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Bob Epstein, Project 2030 (00:13:10):
I hope you all had a good lunch and are wide awake for what we’re about to cover. So the title of this is Biomass Happens. Can We Safely and Cost Effectively Sequester the Carbon? So we’re going to look at multiple things that we’re discussed earlier in the day and combine them together. I’ll introduce myself and then as panelists speak they can introduce themselves. I’m Bob Epstein. I am an entrepreneur in California. Did four startup companies. They all worked out rather well. So for the last 25 years I’ve worked as a volunteer on climate policy doing a lot of the major legislation from the original Pavley bill in 2002 up to the most recent activities. And our panel today, you can see their names. We have Cohen Murphy from uc, Davis and ITS and Dan Reese from the Center on Race Poverty and Environment, Tom Hobie from Yosemite Clean Energy and Elizabeth Bettencourt from Working Lands from the state governments.
(00:14:13):
So trying to bring together, we will bring together a number of perspectives, but we’re going to set up of a couple of ground rules of what we’re going to talk about because it’s a big topic. So first of all, if we look at the California scoping plan in 2022 at the legislature’s direction, it added in a target of getting to net neutral by 2045 with an intermediate target on 2030 and 2021. But the key thing is if we look at that green area down there, that’s all carbon dioxide removal. So the goal is to eliminate emissions as fast as possible, but by the time we’ve done eliminating all the ones that we can, there are still other emissions that are either hard to capture or have other associations with it. So the goal is to be able to pull stuff out of the atmosphere. And like was said earlier today, this is not capturing carbon to prevent it from being emitted. This is taking carbon that was already emitted, it’s historic emissions, pulling it out of the atmosphere to get to neutral. So that’s the state’s official policy and goals. And the initial target in 2030 is to get about 7 million tons. The seven disappeared from the chart of which about 1 million is expected to come from working lands. The rest are going to come from somewhere. We know it’s coming from the atmosphere. We don’t know who’s grabbing it or what’s happening to it.
(00:15:53):
For this panel, we’re trying to narrow it down. We will narrow it down to what we’re calling waste biomass. And that’s not necessarily the easiest thing in the world to define. So we may have some disagreement on what is waste biomass, but a couple of examples. One is forest treatments needed to restore the health of the forest and the second is agriculture waste. After you’ve processed the food, what’s left over that biomass is CO2 that was in the atmosphere before that bioactivity happened and we now want to permanently take it out of the atmosphere. The potential benefits then that we look at are sequestering CO2 without material impacts on other things that we care about. Community benefits, which we talked about this morning, these been done with the community as opposed to in competition with the community. I think the other key thing is they have to be economically viable at scale.
(00:16:57):
And that’s one of the things we’ll talk about are the various co-benefits. And then we want to avoid the status quo. If you look at the history of biomass in California, it is riddled with combustion. That wasn’t done very well. And so we want to do better. We want to take what we’ve learned from the past and apply it. Now one way to look at that on a single chart is to look at the various ways that biomass can be dealt with. So we’re going to assume this green area right here is biomass that has been protected and is really residue or waste. It wasn’t grown for the purpose of making money and carbon removal. It is leftover and that is a big question that we want to talk about. Then there’s several different ways of dealing with it. One way, and these are not in priority order, they’re just in the order.
(00:17:50):
The slide ended up one way is to compost it. As Dan will talk about. That’s one of the least cost ways of dealing with it. And when you compost it, it goes into the soil that’s missing from this chart. Imagine there’s soil right there. It goes into the soil, some amount of it becomes permanent and is stored. So that’s one pass. Another process is to actually take the biomass itself and in an oxygen free environment, warm it up. And if you do it at medium temperatures, we’re going to call that pyrolysis. And that gives you several things. It gives you carbon as a solid, it can give you carbon as a liquid, it can give you a variety of different things. And that’s how you get biochar or biooil. There’s some gassing that happens from that. You can capture the gases. The other way of doing it is to fully gasify it.
(00:18:52):
And there’s several different ways to do that. We’re not going to go into every category, but when you fully gasify it, your goal is to get all of the gas, all of the elements in the gas and minimize the amount of solid. And you can make a biofuel from that. You can make sustainable aviation fuel from it. You can make electricity, energy products, et cetera. But because you had that CO2 as a gas, you can capture it very inexpensively. It came out as a gas, either carbon monoxide and converted or carbon dioxide and then you sequester it underground. So those are the various paths that we’re going to talk about and possibly disagree about, but they all have different questions in terms of what is the cost to do it, how much CO2 can you get, what are the benefits? So just to talk for a second about gasification pyrolysis, if we look at combustion, combustion is what you do when you strike a match, right?
(00:19:53):
It’s uncontrolled. You’re the oxygen’s combined in there. You’re producing your inputs. It has to be very dry biomass to combust. You take air and oxygen, some form of spark and your output is heat. A collection of criteria pollutants, bad for humans, bad for the environment ash and smoke and some CO2. On the gasification side, it’s much more controlled. So the main goal there is to capture the synthetic gases like hydrogen, CO2. The CO2 can be in a solid form like from pyrolysis that can then be used as a cobe soil amendments. But you will get, will potentially get some criteria pollutants. We will go into a fair amount of detail as to what you might get and how you manage all of this. So what we’ll discuss on this panel, first of all, what could go right if it’s done well, if there’s a way to do it well, we’ll just start with the word if because we’re not taking anything for granted, then the scale of waste biomass is manageable and it’s not going to decompose.
(00:21:11):
So you get the potential sequestration. There’s a variety of co-benefits we’ll talk about, but equally important, what can go wrong? First of all in the policies? What exists in the current policies that enable this conversion economically? What’s missing? And then what can go wrong? Well, one question, is it really residual? Is it really residue and waste? Or was this a clever technique to create something that really wasn’t waste and turn it into a carbon credit? How do we protect communities for air quality, water, et cetera, which we heard about this morning. And then if it’s a bad idea, we know why it hasn’t happened yet. It’s a bad idea. If it’s a good idea, why haven’t projects happened already? What’s missing? And a key element that was talked about this morning is how do we do this in a way of communicating with each other? How do we create trust between communities and projects? So it’s something that everybody wants to see. That’s the ground rules we’ll set up. I am not predicting where we’ll end up, but I am guaranteeing you, you’ll hear a diversity of opinions. And for the first one, I’d like to start out with Elizabeth, who will give you the perspective from the state. Why did I just, oh, okay. So thank you. I’ll turn it over to Elizabeth. Thanks Bob.
