Tennessee: Carbon footprints

When the Tennessee River Gorge Trust’s Jim Brown and Jennifer Sexton look at trees in the gorge, they see a cache of beauty for preservation.

But they also see the potential for making money.

While the stock market may be sagging, the carbon market is bullish and the two are researching whether the Trust might cash in on its 6,140-acre cache of trees.

“We’re all based on carbon, but only trees have the ability to take carbon in its raw form, its gaseous form, and turn it into something useful,” Mr. Brown said.

Standing and living right where they are, trees soak up carbon, use it and store it, keeping it from being released into the atmosphere.

With carbon dioxide considered a major contributor to global warming, carbon is now traded like a commodity on the Chicago Climate Exchange. The Exchange, launched in 2003, is the world’s first and North America’s only active voluntary, legally binding trading system to reduce emissions of all six major greenhouse gases, according to its Web site. The Exchange deals with companies worldwide.

Carbon trading is similar in some ways to the cap-and-trade legislation now awaiting consideration in Washington. Under cap and trade, polluters would be assigned a certain amount of allowed emissions, and they would be able to trade those amounts among themselves to help reach goals for gradually lowered emissions. If one company can easily lower its emissions below its allowed number, for instance, it could sell or trade its unused allowance to another company that is unable to lower emissions quickly enough to meet toughened government standards.

While cap and trade operates business to business, carbon trading lets farmers, forest owners or entrepreneurs sell “carbon credits” from their carbon-storing plants to polluters. To do so, the contract with the Chicago Climate Exchange for five years at a time and, in turn, the Exchange brokers sell the “carbon credits” to businesses.

While the polluters are not actually lowering their emissions with the credits, their investment is ensuring that the forest or farmland now soaking up excess carbon dioxide is not being clear-cut or developed for at least five years.

U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., has been outspoken in his opposition to the cap-and-trade legislation, calling it another form of taxation. Multiple attempts to reach him Friday for comment on the carbon credits issued by the Exchange were unsuccessful.

Carbon trading already is up and running in Europe, but it is voluntary in the United States. Still, companies or organizations feeling pressure to reduce their carbon footprint already are buying carbon credits to green themselves up before mandatory pollution caps are imposed, said Dale Enerson, director of the National Farmers Union. The union works with farmers to aggregate large plots of land to be brokered by the exchange.

To date, buyers of such credits from the Chicago Climate Exchange include IBM, Ford, DuPont and Motorola, as well as some state and municipalities looking to lower their carbon footprints, Mr. Enerson said.

Tennessee Gorge Trust officials see the opportunity not just as a way to earn money, but also as a way to preserve more local land, forest and scenery.

“Money talks,” said Ms. Sexton, the trust’s administrative assistant who is analyzing 17 gorge plots for a master’s thesis in the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s environmental science program. “If you can pay people to keep trees on their property, then it’s an incentive to keep land forested.”

Ms. Sexton and Mr. Brown said they also like the big-picture promise of the project: helping the Earth and providing an example of how preservation or reforestation can be rewarded. The two said money the Trust might earn could be turned around to fund new planting projects or purchase more forested land for preservation.

Airing the trades

The National Farmers Union, working with the Chicago Climate Exchange since late 2006, has helped broker carbon credits totaling $8 million for more than 2,300 farmers and ranchers, Mr. Enerson said.

“It’s sort of a newly hatched industry in recent years,” he said.

The National Farmers Union has sold carbon credits on 2.8 million acres of land where farmers use no-till cropping practices and croplands-to-grass programs to store carbon dioxide. That acreage stores enough carbon dioxide to offset the estimated annual emissions of 320,000 automobiles, according to the National Farmers Union Web site.

Mr. Enerson said companies purchasing the carbon credits must commit to reducing their total emissions by 6 percent by 2010.

But eventually, the cost of buying credits will become more expensive than lowering emissions, Mr. Enerson said.

“We in agriculture are just bringing a supply of offsets to the market,” he said.

For now In the Tennessee River Gorge, Ms. Sexton and Mr. Brown, along with any volunteers they can muster, work forest plots they identified as being most representative of the gorge property.

“You’re really just analyzing the volume of cylinders and cones. A tree of a certain size will sequester so much carbon,” Mr. Brown, a lifelong forester, said as he measured the circumference of trees in a plot near Pot Point House on River Canyon Road in Marion County last week.

He and Ms. Sexton and Gorge intern David Zimmerman eventually will extrapolate their findings to the entire Gorge acreage. Preliminary figures show that about 400 acres in the Pot Point area store more than 17,000 tons of carbon, Mr. Brown said.

Ms. Sexton believes the analysis will help determine whether it is economically viable for a small land trust to offer carbon credits for sale. If it proves feasible for the gorge, it may be a way to help land trusts persuade smaller landowners to grant easements for forest protection instead of selling to developers.

“For now it’s an academic exercise.” Mr. Brown said. “When we know more we’ll take it to our board (of directors) and see what they want to do. However the scientific knowledge we’ll gain here is something we really would like to know, and we’ll continue to monitor here over time for all kinds of things, not just carbon.”

Describing trees and plants as the great natural air scrubbers, he said he worries that mankind has tipped the balance of nature in more ways than one to disrupt the natural cycles of climate.

“To dismiss it as just the idea of a bunch of liberal kooks is to stick your head in the sand,” he said. “We’re playing a part now because we’re taking ancient carbon out of the ground in the form of petroleum, and we’re breaking it back out in gaseous carbon dioxide and things that go back into the atmosphere.

“In other words, these things (carbon gases) were scrubbed out of the atmosphere millions of years ago and we’re digging them out and putting them back in (the air). They’re not in a form that’s inert in the earth any longer,” he said. “We’d better figure it out.”