A study by researchers at UCLA and the University of Chicago published in the academic journal Environmental Pollution reveals how the 2020 wildfires released nearly 140 million tons of carbon dioxide—nearly as much greenhouse gas emissions as all the passenger vehicles in California generate in a typical year. Lead author Michael Jerrett concludes that the devastation of 2020 and worsening climate factors may put pressure on policymakers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in other segments of society, such as motor vehicles, if the state can’t curb damage from wildfires.

Julie Kies, USA Forest Service Wood Innovations Program Coordinator for the Northern and Intermountain Regions, shares her recommendations for leveraging wood energy to power buildings while displacing fossil fuels, promoting forest restoration, and bolstering environmental stewardship. From local hospitals and colleges to museums and ski resorts, a growing group of entities in commercial, industrial and institutional sectors are opting for local, clean wood technology.

Wisewood Energy's biomass installation at the High Desert Biomass Cooperative in Burns, Oregon is highlighted as a functional example of how communities are leveraging the promising tool for decarbonization and climate smart energy generation.

The signing of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in August 2022 by President Biden unlocked billions of dollars for rural communities to build power reliability and community wealth with microgrids. Michelle Moore, former sustainability chief under President Obama and author of Rural Renaissance: Revitalizing America's Hometowns through Clean Power, shares her insight on opportunities that open doors for bringing decentralized energy infrastructure to rural, low-income communities across the country.

$50 million in grant dollars are available from the Oregon Department of Energy Community (ODOE) Renewable Energy Grant Program community renewable energy and resilience projects like solar, wind, storage, EV, and microgrids. From 2021-2024, Oregon Tribes, public bodies, and consumer-owned utilities are invited to apply on behalf of projects that support ODOE equity goals, demonstrate community energy resilience, and include energy efficiency and demand response.

In late August 2022, Klamath National Forest Supervisor Rachel Smith wrote a statement celebrating the success of her agency at suppressing the McKinney Fire and several smaller fires in the region. But not everyone agreed with her assessment. Will Harling, a firefighter and the director of the Mid Klamath Watershed Council, a Siskiyou County nonprofit that leads local land management and prescribed fire trainings, shares his critique with Jefferson Public Radio.

A chilling town meeting presentation by the U.S. Forest Service in the early 2000s had warned that a wildfire could easily wipe the town of Grizzly Flats, CA off the map. Two decades later, and two years after the catastrophic Caldor Fire that destroyed 400 homes and over 221 thousand acres, forest officials and survivors reflect on failures of inaction, and how proper forest management might have saved the small Sierra foothills town.

The “2022 State of Reliability” report states that the bulk power system is impacted by extreme weather events more than ever. The report points out that with sweeping power outages, freezing natural gas supplies, unpredictable grid demand, increased cyber attacks and unaddressed inverter issues, the power grid is increasingly unstable and unreliable - vulnerabilities that make investments in distributed resources and microgrids even more critical.

In an analysis published this week in the annual Air Quality Life Index, researchers found that wildfire smoke probably offset decades of state and federal antipollution efforts, at least temporarily.

Just over 9,900 wildfires burned about 4.3 million acres in 2020. That’s more than twice the previous record of acres burned in California. The study, published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, said 2020 was the first year in recorded history that burned area in California came close to rates seen before the 1800s, when an estimated 3-4 million acres burned in an average year.

As California’s wildfire crisis has grown, it has become clear the state must focus not only on fighting fires, but on preventing them from igniting and spreading. With that imperative in mind, the state is launching new initiatives aimed at a complex and critical problem: removing the excess and dangerous build-up of vegetation within forests and finding ways to put the woody materials to productive uses. The new efforts stretch across several state agencies and include a suite of interrelated strategies.

The biomass heating system at the University of Maine campus replaces dozens of smaller, older boilers that required the college to purchase nearly 400,000 gallons of oil per heating season. The school says the new system is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and has reduced oil purchased by close to 90%. By requiring the wood chips to come from sustainably harvested trees within 50 miles of campus, the heating system is also investing in Franklin County's wood products industry.

The importance of this new facility is not just turning low- to no-value material into something because the existing mills aren’t taking anything, we are talking about creating lumber to rebuild Greenville. And it’s ultimately about more than rebuilding Greenville, it’s about rebuilding hope in Indian Valley.

“The key part of our innovation project, using the Innovative Finance for National Forests grant, is trying to address the major obstacles to implementing these systems: high costs of construction, continuity cost analysis, design, and construction, and reliable operations and maintenance of biomass facilities.”

From firestorms in California’s Tahoe region to melting glaciers in the Alps, ski areas face a daunting array of environmental threats. Here’s what some resorts are doing.

As the climate warms, a huge forest experiment aims to reduce wildfire risk and find common ground between loggers and environmentalists.

As the Caldor Fire roared into the Lake Tahoe basin more than a month ago, Brian Newman took some comfort in the surroundings. Thousands of acres of trees and brush had been deliberately removed from around the basin in recent years, turning imminent disaster into one of the most dramatic success stories of the 2021 wildfire season.

Scaling Biomass Energy Implementation in USFS Regions 5,6, and 10 — $115,500 to Wisewood Energy to continue IFNF support to launch Biomass Utilization Funds across the Sierra Nevada and Pacific Northwest to address the biggest barriers to the widespread adoption of community-scale biomass energy in the U.S. West: capital costs, continuity across project stages, and dependable operations.

The Caldor Fire defied expectations, climbing mountains and crossing highways, destroying more than 1,000 structures in the process. South Lake Tahoe narrowly avoided the fire’s wrath. The following maps show how prescribed burns and other methods of removing vegetation to reduce the risk of hotter, larger fires—known as “fuel treatments”—slowed or curbed Caldor’s growth.

Mt. Bachelor ski area wants to build a $5.5 million biomass facility that would use locally sourced woody materials to produce heat for the resort. Deschutes County commissioners will hear a pitch for the plan at their meeting Wednesday, September 1.

A story from Oregon offers lessons for a dried-out, overheated West.