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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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That’s okay for clean energy firms, terrible for manufacturers, and a big risk for everyone.
Over the past few months, you could put together three different — and somewhat conflicting — pictures of the American economy.
For companies exposed to the AI boom, business has been good — excellent, even. The surge in ongoing capital investment into data centers and electricity has been larger than other recent booms, such as the telecom buildout. Electricity demand is soaring, especially in Texas and the Mid-Atlantic. Technology companies have signed power offtake deals with nuclear and hydroelectricity companies. If anything, companies exposed to artificial intelligence are more afflicted by congested supply chains and shortages than by slack demand — see the yearslong waiting lists to get a new transformer or natural gas turbine.
Outside of the AI economy, though, the economy has been a fair bit colder. You might even say it’s been frozen by indecision. When you talk to business leaders, they confess confusion about where things are heading. President Trump’s constantly changing tariffs — and his administration’s mercurial policy shifts — have made it difficult for non-AI-exposed businesses to plan long-term capital investment.
You could hear this view from clean energy manufacturing and traditional fossil firms alike. When I talked to John Henry Harris, the CEO of the medium-duty truck maker Harbinger Motors, for an episode of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast in June, he told me that his company was just about to shift a production process to Mexico when a last-minute Trump change made it cheaper to keep it in China. Meanwhile, an oil and gas executive recently told the Dallas Federal Reserve: “The Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry. Drill, baby, drill will not happen with this level of volatility.”
But the data contradicted that tepid view. This was the third picture that we were getting of the economy. Through the summer, federal surveys showed an economy that was performing okay. In May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy added 139,000 jobs; it gained another 147,000 jobs, apparently, in June. The AI boom was clearly contributing to those robust reports. But how could an economy that business leaders otherwise described as difficult be going so well?
Now we can finally square these disparate pictures.
On Friday, the federal government released its newest tranche of job numbers. The headline number was mediocre — the U.S. added a mere 73,000 jobs in July — but the guts of the report were worse. The government revised down its estimate of the May and June reports by a total of 258,000 jobs. With these new numbers in hand, it’s clear that the labor market has essentially stalled out since Liberation Day in April.
The unemployment rate slightly rose to 4.2%, which was in line with what economists predicted.
These new reports clarify that the broader American economy wasn’t actually thriving. Its summer strength was a mirage the whole time. Outside of AI, things are downright frigid. And as President Trump continues to shuffle tariffs and increase trade uncertainty, we can expect conditions to worsen. Trump seems hellbent even on clouding our ability to understand the underlying economy: on Friday afternoon, he fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, a career civil servant.
If you squint, you can see a hazy “AI sector” versus “non-AI sector” distinction in the data, even among the energy and decarbonization companies we cover at Heatmap. But it’s not obvious. Contrary to what you might expect when power demand is surging, utility employment was basically flat last month. Heavy and civil engineering construction jobs were up by 6,000, and “nonresidential specialty trade contractors” — a category that can include electricians — gained nearly 2,000 jobs.
But manufacturing lost 11,000 jobs last month, with the motor vehicles industry driving 2,600 of those losses. Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas jobs were down. The Institute of Supply Management report, a private survey of U.S. manufacturing activity, showed the sector shrank in July for the fifth month in a row.
And even though the Department of Government Efficiency’s deferred buyout program for more than 150,000 people has yet to hit, the federal government bled 12,000 jobs.
In a way, the clean energy industry — or at least solar, battery, nuclear, and geothermal developers — might consider themselves lucky. Despite the best efforts of Trump’s officials, and despite the chaos of President Trump’s policies, they have been able to eke through the past few months because of the AI boom. Nearly 70% of all new power-generating capacity added to the U.S. grid in the first quarter of this year came from solar panels, and the government has thrown its weight behind next-generation nuclear and geothermal technologies. A tepid jobs report might even bring some interest rate relief from the Federal Reserve.
But if that AI boom slows down, we should all watch out below.
A conversation with Heather O’Neill of Advanced Energy United.