Elizabeth Betancourt, California Department of Con (00:22:40):
Thank you. I’m Elizabeth Beton Court. I’m natural and working lands policy advisor at the Department of Conservation. It’s really great to be here and talk about one of my favorite topics. So one of Bob’s first questions for us is what brings you to this topic? And I will say I grew up in a very large family and camping was our thing. That’s what we did to go on vacation.
(00:23:37):
It’s cheap, super accessible to anyone in California and great for kids to get dirty. And so I grew up really valuing the forest, forest health, understanding our role in it, the history of California and including genocide and the evolution of how we think about forest and how we think about our role in this space. And came to realize and recognize the role of humans as a keystone species. We’re really essential parts of this ecology here in this state. And so that it really is, it’s a heart thing for me coming to forest management. And then very conveniently, I also now own co-own a farm with my husband, very small farm. There’s a lot of similarities in biomass utilization between farms and forests. So that’s what we’re talking about today. I do also, as I mentioned, live rurally. And so biomass utilization really is an exceptional opportunity for rural communities to create value that stays in rural communities.
(00:24:40):
Biomass is super hard to transport. It’s heavy, it’s full of water. And so really you can’t transport it too far before you get an uneconomic project. And so rural communities, this represents a great opportunity for those communities. I also work really closely with the wildfire and forest resilience task force. I’m the co-chair of the wood utilization work group in the state alongside the forest service. And so this really biomass utilization has been a lot of what I’ve been thinking about the last few years. And really what it is at its heart is a circular bio economy. This framework, this conceptual framework of which this is probably too detailed of a graphic, but I really like it. It includes so many things. It represents the internalization of the externalities that have been put on the earth and on us since industrialization.
(00:25:38):
I mean at its heart, that’s why we’re paying now. We are paying for those externalities that have been put out there into the ether. And so thinking through how can we create a more holistic way of thinking about economic development, environmental restoration, the integration of people and communities with the environment that is the circular bio economy at its heart. It values biodiversity. We can’t do this brand new economy without biodiversity, healthy forests, healthy river systems. We have to protect those to ensure that we have a healthy economy. So quantifying biomass in California, I was asked to provide some information on this. There are lots of sources. The state of California actually does. We do use the Lawrence Livermore estimates, but this is a very back of the envelope, basic quantification of what’s out there. Orchard waste in 2024 just alone in the San Joaquin Valley.
(00:26:41):
A million metric tons, I’m sorry, a million bone. Dry tons is the quantification here for forest health. We expect to, our goal is to treat 1 million acres annually starting this year. We expect that one third of the treatment we do will be hand treatment, which is the only treatment method that results in biomass that can be utilized for utilization pathway. So that’s 3.3 million bone dry tons of biomass and that’s, I’m sorry, about 10 bone dry tons per acre of treatment. The scoping plan goal carbs 2022 scoping plan estimated we needed to get to 2.3 to 2.5 million acres of treatment to get to a climate resilient landscape by 2045. And so that would result in 7.7 million, bone dry tons of biomass. Right now we use about 1 million bone dry tons in energy production just for scope and scale and anything else is peanuts. We don’t have a super robust biomass based like fiberboard industry. We don’t have at this point any pellet industry in California. So really the 1 million bone dry tons going to energy is it for us right now.
(00:28:04):
So what happens to the rest of it or what would happen to the rest of it? As we grow in forest health, those byproducts are often left in the forest in a pile or scattered. They can be burned pile burned. If you go to Tahoe, you probably have driven through stacks of biomass waste or any forest really, and seen them on fire in the early spring. That’s usually when burning happens. Or unfortunately they burn in wildfire and piles can result in less predictable fire behavior because they’re unevenly dried. So it can really exacerbate catastrophic wildfire. Agricultural products as well have the same sort of pathway, although they have a more interesting history. We did use a lot of those for bioenergy in the seventies and eighties that phased out into the nineties and now there’s a burn prohibition in the San Joaquin Valley. So they don’t have any place to bring their biomass and they can’t burn it in the field.
(00:29:06):
This is good stuff for public health for sure, but we need to think about what those agriculturalists can do with their non-food byproducts. I think leaving and burning this biomass waste. And just a reminder, we are managing our forests for forest health. We’re not managing them for biomass. We do not do that here in the state. And so these byproducts from ag and forest management are going to occur as we reach our goals of economic development and food security and forest health leaving and burning both result in greenhouse gas and criteria pollutants. And so we need to think of alternative ways of managing them.
(00:29:53):
So I just want to talk a little bit about biomass management generally, the co benefits of that. This is just, oh my gosh, my time goes so quickly. So this is just one snippet of a fun fact of addressing forest health. At the rate of 2.3 or more million acres a year can result in 3.1 billion in annual savings and public health costs alone. And that’s because of the impacts of wildfire smoke. This is quantification from the 2022 scoping plan, and that’s in addition of course to other community benefits of stability, infrastructure, habitat, recreation. So in the circular bioeconomy biomass is a resource and I wanted to highlight it can be utilized through wood fiber applications, innovative wood products like building materials. This is a mass timber application in the photo up here, ammonia for fertilizer is a particularly interesting pathway, creating urea from the biomass from the forest or agricultural applications to displace the massive imports that we have here in the state.
(00:30:58):
It’s an innovative application that really hasn’t been utilized too much in the state yet. And then I wanted to highlight, of course, energy is a byproduct as well. And energy bioenergy production uses just orders of magnitude more biomass waste than any other application. So it is really an important component of the system and it also provides carbon negative energy because of the ease of capturing that carbon stream, which you’ll hear about more from Tom later. And sequestration and suing sequestration. So how are we approaching this? Some policy factors. There are policy factors that have been put into place by the legislature, by the administration, by voters through proposition four. I wanted to add too, there were just too many for the list. The SB 9 0 5, which is the carbon capture and sequestration bill of 2022. And then the scoping plan update is really central to our enabling policy as well, although it certainly isn’t policy in and of itself.
