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The U.S. is burning through forests, and replanting them is expensive.
Wildfires are razing U.S. forests faster than either natural regrowth or active replanting can restore them. There’s a nearly 4 million-acre backlog in the western U.S. of forests that have burned and not been re-seeded. That’s slightly larger than the size of Connecticut. And unless we pick up the pace, the shortfall could increase two to three times over by 2050 as wildfires get worse under a warming climate.
These are the findings of a study published last week on the yawning gap between reforestation needs and reforestation capacity in the western U.S. Trees are still the country’s most important resource to counteract climate change, offsetting more than 12% of annual greenhouse gas emissions as of 2021. But in some areas like in the fire-ravaged Rocky Mountain region, forests have become a net source of carbon to the atmosphere, releasing more than they draw down. To prevent the reforestation gap from widening, the new study warns, we have to fix the “reforestation pipeline” — our capacity to collect seeds, grow seedlings, and plant them.
It also highlights solutions. The research was primarily funded by a company that finances tree-planting efforts by selling credits to carbon-emitting businesses based on the amount of carbon the trees suck up, allowing those businesses to offset their own emissions. To rebuild the country’s reforestation capacity, the study recommends — surprise, surprise — expanding the role of forest carbon offsets, among other ideas.
Some might look at this paper and dismiss it as biased science, but it got me thinking about the long-running debate in the climate community over trees. Should companies be allowed to offset their emissions from burning fossil fuel by planting carbon-sucking forests? It’s easy to say no. Too many forest-related carbon offset projects have come under fire for using faulty accounting methods or for “protecting” forests that were at no risk of being felled. Plus, there’s the larger risk that offsets provide a license to emit.
But when you contemplate the chasm between the funding and infrastructure required to restore forests and current capacity and incentives — not just in the U.S., but also globally — it’s easy to see why so many people ignore these realities and say we must finance reforestation through carbon markets. The new study spells out the predicament quite clearly.
Solomon Dobrowski, the lead author and a professor of landscape ecology at the University of Montana, was quick to tell me that these numbers were a rough estimate. “I'm not so hung up on the absolute number,” he said. “We can increase the precision of that number. But the take-home message here is that the needs are rapidly outstripping our capacity to fill them.”
Dobrowski studies how forests grow back after a disturbance like a wildfire, and he’s been documenting a concerning trend. Larger, more severe fires are “punching these big holes into landscapes,” he told me. A severe burn might leave a mile-long stretch between nearest living trees, making it impossible for the forest to regenerate through natural seed dispersal.
At the same time, the government is struggling to pick up the slack. Due to funding shortfalls, the U.S. Forest Service has managed to address “just 6% of post-wildfire replanting needs” per year over the last decade.
The average area burned in the U.S. more than doubled from 2000 to 2017 compared to the preceding 17-year period. But the uptick in severe fires is not the only reason we’ve fallen so far behind on reforestation. At the same time fires have increased, both public and private forestry shops have collapsed. Ironically, the decline of an ecologically destructive industry — logging — also gutted the potential for an ecologically regenerative forestry industry to thrive.
Previously, most of the Forest Service’s reforestation work was funded by the agency’s timber sales. But beginning in the 1990s, logging on public lands sharply declined due to a confluence of factors, including over-harvesting in previous decades and the listing of the northern spotted owl as protected under the Endangered Species Act. The agency’s non-fire workforce has decreased by 40% over the past two decades. It also shut down more than half its nurseries, leaving just six remaining. Many state-owned nurseries have also closed due to budget cuts and reduced demand for seedlings.
Today, the reforestation supply chain is mostly sustained by private companies serving what’s left of the wood product and fiber industry. State and local regulations require companies to replant in the areas they harvest. But since the industry is concentrated on the west coast, so is the supply chain — 95% of seedling production in the western U.S. occurs in Washington, Oregon, and California. That means interior states like Montana, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico, which are seeing increasingly large fires, have no mature supply chain to support reforestation.
The New Mexico Natural Resources Department, for example, estimates it needs 150 million to 390 million seedlings to replant the acres burned in the past 20 years. But the only big nursery in the state, a research center at New Mexico State University, can supply just 300,000 seedlings per year. The nearest U.S. Forest Service nursery serving the region is in Boise, Idaho, more than 700 miles away. Matthew Hurteau, a forest ecologist at the University of New Mexico who is a co-author on the reforestation study, told me he has been working with the state to develop a new nursery capable of producing 5 million seedlings a year. The project has received some funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the state government, but still needs to raise roughly $60 million more, Hurteau said.