This week’s conversation is with Heather O’Neill, CEO of renewables advocacy group Advanced Energy United. I wanted to chat with O’Neill in light of the recent effective repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credits and the action at the Interior Department clamping down on development. I’m quite glad she was game to talk hot topics, including the future of wind energy and whether we’ll see blue states step into the vacuum left by the federal government.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
During Trump 1.0 we saw blue states really step into the climate role in light of the federal government. Do you see anything similar taking place now?
I think this moment we’re in – it is a different moment.
How are we handling load growth? How are we making sure consumers are not paying for expensive stranded assets? Thinking about energy affordability? All of those challenges absolutely present a different moment and will result in a different response from state leaders.
But that’s where some of the changes our industry has gone through mean we’re able to meet that moment and provide solutions to those challenges. I think we need aggressive action from state leaders and I think we’ll see that from them, because of the challenges in front of them.
What does that look like?
Every state is different. Take Virginia for example. Five years after we passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act – a big, bold promise of action – we’re not on track. So what are the things we need to do to keep the foot on the accelerator there? This last legislative session we passed the virtual power plant legislation that’ll help tremendously in terms of grid flexibility. We made a big push around siting and permitting reform, and we didn’t quite get it over the finish line but that’s the kind of thing where we made a good foundation.
Or Texas. There’s so much advanced energy powering Texas right now. You had catastrophic grid failure in Hurricane Uri and look at what they’ve been able to build out in response to that: wind, solar, and in the last few years, battery storage, and they just passed the energy waste reduction [bill].
We need to build things and make it easier to build – siting and permitting reform – but it’s also states depending on their environment looking at and engaging with their regional transmission organization.
You saw that last week, a robust set of governors across the PJM region called on them to improve their interconnection queue. It’s about pushing and finding reforms at the market level, to get these assets online and get on the grid deployed.
I think the point about forward momentum, I definitely see what you’re saying there about the need for action. Do you see state primacy laws or pre-emption laws? Like what Michigan, New York, and California have done…
I’m not a siting expert, but the reform packages that work the best include engagement from communities in meaningful ways. But they also make sure you’re not having a vocal minority drowning out the benefits and dragging out the process forever. There are timelines and certainty attached to it while still having meaningful local engagement.
Our industry absolutely has to continue to lean into more local engagement and community engagement around the benefits of a project and what they can deliver for a community. I also think there’s a fair amount of making sure the state is creating that pathway, providing that certainty, so we can actually move forward to build out these projects.
From the federal government’s perspective, they’re cracking down on wind and solar projects while changing the tax credits. Do you see states presenting their own incentives for renewables in lieu of federal incentives? I’ve wondered if that’ll happen given inflation and affordability concerns.
No, I think we have to be really creative as an industry, and state leaders have to be creative too. If I’m a governor, affordability concerns were already front and center for me, and now given what just happened, they’re grappling with incredibly tight state budgets that are about to get tighter, including health care. They’re going to see state budgets hit really hard. And there’s energy impacts – we’re cutting off supply, so we’re going to see prices go up.
This is where governors and state leaders can act but I think in this context of tight state budgets I don’t think we can expect to see states replacing incentive packages.
It’ll be: how do we take advantage of all the flexible tools that we have to help shape and reduce demand in meaningful ways that’ll save consumers money, as well as push on building out projects and getting existing juice out of the transmission system we have today.
Is there a future for wind in the United States?
It is an incredibly challenging environment – no question – for all of our technologies, wind included. I don’t want to sugar-coat that at all.
But I look at the whole picture, and I include wind in this: the technologies have improved dramatically in the past couple of decades and the costs have come down. When you look around at what resources are around to deploy, it’s advanced energy. We’re seeing it continue to grow. There’ll be headwinds, and it’ll be more expensive for all of us. But I look at what our industry and our technologies are able to offer and deliver, and I am confident we’ll continue to see growth.
The Grain Belt Express was just the beginning.
The anti-renewables movement is now coming for transmission lines as the Trump administration signals a willingness to cut off support for wires that connect to renewable energy sources.