(00:32:03):
We do have great existing programs, but they’re only beginning to move. Private finance. Wood utilization policy has really suffered in the state from a lack of long-term consistency and a lack of long-term leadership. Sorry, maybe one more minute. So I think it’s really only in the last few years that we’ve developed a leadership structure in the state to provide a little more consistency and we’re just at the beginning of the continuity that will support that longer term investment in the developer community. These topics are super difficult from technology and a cultural perspective, and so we want to be sure that we’re doing it in an inclusive way. And so again, really appreciate the opportunity to be on this panel and talk about these things. And just a quick mention of where things are working. They’re working really well in mountain communities and tribal communities who see the direct benefits of forest health and wildfire mitigation. A list of tribes here that are actually implementing projects right now. I know that list is bigger than this. And then a list of studies here at the bottom from the perspective of public health, carbon sequestration, healthy forest and climate resilience, identifying the importance of carbon negative bioenergy to reaching California’s goals of climate, economic resilience, inclusive democratic economic development, environmental development and or environmental protection and others. So I will stop there. Thank you Bob.
Bob Epstein, Project 2030 (00:33:42):
Okay, Colin is next. I’ll turn the floor over to him.
Colin Murphy, UC Davis Institute of Transportation (00:33:51):
So thank everyone. Happy to be here. Like Elizabeth, I could talk about two of my favorite topics in this case, low carbon fuel policy and lifecycle analysis, maybe not quite so picturesque as camping and having a farm, but it keeps me from being bored. So I am the associate director of the Energy Futures program at the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies and I co-lead the Low Carbon Fuel Policy Research Group. So most of my job is I focus on things like the low carbon fuel standard, which is policy California uses to support lower carbon options for transportation. But the basic concepts of lifecycle analysis of energy systems apply in a lot of other areas and we’re seeing them get adopted in a number of ways. So a quick note talking about waste based fuels, and I have not really liked the term waste as an important designator of critical characteristics in fuels for a long time because it is to contextually define, everybody has a slightly different idea of what a waste is and a lot of things that we have classified as waste historically really would’ve had some other use and probably shouldn’t have been classified as waste.
(00:34:55):
So I think there’s a lot of gray area here in terms of what is sort of a true waste that has no other valuable use, what has a minimally valuable use that’s at least better than land filling or disposing in some other way. The waste we’re talking about today is largely using the same definition that Elizabeth gave. It’s things that really don’t have any other use and would otherwise be landfill or incinerated or just piled up and left to decompose on their own. So things that don’t have some useful alternative faith. It’s not to say that if a material has a useful alternative to being used for bioenergy or biofuels or carbon dioxide removal, it shouldn’t be used. It means you have to do a case by case analysis. The low fruit are the things that we know would otherwise just get burned or landfill or otherwise.
(00:35:41):
And that’s the stuff like Elizabeth mentioned, the piles of wood leftover from forest fuel management treatments, the orchard residue or some of the other agricultural residue in California that otherwise would either be landfill or left to decompose or burn. So that’s really what we’re talking about today and everything else is an interesting gray area. That is a fascinating discussion I’d love to have, but not in the limited time I have here today. So there are also a lot of different values that these materials can provide. And so I’m talking about energy uses because that’s where my expertise is and where I spend most of my time focusing. But like Elizabeth mentioned, other things you can do with these. And Bob also mentioned his first slide where you can compost things to get a soil amendment can, if it’s a wood waste make particle board or other engineered wood products out of it.
(00:36:31):
I’m certainly not trying to imply that those are bad or less useful in a lot of cases if you keep the carbon solid, it’s better for the climate in the long run. Again, sort of talking about what are the energy potentials in this waste space in California. So if we take the numbers that Elizabeth gave and her presentation of about at when we reach our full California forest health goals, about 7.7 million, bone dry tons of biomass per year and another million or so coming from agricultural residue, we can at a very back of the envelope level of math, assume that you can turn this material into a liquid fuel at about 60 62 gallons or so for every bone dry ton. This is to make something like a gasoline or a diesel product, assuming that it means that this nearly 8 million or nearly 9 million tons of waste could produce a little over 500 million gallons a year of a liquid renewable fuel.
(00:37:30):
And this compares to the sort of amounts of fuel that we’re using 12 billion gallons or so of gasoline in 2023, about 4 billion gallons of liquid diesel, mostly biomass these days, but some other stuff. California about consumes on four and a half billion gallons a year of jet fuel largely on the Pacific Flyway of that 400 to 500 million gallons or for flights that take off and land in the states. So this is a non-trivial amount of fuel. It’s not enough that it’s going to solve all of our fuel problems, right? We’re not going to be powering our entire aviation sector or any meaningful large sector of the on-road pool just off of waste biomass. But it is something and given how we are desperately searching for tools to reduce emissions from these sectors, it’s going be not a good idea to leave this on the shelf when this much potential exists there.
(00:38:22):
So when we start talking about the low carbon fuel standard, which I bring up because again, it’s my day job, A lot of people look at the LCFS as some combination of both a, of policy support in the near term to help these things reach market as well as a template for similar policies that might aim them towards sectors other than transportation. And a lot of ways this is good. We have known from our experience with alternative fuels that you have to do lifecycle analysis on any sort of biofuel in order to understand the full environmental impact. You cannot just look at the fuel from the conversion facility to the tank. You have to consider where the biomass came from. You have to consider the soil carbon impacts, the carbon cycling impacts and natural ecosystems. If you don’t take this very broad holistic view, you’re likely to miss critical areas and potentially underestimate the impacts there.
(00:39:12):
So when we think about what the LCFS can do in terms of biofuels and waste, biofuels and CDR, because it is based in lifecycle analysis itself, it comes in having adopted the right framework and the right approach to evaluating the environmental impacts or at least or at least the greenhouse gas impacts. There are other local environmental impacts that are outside the scope of the LCFS that need to be tackled in other areas because the LCFS is very much a make polluters pay type program. It funds itself by applying charges to high carbon fuels as long as the political will exist to protect the program. The funding is relatively secure. It’s not where you’re waiting on appropriations that may or may not come from a legislative body on a year to year basis. It has already a history of being able to provide credits for carbon capture and sequestration.
(00:40:05):
I don’t think anybody’s actually successfully fully certified a pathway and received credits yet. But it was the first regulatory program in the world to create a way for CCS to be sort of monetized and brought into a regulatory program that would have long-term ongoing support. And because a system that produces a biofuel and has a CDR or carbon removal element to it is likely to yield a pretty low carbon fuel. These fuels are likely to have some good staying power in the industry. The nature of the LCFS, it has a target that keeps getting stronger and stronger every year, which means fuels that are a little cleaner than petroleum might receive credit at first, like things like ethanol and soybean oil biofuels do right now. But eventually the targets are going to get to the point where they can’t keep up and they’ll flip from receiving credits to generating deficits, right?