Nurseries aren’t the only bottleneck. Hurteau has also been working to build the state’s seedbank, a time-consuming process that requires going out into the field and collecting seeds one by one. Another piece of the puzzle is workforce development. Dowbrowski pointed out that the majority of tree planting today is not done by government workers but rather by private contractors that hire H2B guest workers. Due to federal limits on immigration, reforestation contractors haven’t even been able to hire enough to meet current planting demand.
The new paper is far from the first to highlight these issues, and policymakers are beginning to address the problem. In 2021, the Forest Service got a major infusion of cash from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which lifted the cap on its annual budget for reforestation from $30 million to at least $140 million with the directive to clear its backlog.
But Dobrowski said this is a far cry from all that’s needed. In the study, he and his co-authors estimated that clearing the existing backlog in the West alone could cost at least $3.6 billion. And that’s a conservative estimate — it doesn’t include the cost of building more greenhouses or expanding the workforce. “The reality is that the feds don’t have the infrastructure and workforce to address this at scale,” he told me. The Forest Service budget also won’t address reforestation needs on private lands, which account for about 30% of forested land in the western U.S.
After establishing the scale of the problem, the paper raises a followup question: How can we scale the reforestation supply chain? There, it pivots to argue that “new economic drivers” — like carbon markets — “can modernize the reforestation pipeline and align tree planting efforts with broader ecosystem resilience and climate mitigation goals.”
This is precisely what Mast Reforestation, the company that funded the research, is trying to do. Mast is vertically integrated — it collects seeds, grows seedlings, and plants them. The company has developed software to improve the efficiency of each of these steps and increase the chances of success, i.e. to minimize tree deaths. To fund its tree-planting efforts, Mast sells carbon credits based on the amount of CO2 the trees will remove from the atmosphere over their lifetimes. It only plants on privately owned, previously burned land that wouldn’t have otherwise been replanted (because the owner couldn’t afford it) or regenerated (because the burn was so severe). The idea is to create a more stable source of financing for reforestation not subject to the whims of congressional appropriations.
Matthew Aghai, an ecologist who works as the chief science officer at Mast and another of the study’s co-authors, told me there’s a misunderstanding among policymakers and the general public that when forests burn, the government is ready to step in, and all that’s needed is more funding for seedling production. Aghai hopes the new paper illuminates the truth, and how risky it is to wait for state backing that may never arrive. He told me that he sought out Dobrowski to work with him because he knew, as a former academic himself, that if he had written the paper on his own, there would have been a stigma attached to it. “I think the best way for me to get those ideas out was actually something that needs to happen in our broader market, which is a lot more collaboration,” he said.
There are many climate advocates who believe the problems with carbon offsets can be fixed, that the markets can be reformed, and that “high quality” nature-based credits are possible. Indeed, many consider restoring trust in nature-based carbon credits an imperative if we are to fund reforestation at the level that tackling climate change requires. A few weeks ago, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce announced a new coalition called Symbiosis that will purchase up to 20 million tons of carbon removal credits from nature-based projects that “meet the highest quality bar” and “reflect the latest and greatest science.” Then, last Tuesday, the Biden administration followed up with a show of support for fixing the voluntary carbon market, because it can “deliver steady, reliable revenue streams to a range of decarbonization projects, programs, and practices, including nature-based solutions.”
But there is one fundamental problem with selling carbon credits based on trees, which no amount of reform or commitment to high integrity can solve. Fossil fuel CO2 emissions are essentially permanent — they stay in the atmosphere for upward of a thousand years. The CO2 sequestered by forests is not. Trees die. In a warming world, with worsening pest outbreaks, drought, and wildfires, the chances of a tree making it to a thousand years without releasing at least some of its stored carbon are slimmer than ever.
Hurteau, despite contributing to the paper, is deeply skeptical of financing reforestation through the sale of carbon credits. “We need to be making monster investments in maintaining forest cover globally, and I understand why people look at carbon finance to do this,” he said. “But you can't fly in an airplane and pay somebody to plant trees and have it zero out. From an energy balance perspective, for the Earth’s system, that's not real.”
When I raised this with Dobrowski, who endorsed the paper’s conclusions about the potential for carbon markets, he said it’s something he struggles with. He agreed that a ton of fossil fuel emissions is not the same as a ton of carbon sequestered in trees, but comes back to the fact that we need new incentive structures for people to do reforestation and be better stewards of our forests. It’s something I’ve heard echoed many times over in my reporting — the unspoken subtext essentially being, do you have any better ideas to raise the billions of dollars needed to do this?
