuel source for an energy-hungry state.

“Swift action on bioenergy will create jobs, increase local clean energy supplies, and help businesses grow in California,” said resources agency secretary John Laird in a Department of Natural Resources release. Currently, the bioenergy sector employs roughly 5,000 people and contributes $575 million to the state economy; the agency estimates the new plan could create an additional 4,000 jobs statewide.

The 2012 plan, a collaboration among eight agencies including the Natural Resources Agency, the California Public Utilities Commission and the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), is the latest in a string of initiatives meant to jumpstart the California bioenergy industry. In 2006, the state released its first bioenergy plan, after then-governor Schwarzenegger signed an executive order requiring the state to establish:

“…targets for the use and production of biofuels and biopower and [direct] state agencies to work together to advance biomass programs in California while providing environmental protection and mitigation.”

A bioenergy source touted in the 2012 plan are so-called anaerobic digestion systems, which harness anaerobic bacteria to break down organic wastes. The California Energy Commission points to a farm in Tulare, which recaptures methane, or natural gas, released as anaerobic bacteria break down vast piles of hog manure. Enough gas is reportedly generated to drive two gas power plants that produce enough electricity for the entire farm.

Cal Fire chief Ken Pimlott sees bioenergy not only as way to diversify California’s energy portfolio but also a means to reduce the likelihood of large forest fires, such as those currently burning in the state’s northern half. “Generating energy from forest waste helps to reduce dangerous fuel loads in our forests while providing jobs and local energy supplies in forest communities,” said Pimlott in the release.

Heaps of wood along with agricultural scraps and municipal garbage can be fed into waste-to-energy or “biomass” plants. One facility highlighted in the plan is the Wheelabrator Shasta Power Plant, near Anderson, which consumes around 750 million tons of “forest residue” and wastes from local mills to generate 49 megawatts of energy. According to the California Energy Commission, at the biomass industry’s peak in the state, there were 66 biomass plants producing 800 megawatts of energy a year — roughly the generating capacity of one large gas-fired plant.

Critics say wood-burning plants may have an adverse effect on the atmosphere in the short term, since burning wood releases carbon more rapidly than under natural conditions of decay. Others assert the plants are really a veiled push for increased logging and, in the long-run, may end up competing for harvested wood used for construction or paper manufacturing.

But biomass boosters, such as  Plumas County supervisor Robert Meacher, say proof of the need to tap the state’s vast stores of “woody renewables” is lingering in the air over Northern California.

“You can cut the smoke with a knife in the northern Sierra right now,” Meacher told me as he drove from the front lines of one of the large fires burning in his county. “I would submit that by the time these fires burning in northern California are out, it will negate all that we are trying to do under AB 32 for the calendar year.”