(00:40:54):
They’ll flip from receiving money from the system to paying into the system, whereas a fuel made where if you’ve got a CDR is likely to have staying power. Oh, I’m definitely running behind them. Okay, so the bad news, the LCS only applies transportation fuels and in a lot of cases the best use of the stuff probably isn’t in the transportation sector. So that may lead to some awkward fits in the near term. We’ve been having a period of low LCS credit prices and it’s going to be hard to develop a lot of incentive as long as that continues. And I don’t think the most recent amendments are likely to fix that. And forests have a unique carbon cycling dynamic that requires a lot of modeling tools that aren’t really fully mature yet, that still need to be developed in terms of what the LCS could do to provide this is sort of, people keep asking me, how much can fuel X get out of the LCFS over the next 10 years?
(00:41:44):
It’s very difficult to predict because the price of the LCS credit fluctuates. The target is now variable because there’s not acceleration mechanism and we don’t know what the carbon intensity fuels are. So this is just to really show the potential range of outcomes. We did a scenario analysis of 30 scenarios that at least were plausible. We could generate a story as to why they might occur. And so on the left you have the amount of incentive of 40 gram per megajoule. Remember gasoline, diesel are about a hundred grams. So this is a clean but not zero. Carbon fuel might receive on the right if you can get it to zero. So even on the zero carbon sort of tops out in the 50 75, maybe a dollar per gallon, I don’t think anybody thinks that that forced biomass fuels are just a dollar a gallon away from being competitive.
(00:42:25):
So I think this really shows that additional incentives or additional structures are going to be necessary. Like I mentioned, there are a number of modeling tools that are needed in order to really effectively understand the carbon dynamics and the carbon cycling implications that happen when you use biomass, especially if this expands to the point where you’re not just using the piles that are already sitting there waiting to be picked up that would otherwise have been burned and potentially use the biofuel or bioenergy industry to help support additional forest treatments. You’ve got to understand these dynamics using models that are still immature. There’s one good one from Kevin Fingerman at Humboldt State called C Breck. There’s at least starting to do some of this, but you also need models of how forest treatments affect fire risk in order to quantify those benefits. And we’re still waiting to see fully mature models there.
(00:43:15):
The other problem is if you’re using a pile of wood that’s already there, that’s great near the end. So if you’re using pelvic, it’s already, that’s great. If you’re trying to have an industry where it is going in and doing the treatments itself to bring additional material out and to help do the four steel manager treats, that is a very energy intensive process, right? It takes a lot of equipment loaders, skid steers, ATVs to get into these remote mountainous areas and remove that biomass and get it out to a road and then get that to a conversion facility. So that means that if you do a lifecycle analysis, that energy has to be counted for and that means the lifecycle analysis ends up looking not great. Beyond that, the problem in forest health in a lot of places is they’re overstocked with carbon right now, right?
(00:44:01):
We have over controlled forest fires historically, so there’s too much highly flammable carbon there. You take it out to make a fuel. Yes, you can sort of reduce the wildfire risk and improve the overall greenhouse gas footprint. But from the lifecycle analysis of the fuels perspective, that reduction in carbon has to be accounted for. And unless you have some sort of definition of what the right amount of carbon in a forest is, and obviously that is a difficult quantity to establish, then you’re again going to have trouble getting a lifecycle analysis to give you the ability to these fuels through something like the LCFS. So additional tools to understand these carbon dynamics, to define what the appropriate amount of carbon is and to give us some sort of pathway to leverage this potential value is really needed. So all those are really saying that if we have ways to turn biomass that would otherwise be sort of burned or landfilled or just left to decompose, if you can turn it into something useful, that is generally speaking an environmental win. And there are certainly ways that that is quite possible within the forest biomass or the agricultural biomass space. The LCFS provides a good model for how to support this, but it’s not going to be enough by itself. And even for the fuels that want get in the LCFS space, there are some additional modeling and research needs that have to occur before we’re able to effectively assess these. So that’s it.
Bob Epstein, Project 2030 (00:45:22):
Okay, next step we have Dan Reese.
Dan Ress, Center on Race, Poverty & the Environmen (00:45:32):
Hi everyone. Dan Ress with the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. I came to this by way of working on oil and gas issues and understanding that carbon capture was being used as an off ramp to keep oil and gas production going and to delay real climate action. That’s how I kind of came to carbon capture. And I’ve seen that a lot in the biomass space as well, where it’s being used as a way to generate revenue, not really as a climate tool, but there are options here that can be really good. So we’re going to go through a framework for evaluating these projects and then apply it to a couple big picture types of projects. So the five key criteria we’ve got cost, how much does this really cost? What kind of jobs is this producing? What are the climate impacts of this type of thing?
(00:46:29):
What are the environmental impacts? And then how does this impact justice and equity? And I separate out climate environmental because I think they’re related, but they’re slightly different, at least as I’m using ’em. So first we’ll start with healthy soils. We’re focused on composting because this panel is focused on waste, but there’s a bunch of other healthy soils programs aside from composting. It’s very, very, very cheap. $15 a ton. We’ll see a much different order of magnitude for another option here. There are a ton of jobs in this. It’s actually, you need a lot of jobs for this to work. I will say that the workers are very poorly paid, and that’s a problem regardless of whether it’s a climate program, but it would be a lot of jobs. And if there’s state resources going to this, you could enforce labor standards. The carbon is stored in the soil.
(00:47:23):
It’s good. It’s a little bit hard to measure exactly how much, but there’s definitely some stored in the soil. The environmental impacts are incredible. You reduce your need for pesticides, reduce your need for fertilizer, not as much irrigation water needed. The water stays in the soil, your soil lives longer. Our soil in the central valley where I live, it’ll probably die in about 20 or 30 years. And the most productive crop land in the nation will no longer be producing crops or not as many by it at all. And then there can be a lot of local benefits. If we take out pesticides and fertilizer, there’s local benefits, there’s more water to go around and those jobs are local.
(00:48:04):
So it’s not perfect though. And there are some things we need to do. As I mentioned, labor guarantees to make sure their jobs are better. Compost’s production itself can actually have a lot of local pollution. So we need to make sure we’re doing this in a way that’s safe and healthy and we need for this to work as a climate program. There needs to be a long-term commitment for healthy soil management trip. So let’s talk about Becks next. I also hear this called bikers, biological carbon removal and storage. I think that’s a euphemism for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage that assumes that it’s a removal. When I’m skeptical, this is very expensive, $500 a ton, and I do not believe it will benefit much from economies of scale because the energy production is really the challenge here. There are not a lot of jobs in this.