Aghai had a slightly different take. To him, the one-to-one math isn’t so important “as long as the trajectory is moving forward, we're accumulating carbon, we're protecting watersheds, we're increasing the biodiversity index.” That may sound a bit hand-wavy — and it still gives a pass to polluters. But then he raised an interesting point, one that I don’t think I’ve heard before. The environmental damage caused by fossil fuels is not just the carbon they spew into the atmosphere. And the value forests provide is not just the carbon they sequester.
“Carbon’s our currency right now. It’s the thing that everyone is measuring around,” he said. “But what about all the other destruction that comes with the energy sector? There's cascading effects that impact water, soils, methane. Forests tend to stabilize everything by moving us toward homeostasis at a landscape level. For me, these markets will work when we catalyze them at a regional, dare I say global scale.”
Are these benefits enough to dismiss the incongruity inherent to forest carbon offsets? To say, for example, that trees might not actually offset the full amount of carbon that Google is putting in the atmosphere, but the funding Google is providing to get these trees in the ground makes some greater, unquantifiable progress toward our climate goals?
Some scientists have proposed alternative solutions. Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford, has advocated for “like for like” offsetting, in which companies only buy nature-based carbon credits to offset their emissions from nature-based sources, such as land cleared to grow food. To offset fossil fuel emissions, the logic goes, they could buy other kinds of credits, like those based on carbon captured from the air and sequestered deep underground for millenia. The European Union is currently considering a rule that would require companies adhere to this principle. Others have suggested companies could make “contributions” to climate mitigation through investments in forests, rather than buying offsets.
Both would be significant departures from the way corporate sustainability managers have used carbon markets in the past. But the current system is in crisis. The volume of carbon credits traded declined precipitously in the last two years as buyers were spooked off buying offsets. Forestry-related credits, in particular, contracted from $1.1 billion in sales in 2022 to just $351 million in sales in 2023, a 69% drop. Within that, the vast majority of the credits traded during both years came from forestry projects that reduced emissions, not reforestation projects like Mast’s that remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Even if you agree with Aghai that carbon markets are our best hope at addressing the reforestation gap, gaining the trust of buyers is a prerequisite. That means that scientists, companies, and governance groups like the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market first have to converge on what these credits actually mean and how they can be used.
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Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.
Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.
But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.
Trump administration officials — including the president himself — have touted cheaper oil to suggest that the economic response to the tariffs hasn’t been all bad. On Sunday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told NBC, “Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days, which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does.”
Trump picked up this line on Truth Social Monday morning. “Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION,” he wrote. He then spent the day posting quotes from Fox Business commentators echoing that idea, first Maria Bartiromo (“Rates are plummeting, oil prices are plummeting, deregulation is happening. President Trump is not going to bend”) then Charles Payne (“What we’re not talking about is, oil was $76, now it’s $65. Gasoline prices are going to plummet”).
But according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, pointing to falling oil prices as a stimulus is just another example of the “4D chess” theory, under which some market participants attribute motives to Trump’s trade policy beyond his stated goal of reducing trade deficits to as near zero (or surplus!) as possible.
Instead, oil markets are primarily “responding to the recession risk that comes from the tariff and the trade war,” Dutta told me. “That is the main story.” In short, oil markets see less global trade and less global production, and therefore falling demand for oil. The effect on household consumption, he said, was a “second order effect.”
It is true that falling oil prices will help “stabilize consumption,” Dutta told me (although they could also devastate America’s own oil industry). “It helps. It’ll provide some lift to real income growth for consumers, because they’re not spending as much on gasoline.” But “to fully offset the trade war effects, you basically need to get oil down to zero.”
That’s confirmed by some simple and extremely back of the envelope math. In 2023, households on average consumed about 700 gallons of gasoline per year, based on Energy Information Administration calculations that the average gasoline price in 2023 was $3.52, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics put average household gasoline expenditures at about $2,450.
Let’s generously assume that due to the tariffs and Trump’s regulatory and diplomatic efforts, gas prices drop from the $3.26 they were at on Monday, according to AAA, to $2.60, the average price in 2019. (GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haanwrote Monday that the tariffs combined with OPEC+ production hikes could lead gas prices “to fall below $3 per gallon.”)
Let’s also assume that this drop in gas prices does not cause people to drive more or buy less fuel-efficient vehicles. In that case, those same 700 gallons cost the average American $1,820, which would generate annual savings of $630 on average per household. If we went to the lowest price since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about $3 per gallon, total consumption of 700 gallons would cost a household about $2,100, saving $350 per household per year.