Last week, Trump’s Energy Department with a brief letter rescinded a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee to Invenergy for the Grain Belt Express line that would, if completed, connect wind projects in Kansas to areas of Illinois and Indiana. This decision followed a groundswell of public opposition over concerns about land use and agricultural impacts – factors that ring familiar to readers of The Fight – which culminated in Republican Senator Josh Hawley reportedly asking Donald Trump in a meeting to order the loan’s cancellation. It’s unclear whether questions around the legality of this loan cancellation will be resolved in the courts, meaning Invenergy may just try to trudge ahead and not pick a fight with the Trump administration.
But the Grain Belt Express is not an anomaly. Across the country, transmission lines tied to both renewable sources and more conventional fuels – both fossil and nuclear – are facing a growing chorus of angst and anguish from the same crowds that are fighting renewable energy. In some ways, it’s a tale as old as widespread transmission itself. But I am also talking about farmers, ranchers, and rural towns who all now mention transmission lines in the same exasperated breaths they use to bemoan solar, wind, and battery storage. Many of the same communities fighting zero-carbon energy sources see those conflicts as part of a broader stand against a new age of tech industrial build-out – meaning that after a solar or wind farm is defeated, that activism energy is likely to go elsewhere, including expanding the grid.
I’ve been trying to figure out if there are other situations like Grain Belt, where a project facing local headwinds could potentially be considered no longer investable from a renewables-skeptic federal perspective. And that’s why since Invenergy lost its cash for that project, I have been digging into the Cimarron Link transmission line, another Invenergy facility proposed to carry wind energy from eastern Oklahoma to the western part of the state, according to a map on the developer’s website.
Do you remember the campaign to ban wind energy in Oklahoma that I profiled at the start of this year? Well, one of the most prominent scalps that this activism movement has claimed was bagged in late 2024, when they successfully pressured Governor Kevin Stitt into opposing a priority transmission corridor proposed by the Biden administration. Then another one of the activists’ biggest accomplishments came through an anti-wind law enacted this year that would, among other things, require transmission projects to go through a new certification program before the state’s Corporation Commission. Many of the figures fighting Cimarron and another transmission line project – NextEra’s Heartland Spirit Connector – are also involved in fighting wind and solar across the state, and see the struggles as part and parcel with each other.
Invenergy appears to want to soldier on through this increasingly difficult process, or at least that’s according to a letter some landowners received that was posted to Facebook. But these hurdles will seriously impact the plausibility that Cimarron Link can be completed any time soon.
Now, on top of these hurdles, critics want Cimarron Link to get the Grain Belt treatment. Cimarron Link was told last fall it was awarded north of $300 million from the Energy Department as a part of DOE’s Transmission Facilitation Program.
Enter Darren Blanchard, a farmer who says his property is in the path of Cimarron Link and has been one of the main public faces of opposition against the project. Blanchard has recently been pleading with the DOE to nix the disposition of that money if it hasn’t been given already. Blanchard wrote the agency a lengthy request that Cimarron get similar treatment to Grain Belt which was made public in the appendix of the agency’s decision documents related to the loan cancellation (see page 23 of this document).
To Blanchard’s surprise, he got a reply from the Transmission Facilitation Program office “responding on behalf of” Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The note, to him, read like they wanted him to know they saw his comment: “We appreciate you taking the time to share your views on the project,” it read.
Now, this might’ve been innocuous. I haven’t heard back from the Energy Department about Cimarron Link and I am personally skeptical of the chances a grant is canceled easily. There is no high-level politician calling for the cancellation of this money right now, like there was in Sen. Josh Hawley and the Grain Belt Express.
But I do believe that if there is a will, there is a way with the Trump administration. And as anti-renewables sentiments abound further, there’ll be more ways to create woe for transmission projects like Cimarron that connect to renewable resources. Should voices like Blanchard aim their sights at replicating what happened with Grain Belt, well… bets may be off.
Over the next few weeks, I will be chronicling more fights over individual transmission projects connected to zero-carbon sources. Unique but with implications for a host of proposed wires across the country, they’re trend-setters, so to speak. Next week I’ll be tackling some power lines out West, so stay tuned.