(00:48:51):
We have local projects that says they’ll have five permanent jobs. I’ve seen as high as 45, but there are not a ton of jobs. There’s a really high opportunity costs. What are you not doing with those monies that are going to these projects? And it’s fake. I mean, there’s not actually reductions. We’re pretending it’s reductions and then continuing to emit. So you’re pretending it’s an offset program when it’s actually just a free emission program. And it is net positive if you really dive into the modeling assumptions that are made and compare them to what’s happening on the ground. There’s no one who’s using just waste. There’s primary biomass including crops and clear cutting forests. In fact, commodifying waste results in more waste, right? So if we’re giving value to this thing, now we’re going to want more of it. What does that mean? What we’re calling waste, right?
(00:49:52):
And then of course the moral hazard. Are you deterring mitigation by reducing emissions instead of doing afterward? Carbon rule for that last one, the moral hazard. We say no offsets, think offsets are a bad idea. If we’re talking about ways to remove carbon to get to legacy emissions, that’s something we should be talking about. And maybe that last 5% we can talk about it, but I don’t think an offset program is the right way to get it or else it’s going to rapidly grow to be 10 and 15. And then, as I said, under real world conditions, that’s positive. So we need the full lifecycle analysis, and Colin was speaking to this a little bit, but we really need this to be done deeply and skeptically, looking at how it’s going to really happen on the ground. The LCFS does not do a good job of following up to look at what’s actually happening with projects.
(00:50:44):
For example, also, the LCFS encourages enhanced oil recovery with captured carbon, including from Becks, as long as it’s not in the state of California where it is illegal. But LCFS is a national program even though it’s California based. So we are subsidizing enhanced oil recovery as part of our climate program. We need to reduce the amount of waste biomass by being careful about not commodifying it and coming up with ways of efficiency. We also need to use only waste biomass, and not as every project I’ve ever heard of also use primary biomass. We do not want to have long distance trucking because that obviously has its own climate issues as well as local pollution and in general, just don’t do bess because it’s a bad idea. Then there’s this opportunity costs. We want to limit our public spending. If the private market without any subsidies is doing this, we can talk about protections, but let’s at least not spend our money on this.
(00:51:45):
Alright, so I’ve got some pictures of how there’s really harms at each stage. I’m not going to go into this too much, which I think we’re sharing the slides after, but we’re incentivizing cutting down forests and growing crops for banks in so far as we’re including this as a program. These old biomass plants, which they’re trying to refire, including where I live in Delano, there’s an old biomass plant, the worst point source of air pollution and the nation’s worst Sara Basin, actually the worst is in Mendota, which they’re also wanting to refire and now we’re going to refire it. They told us that it would clean up the air when they did it. It didn’t back in the day. And now they tell us it’s going to clean up the air again. It won’t. So the paralysis and gasification, these are the same processes used in chemical recycling.
(00:52:38):
Y’all may have heard of this as an alternative to incineration for plastics. Incredibly dirty. I don’t have faith that this will actually be cleaner since that’s actually dirtier than incineration, at least for plastics. And then these are going into disadvantaged communities. That’s where they’re coming. And we have the worst air pollution in the nation and it’s going into low income communities of color there. So we really need strong community protections. SB 9 0 5 is a bill passed a few years ago that requires carb to come with CER protections, but they have no plans to start a rulemaking as required under the law, and yet the projects are coming now. So we really need a pause on any permits for any projects until those rules for community protections are in place. I’m going to go quickly through some other protections. We don’t want to increase any local air and water pollution.
(00:53:32):
We need a strong buffer zone where we recommend 10 miles between homes and capture storage or pipelines for the local pollution that these projects create. We want to make sure they’re powered by excess, clean, renewable energy. They actually, a lot of times, even if they’re doing paralysis, will burn something to power the paralysis. We need financial insurances that are strong so that a hundred years from now there’s someone on the hook for this. So we need bonds or third party insurance that will last as opposed to accounting on an oil company to still be here in a hundred years from there’s no oil. We need reevaluation of costs, of closure, remediation, leaks, other harms, and responding to that with our bonding or other assurances. We need really great government process. We’re not that moral hazard. Really being careful about that. Make sure these are additional reductions and that there’s plu or pays that this is paid not through increasing utility rates or gas prices.
(00:54:24):
This is affordability issue. This is so expensive. It’s going to come back to us. We also need informed consent and really good process. We want great notification workshops, community benefits. We need environmental impact reports on all of these projects. They need careful analysis and we should do worst case scenario modeling storage. We should be studying carefully. Before we do this, we need to assess and prove stable geology, no leak risk, no increase in geological risks. Just one more sli finish really quickly. We need permanence. We need site characterization, monitoring, reporting, verification, all these things to make sure this isn’t causing harms. And then for transportations, I’ll just say until we have everything set up to keep pipelines safe, we really need to not be using carbon pipelines. They’re incredibly dangerous and we do not have the appropriate regulations in place so we can talk more about what protections are needed, but that’s the big idea. Get strong protections before you start doing it. I think that’s my last slide. Oh, I have, we’ll get to that. Oh, sorry. Just we can get to questions too. I’m all over time. I’ll stop there.
Thomas Hobby, Yosemite Clean Energy (00:56:00):
(00:56:00):
Good afternoon. Great to be here. Tom Hubby. I’m the CEO of Yosemite Clean Energy and my background has been in forestry for four generations in the Sierras. And like Elizabeth said, it was my playground where I lived and played and loved. And how many here have had either an issue or a place that you’ve recreated have been destroyed by wildfire or a family or a loved one that’s been impacted by wildfire in the last few years? That’s a majority of people in this room. And I think that’s really at the beginning of my presentation. That’s the why of Yosemite Clean energy. Back to Dan’s point, I’m not about just trying to rake the forest and just seeing a commodification of biomass. It really is about sustainable development and having a balance in the ecosystem.
(00:56:47):
And I think about our Native American friends this morning gave that great song in prayer. And one of the things that I got to write a paper about 20 years ago with the First Nations up in the ksan of British Columbia, and they had this principle of kind of the reciprocity. There was always a giving and a giving back. So they would take and give back in an ecosystem. And I think really that’s the heart of Yosemite Clean. We know what the statistics of wildfires have been more and more. We’ve burnt literally over 12 million acres in California. We have millions of acres that need forest fuels reduction. They’re in the 90th percentile of high risk of wildfire. And that’s not just the wildfires are just another acre burned. The severity and the intensity of those fires that once these fires go through, we can’t grow forest again.