That being said, $1,820 is a pretty low level for annual gasoline consumption. In 2021, as the economy was recovering from the Covid recession and before gas prices popped, annual gasoline expenditures only got as low as $1,948; in 2020 — when oil prices dropped to literally negative dollars per barrel and gas prices got down to $1.85 a gallon — annual expenditures were just over $1,500.
In any case, if you remember the opening paragraphs of this story, even the most generous estimated savings would go nowhere near surmounting the overall rise in prices forecast by the Yale Budget Lab. $630 is less than $3,800! (JPMorgan has forecast a more mild increase in prices of 1% to 1.5%, but agrees that prices will likely rise and purchasing power will decline.)
But maybe look at it this way: You might be able to drive a little more than you expected to, even as your costs elsewhere are going up. Just please be careful! You don’t want to get into a bad accident and have to replace your car: New car prices are expected to rise by several thousand dollars due to Trump’s tariffs.
With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.
More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.
That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.
Yet lots of those cars are still around. I see a few prowling my workplace parking garage or roaming the streets of Los Angeles. With the faded performance of their old batteries, these long-running EVs aren’t good for much but short-distance city driving. Ignore the outdated battery pack for a second, though, and what surrounds that unit is a perfectly serviceable EV.
That’s exactly what a new brand of EV restorers see. Last week, car site The Autopiancovered DIYers who are scooping up cheap old Leafs, some costing as little as $3,000, and swapping in affordable Chinese-made 62 kilowatt-hour battery units in place of the original 24 kilowatt-hour units to instantly boost the car’s range to about 250 miles. One restorer bought a new battery on the Chinese site Alibaba for $6,000 ($4,500, plus $1,500 to ship that beast across the sea).
The possibility of the (relatively) simple battery swap is a longtime EV owner’s daydream. In the earlier days of the electrification race, many manufacturers and drivers saw simple and quick battery exchange as the solution for EV road-tripping. Instead of waiting half an hour for a battery to recharge, you’d swap your depleted unit for a fully charged one and be on your way. Even Tesla tested this approach last decade before settling for good on the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations.
There are still companies experimenting with battery swaps, but this technology lost. Other EV startups and legacy car companies that followed Nissan and Tesla into making production EVs embraced the rechargeable lithium-ion battery that is meant to be refilled at a fast-charging station and is not designed to be easily removed from the vehicle. Buy an electric vehicle and you’re buying a big battery with a long warranty but no clear plan for replacement. The companies imagine their EVs as something like a smartphone: It’s far from impossible to replace the battery and give the car a new life, but most people won’t bother and will simply move on to a new car when they can’t take the limitations of their old one anymore.
I think about this impasse a lot. My 2019 Tesla Model 3 began its life with a nominal 240 miles of range. Now that the vehicle has nearly six years and 70,000 miles on it, its maximum range is down to just 200, while its functional range at highway speed is much less than that. I don’t want to sink money into another vehicle, which means living with an EV’s range that diminishes as the years go by.
But what if, one day, I replaced its battery? Even if it costs thousands of dollars to achieve, a big range boost via a new battery would make an older EV feel new again, and at a cost that’s still far less than financing a whole new car. The thought is even more compelling in the age of Trump-imposed tariffs that will raise already-expensive new vehicles to a place that’s simply out of reach for many people (though new battery units will be heavily tariffed, too).
This is no simple weekend task. Car enthusiasts have been swapping parts and modifying gas-burning vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age, but modern EVs aren’t exactly made with the garage mechanic in mind. Because so few EVs are on the road, there is a dearth of qualified mechanics and not a huge population of people with the savvy to conduct major surgery on an electric car without electrocuting themselves. A battery-replacing owner would need to acquire not only the correct pack but also potentially adapters and other equipment necessary to make the new battery play nice with the older car. Some Nissan Leaf modifiers are finding their replacement packs aren’t exactly the same size, shape or weight, The Autopian says, meaning they need things like spacers to make the battery sit in just the right place.
A new battery isn’t a fix-all either. The motors and other electrical components wear down and will need to be replaced eventually, too. A man in Norway who drove his Tesla more than a million miles has replaced at least four battery packs and 14 motors, turning his EV into a sort of car of Theseus.
Crucially, though, EVs are much simpler, mechanically, than combustion-powered cars, what with the latter’s belts and spark plugs and thousands of moving parts. The car that surrounds a depleted battery pack might be in perfectly good shape to keep on running for thousands of miles to come if the owner were to install a new unit, one that could potentially give the EV more driving range than it had when it was new.