(00:57:35):
It can barely grow chaparral or brush, but we’re not seeing forests regenerate with this hot of intense fires. So we need to again, do the thinning and remove this biomass so that we can have a chance to do forest restoration before the rest of the state’s burned. We have about 20 million acres to do. That doesn’t include about 15 million acres of chaparral in California. And then lastly, and I’m sorry, my slides somehow are looking weird here on the thing, so my apologies. But the other issue is that people can’t afford to live in these mountain communities because of the risk of wildfire insurance. We have millions of homes that people can’t get insurance or my family lives, it’s about 8,000 to $10,000 just for a homeowners or policy for insurance. So part of what we can do is begin to use this waste biomass, reduce the wildfire hazard, reduce the insurance costs.
(00:58:24):
But at the same time though, this is a product that we can convert. And I’ll get to some of Dan’s questions about, again, the emissions of sustainability and lifecycle. We can convert it into biofuels, which is zero emission or even carbon negative. We capture the carbon, and that’s what I’ll show you today. I don’t have to go again on the wildfires. The cost of the damage is unprecedented. They just came out with a report last year in the US Senate between 390 and 893 billion a year over the last decade. If we took and prorated California, it would be about 60 billion of damage. I don’t have to tell you what Los Angeles, I think they said it was 250 billion in economic damage, 20 billion in economic loss. Basically for every acre we treat, that would be over $50,000 of damage per acre. So you think about what’s the value of managing our forest?
(00:59:14):
It’s huge. Again, back to acres burn. We do have a prescribed fire. I want to kind of put a picture in a lot of the first Nations and Native Americans for time immemorial, they use fire as a tool of the landscape. We can’t do that with all these extra millions of trees. But once we get through doing the thinning, cultural fire can be a way to solve this. And it’s reduced emissions than just open burning or wildfire. We had to get 9 million acres burned in a 4, 8, 4 year period. We just took one year, 2023, that’s about 6.9 million tons of biomass. This was a low fire year at about 20 tons to the acre. And I want to hold that thought when I get into our facility of how much biomass we’ll use for a system in our Yosemite clean plants.
(00:59:59):
And I might have a little arm resting. Colin and Elizabeth. I use some prior numbers back from the biomass collaborative and I’m a forest economist. I’ve done well now we’re starting the third national forest doing a biometric analysis on the Tahoe, the Plumas, and now the Stanislau and some of the fuel treatments in what we’re doing to thin we’re getting over 50 tons per acre. Again, we’re not taking more than a third of the basal area to reduce it for fire hazard, getting it from a 90th percentile of a crown fire down into probably a low 10 to 20% crown fire potential. But with doing that, I think we’re somewhere maybe in the middle. Maybe it’s not seven and maybe it’s not 50, but we can argue about that, but that’s not the point. The point is we have a lot of biomass that is being left behind either well to burn or it stands dead and it rots and that creates carbon emission.
(01:00:48):
It’s methane emits over time when it decomposes. So just some quick math. Our facility and what we do, we convert basically wood, which is cellulose and lignin into basically a gas, and the gas is called syngas. It’s carbon monoxide hydrogen, methane, and CO2. From that, with our process, we can basically produce about 77 kilograms per bone, dry ton of wood, so that’s pretty close to columns, number of 62 gallons, diesel gallon equivalents or gasoline gallon equivalents. So again, my theory is like, okay, we’re not going to get to replacing all the diesel in California, but the potential is we can do a lot of good to replace fossil fuels and I think we’re at 1.2 billion of fossil diesel. We could probably replace half of that just with biofuels through these processes. The other part is back then the day just using biomass for heat, been around for hundreds of years, very low, maybe a very low dollar per bone, dry ton electricity, it gets up to about double, but on biomass for hydrogen, we’re actually paying up to a hundred dollars 80 to a hundred dollars a ton.
(01:01:52):
It’s creating between 800 and a thousand dollars of value per ton of biomass. Now, back to Dan, your point, okay, if there is no economic incentive, it is going to stay there and it’s going to rot and it’s going to burn and it’s going to be left behind To create wildfire hazard, the farmers on the other side, they can’t burn and it’s causing a huge environmental issue with farmland because when you put that wood chip in the ground, they have to actually add nitrogen dis in the ground. So that’s not sustainable. It costs about a couple thousand dollars an acre to do that, we’ve got to find a way to better utilize our wood resources. Again, I think hydrogen is an order of magnitude better than previous generations just doing combustion for electricity.
(01:02:34):
Our emissions again from California, I’m sorry that I’m not sure what’s happening to my PowerPoint. I think I did this in A PDF. I should have sent you the PowerPoint, but make a long story short here. The amount of biomass when you burn a ton of wood is about a ton and a half of CO2 emissions for open burning, and this is kind of a big point when we actually put that through a controlled system, we’re reducing an order of magnitude about 250 times reduction of that emission. And if we look at this little curve over here, this is what emissions from wildfires, we actually went up over 200 million tons, which was all of transportation. Obviously if we don’t manage our forest and we don’t deal with this issue, we are going to not meet our climate and our carbon targets, and that’s another reason for biomass utilization.
(01:03:21):
Our specific company, this is based on a 90,000 ton plant that we’re planting in Oroville, California. We have a second in Tami County. If you look at open burning emissions, there’s some particular emissions that basically is on 90,000 tons would be 3,870 tons per year. We reduce that 250 plus times less than 15 on particulates. Same thing with NOx. We’re about a 28 time reduction of NOx and co. I think that’s about 200 and methane is about a 63 time reduction. So we have a cleaner technology that open burning and then just regular combustion systems which produced electricity back in the day. And so we’re excited about that. Again, the health effects of particulate matter, again, we see lots of an average of 5,400 early premature deaths due to particular emissions that we can reduce by utilizing this biomass San Joaquin Valley. They average about a thousand dollars per person.
(01:04:18):
That’s about a $3 billion a year healthcare cost due to particulates and back to some things that Bob wanted to talk about, we have seen good policies. The LCFS has been great. The directive by Gavin Newsom on forest stewardship a million acres, we support that. That’s helpful. The cap and trade has given a lot of communities fire safe councils money to do fuel treatments and help put protection around these communities. We support that. Again, our technology has been around for over 20 years from Vienna, Austria. It’s been used in Europe. Mostly we’ll be the first ones to bring this technology here. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007 went to this plant in Vienna and said, okay, we should be doing this in California. Our kind of tagline is from stump to pump the lifecycle analysis from the stump all the way to the well to wheel, and we will be carbon negative on that and we’ve done the whole, we don’t have it approved by car, but we’ve done the lifecycle analysis for that.
(01:05:11):
So we’re bullish about that. We do believe that we need to have, again, LCS, the extension of the cap and trade. We do need a lot of development capital to make this happen are things like the hydrogen infrastructure arches and other incentives or basically things that we need to make this go forward. Lots of reports again to help us and builds to be able to make our industry strong. And I’d like to just say thanks to our partners. Which one is here at the Department of Conservation, Cal Fire, USDA, forest Service of Wood Innovations and California Energy Commission. Thank you.
Bob Epstein, Project 2030 (01:05:55):
Okay, thank you Tom. So we have about 15 minutes to do Q&A. So think of some questions. I’m going to spend a couple minutes with the panel and see if the panels have questions for each other, but you’ve seen a pretty strong contrast between what’s there and how would we go about doing it. So lemme start first with Elizabeth and say what exists in California to make sure the forests are still protected and owning the forest treatments are coming out.
Elizabeth Betancourt, California Department of Con (01:06:26):
Yeah, thank you Bob. So California has one of the most alongside Maines forest practice rules in the nation. And so not only do our forests not grow like those in the southeastern US for example, which can be farmed essentially for energy and are in some cases our forests don’t grow that way and we have forest practice rules in place that prevent that. And so the bioenergy facilities that exist right now in the state take exclusively wastes from California’s forest health work and from our agricultural agriculturalists in the valleys. So forest health rules require timber harvest plans, which essentially is a process and they get inspected by Cal Fire Department of Conservation and the water boards. And so we are also at the same time the Department of Conservation is working really closely with carb and cal fire to develop a chain of custody protocol to ensure that as we move into greater use of biomass, whatever the pathway looks like that that comes from responsible forest management. Our chain of custody is focused on forest management. We hope to grow it to ag waste utilization as well. But we are in probably the middle stages of what that looks like, creating a pathway. We’ll next year create an actual computer program that users forest management entities, licensed timber operators will be able to use in the forest and certify that wood load as it goes down the hill and to utilization. So yeah, two important considerations.
Bob Epstein, Project 2030 (01:08:07):
Okay, thank you. So let me try hard, well just a couple questions and then we’ll take from the audience. So Dan and Tom, a question for the two of you. So let’s assume for a second that we can agree that this is really waste and it’s not creating new demand for new growth. He reminds me of the economist who’s on a deserted island with a can but no can opener. He starts by saying, let’s first assume the can is open. So if we can for a minute, let’s assume that it’s really waste. If Tom approached your community to want to do something, let’s assume that all the waste is within 50 miles. What would the conversation look like that would result in a successful project between the two of you?
Thomas Hobby, Yosemite Clean Energy (01:09:01):
Just on emissions, I think the word is transparency to build trust. And I think that is something as a forest industry, and again my family’s been here for since the gold rush, we haven’t done a good job of that in the past. And I think with what’s going on with the amount of AI and satellite information and ability to be transparent and then again having robust models that test the principles, we’re an open book for our technology and our company and I think that starts with a conversation going, alright, come evaluat, if there is an issue, tell me. And then do we have a solution for a best available control technology or how do we mitigate? But we’d love to just start with an open and honest conversation.
Dan Ress, Center on Race, Poverty & the Environmen (01:09:39):
Would you mind going to my last slide really quick?
(01:09:43):
Start again. Your last slide should be a guy talking. So I think transparency is definitely the right place to start. I totally agree with that and I also want to clarify while we oppose Becks, I wouldn’t want to tell any community, no, you can’t have that. It should be about informed community consent. People should know what they’re getting into and have a choice and that knowing is important. So you need true transparency and then you need true choice. So if a tribe is doing this, I’m certainly not going to tell a tribe to stop doing. That’s not my place to do. But what we’re seeing is communities being steamrolled and this going head over objections. So this is from a video one of our allies made Central California Environmental justice network. There’s a link at the bottom if you all want to watch though, it’s about an eight minute video including this clip.
(01:10:32):
One of our community members. Lupe says this community benefit agreement, that’s how they’re going to get us to accept because that’s the question you’re asking me, what would it take for us to give in? I won’t because that’s not the issue. When there’s a catastrophe, when there’s a disaster and you end up with people injured or dead, how are you going to pay with with that community benefit agreement? That should not be our goal. That’s not my goal. My goal is for you engineer, agency, whoever you are, prove to me we’re not going to have these catastrophes prove to me it’s safe. We haven’t seen that proof.
Bob Epstein, Project 2030 (01:11:04):
Thanks. Are there any questions between the past? Want to ask each other? If not, I’ll go to the audience. Any burning? Alright. Okay, you had a question? I’ll repeat it. So go ahead.
Speaker 13 (01:11:20):
How do we keep track of what works to actually prevent fire and how do we keep, as you know when you cut a forest it often regrows in Chaparral whether it’s burned or cut, that’s California. How do you keep that from happening?
Bob Epstein, Project 2030 (01:11:39):
Elizabeth? You want to just repeat the question or summarize it?
Elizabeth Betancourt, California Department of Con (01:11:41):
Yeah, so the question as I heard it was how do you keep track of lessons learned about what works in catastrophic fire mitigation and also how do you make sure that you get forest growing back after you do forest health work.
Speaker 13 (01:11:58):
Or how do you keep the forest floor thin after you thin it?
Elizabeth Betancourt, California Department of Con (01:12:02):
Got it. Okay, so forest reentry a question about how often to reenter the forest to preserve forest health. So to the first point, the wildfire and forest health task force task force of the governors has been doing some really extensive research into forest health and what it takes to keep forest healthy, historic patterns of stems per acre, how many trees per acre diameter work on carbon sequestration even what happens when you go into a forest when you do commercial thinning versus ecosystem thinning. And so we have some really good information and data about what healthy forests should look like and how to prevent. We can’t ever prevent wildfire. California’s forests are wildfire adapted. Many of our species require fire to regenerate and so we can though work to prevent catastrophic wildfire when it’s so severe to Tom’s point earlier that the burn is so hot that the seed bed is no longer there or that chaparral regrows. So we can do work to mitigate that and we do have the information required to plan for that and plan for mosaic impact across our forests. California’s forest practice rules require that forests be replanted after they’re commercially thinned and so that regrowth, I mean it’s not like irrigation systems are put in of course, so there’s not guaranteed regeneration but it’s pretty good. Folks are really good at that at this point.