The battery swap is still the domain of serious top-tier DIYers, and not for the mildly interested or faint of heart. But it is a sign of things to come. A market for very affordable used Teslas is booming as owners ditch their cars at any cost to distance themselves from Elon Musk. Old Leafs, Chevy Bolts and other EVs from the 2010s can be had for cheap. The generation of early vehicles that came with an unacceptably low 100 to 150 miles of range would look a lot more enticing if you imagine today’s battery packs swapped into them. The possibility of a like-new old EV will look more and more promising, especially as millions of Americans realize they can no longer afford a new car.
On the shifting energy mix, tariff impacts, and carbon capture
Current conditions: Europe just experienced its warmest March since record-keeping began 47 years ago • It’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit in India’s capital Delhi where heat warnings are in effect • The risk of severe flooding remains high across much of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys.
The severe weather outbreak that has brought tornadoes, extreme rainfall, hail, and flash flooding to states across the central U.S. over the past week has already caused between $80 billion and $90 billion in damages and economic losses, according to a preliminary estimate from AccuWeather. The true toll is likely to be costlier because some areas have yet to report their damages, and the flooding is ongoing. “A rare atmospheric river continually resupplying a firehose of deep tropical moisture into the central U.S., combined with a series of storms traversing the same area in rapid succession, created a ‘perfect storm’ for catastrophic flooding and devastating tornadoes,” said AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter. The estimate takes into account damages to buildings and infrastructure, as well as secondary effects like supply chain and shipping disruptions, extended power outages, and travel delays. So far 23 people are known to have died in the storms. “This is the third preliminary estimate for total damage and economic loss that AccuWeather experts have issued so far this year,” the outlet noted in a release, “outpacing the frequency of major, costly weather disasters since AccuWeather began issuing estimates in 2017.”
AccuWeather
Low-emission energy sources accounted for 41% of global electricity generation in 2024, up from 39.4% in 2023, according to energy think tank Ember’s annual Global Electricity Review. That includes renewables as well as nuclear. If nuclear is left out of the equation, renewables alone made up 32% of power generation last year. Overall, renewables added a record 858 terawatt hours, nearly 50% more than the previous record set in 2022. Hydro was the largest source of low-carbon power, followed by nuclear. But wind and solar combined overtook hydro last year, while nuclear’s share of the energy mix reached a 45-year low. More solar capacity was installed in 2024 than in any other single year.
Ember
The report notes that demand for electricity rose thanks to heat waves and air conditioning use. This resulted in a slight, 1.4% annual increase in fossil-fuel power generation and pushed power-sector emissions to a new all-time high of 14.5 billion metric tons. “Clean electricity generation met 96% of the demand growth not caused by hotter temperatures,” the report said.
President Trump’s new tariffs will have a “limited” effect on the amount of solar components the U.S. imports from Asia because the U.S. already imposes tariffs on these products, according to a report from research firm BMI. That said, the U.S. still relies heavily on imported solar cells, and the new fees are likely to raise costs for domestic manufacturers and developers, which will ultimately be passed on to buyers and could slow solar growth. “Since the U.S.’s manufacturing capacity is insufficient to meet demand for solar, wind, and grid components, we do expect that costs will increase for developers due to the tariffs which will now be imposed upon these components,” BMI wrote.
In other tariff news, the British government is adjusting its 2030 target of ending the sale of new internal combustion engine cars to ease some of the pain from President Trump’s new 25% auto tariffs. Under the U.K.’s new EV mandate, carmakers will be able to sell new hybrids through 2035 (whereas the previous version of the rules banned them by 2030), and gas and diesel vans can also be sold through 2035. The changes also carve out exemptions for luxury supercar brands like McLaren and Aston Martin, which will be allowed to keep selling new ICE vehicles beyond 2030 because, the government says, they produce so few. The goal is to “help ease the transition and give industry more time to prepare.” British Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander insisted the changes have been “carefully calibrated” and their impact on carbon emissions is “negligible.” As The New York Timesnoted, the U.S. is the largest single-country export market for British cars.
The Environmental Protection Agency has approved Occidental Petroleum’s application to capture and sequester carbon dioxide at its direct air capture facility in Texas, and issued permits that will allow the company to drill and inject the gas more than one mile underground. The Stratos DAC plant is being developed by Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has reported, Stratos is designed to remove up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually and set to come online later this year. Its success (or failure) could shape the future of DAC investment at a time when the Trump administration is hollowing out the Department of Energy’s nascent Carbon Dioxide Removal team and casting doubt over the future of the DOE’s $3.5 billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program. While Stratos is not a part of the hubs program, it will use the same technology as Occidental’s South Texas DAC hub.
The Bezos Earth Fund and the Global Methane Hub are launching a $27 million effort to fund research into selectively breeding cattle that emit less methane.