Speaker 13 (01:13:45):
So after biomass cutting, do you need to replant?
Elizabeth Betancourt, California Department of Con (01:13:49):
There’s not cutting for biomass, people aren’t cutting saw logs for biomass utilization. So following commercial thinning where they cut saw logs for lumber, so like dimensional lumber, they are required to replant. We have at this point so many fires on the landscape that we can’t keep up with replanting post-fire. So that really is an issue, but for forest health work that replanting does occur, I’m sure Tom has something to add on this.
Thomas Hobby, Yosemite Clean Energy (01:14:22):
Yeah, the other thing, once we go through and do this thinning for biomass whatever, and historically Native Americans would burn the fire cycle in Sierra Nevada is between 15 and 30 years there’d be a recycle of fire. Now I don’t advocate we’re going to be burning 20 million acres of, but that was one of the tools, but in even mastication every maybe 15 years to come reentry keep the fuel hazard down and meanwhile we’re growing healthy trees and so basically we have some tools that can help manage those forests long-term into older growth from again being the small diameter problem, which is all this fuzz that’s burning,
(01:14:23):
Speaker 8 (01:15:04):
Real quick about the community benefit agreement, what I’m seeing in my area also within in the foothills, there’s also the environmental organizations, and I see this as a generational issue. The older ones who helped us protect the forest with the spotted owl, they’re still seeing we don’t want to single spot owl to be dying through this forest thinning process. The newer ones are saying we need forest health and they’re looking at bioenergy. Question I have for Elizabeth is you said one of the gaps is that there’s still no modern operating plans. Why not? And when is it going to be there and what would it look like?
Elizabeth Betancourt, California Department of Con (01:15:47):
So we are doing our best to incentivize that with policy and then we’ll use some funding allocated in prop four to incentivize it financially, but I think Tom would actually be a better person to answer that particular question.
Thomas Hobby, Yosemite Clean Energy (01:16:02):
Out of biofuels into my Forest econ act because I did my master’s on non-market valuation, which is a whole methodology and how do you take something that doesn’t have a true market and put value to it and ecosystem services are really that you can’t go out and sell clean air or water healthy soils and habitat and all these things, but that is coming. I’ve been at several, not just workshops, the global cop of council of Parties for biodiversity is looking at how to take these values of ecosystem services and put it a stack on a polygon so it’s not just biomass, it’s all these things and in a way that could support that being valued so that we not only protect it but can incentivize it. And I think that’s where we’re maybe heading in the future that we can see nature not trying to just commoditize it as an asset of it really. If it’s going to burn and cost us billions of dollars, we ought to be managing it different. So maybe the kind of programs is not just climate and carbon but ecosystem. That’s where this year the COP 30 is going to be a combination of the climate and the biodiversity cops for the first time. It’s going to be very interesting. I’m planning to go look forward to hearing more about it and I’ll report back someday.
(01:16:02):
Dan Ress, Center on Race, Poverty & the Environmen (01:17:14):
Just want to point out too that rotting is itself an ecosystem service and so the idea that we have to remove all the fuel, there’s actually some pros and cons to that. Thinning isn’t just a fire reduction. In fact it helps improve airflow into the forest and the thinning of these forests isn’t necessarily always a good thing. There’s actually some real downsides and it depends how it’s done and where it’s done and the details matter a lot and the issue with putting that higher price on it is that it incentivizes producing more biomass waste from the forest instead of trying to do the best thing for wildfires or the ecosystem.
Bob Epstein, Project 2030 (01:17:52):
Okay. I have time for one last question. Go ahead.
Speaker 9 (01:17:57):
My question is about lifecycle analysis. You mentioned that when you remove trees from the forest, of course that is removing carbon from the forest as well and that has to be accounted for the lifecycle analysis. Is there any consideration for sort of the long-term carbon stability of a well-managed forest compared to the potential catastrophical loss of carbon from a major wildfire that might occur, even though that’s a hypothetical, is there a way to account for that in the lifecycle
Bob Epstein, Project 2030 (01:18:29):
Analysis? So Colin, just quickly repeat the question.
Colin Murphy, UC Davis Institute of Transportation (01:18:32):
Yeah, so the question was is there a way within lifecycle analysis to account for the long-term health and stability of the forest and the embodied carbon move beyond just simple carbon mass? And the answer is qualified? Yes. It’s complicated. It usually requires modeling and those models are among those I said are not fully developed yet in a lot of cases where we are with our scientific understanding of natural carbon cycles and carbon dynamics is we understand a lot of the basic biochemical and physical processes that drive these. The issue is that the models to try to make predictions of what’s going to happen if I do treatment X, Y, or Z, the different, there’s a vast diversity of landscapes of climate, soil type of species there where we have a lot of data where somebody has done long-term studies on different interventions, we can calibrate the models reasonably well and make pretty good and in a lot of cases make reasonably good predictions there.
(01:19:38):
We just haven’t done studies of the full diversity of landscapes of climate, soil, ecosystem, species, et cetera. And so the models start, the air bars start getting pretty big when you get outside of the types of landscape where we happen to have long-term studies to use to calibrate those. And the problem is that when you’re talking about doing public policy, it’s really hard to say I’m going to do a policy that creates an incentive to do treatments in these particular landscapes here, here and here where we have good data but not these other ones where we don’t happen to have good data. That’s unfair. Often would get challenged in court as being arbitrary and so that’s where a deeper investment in the fundamental science of continuing, we certainly, we’ve got a reasonably good understanding of the chemical and physical processes but not perfect. We need to understand that better and then understanding the interactions with the environment and trying to do better expand the area over which we have confidence.
(01:20:34):
These models are giving us reasonable results. The other thing we have to remember is modeling is great and a lot of the questions we’re talking about within lifecycle analysis, really models are probably the only way you can answer, right? It would take 10 or 15 years of trying an intervention and seeing if it works and we don’t have 10 or 15 years to necessarily wait for the answer. So a lot of these things are going to have to be modeled. No model is going to be right a hundred percent of the time. We’re going to have to understand that the models are going to, if they’re done well and the science is done good, et cetera, they can give us on average over the full landscape, try to use them for a net positive. But there’s going to be some places where they go wrong and we need to try to figure out how do we develop warning systems will tell us it’s going wrong in this place and now we adopt some other management approach in this place even though we maintain sort of a general acceptance that the model is writ large pretty useful.
Bob Epstein, Project 2030 (01:21:27):
Great. So with that, we’re out of time. Thank you very much for attending and let’s give a round of applause to our panel for your time.