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New research casts doubt on a popular climate solution.
A lengthy report from the nonprofit World Resources Institute released Thursday warns of a “growing land squeeze” where increasing demand for food, housing, and wood is threatening the world’s prospects for tackling climate change. Adding to the competition, the authors argue, is something that’s been broadly advertised as a climate solution — the use of mass timber.
Architects and sustainable building advocates have been spreading the gospel about mass timber for at least a decade. The idea is that replacing carbon-intensive materials like concrete and steel with wood can reduce the climate impact of building stuff. Forests suck up carbon from the atmosphere, and using that timber in the built environment is one way to lock it away more permanently.
Countless articles and photo essays and magazine stories featuring sanctuary-like skyscrapers made of wood have painted it as a no-brainer for sustainability. The concept has also been backed up by academic research published in peer-reviewed journals.
But according to Timothy Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University and the lead author of the land squeeze report, they’ve been looking at the carbon footprint of timber the wrong way. “What they’re really doing is treating land and plant growth as free,” Searchinger told me.
Mass timber advocates often emphasize that the wood must be “carbon neutral” and come from sustainably managed forests. The idea is that as long as the amount of wood removed from a forest for construction matches the forest’s growth that year, there’s no net impact on the climate. “What that misses,” said Searchinger, “is that if you didn’t harvest it, the forest would grow and absorb carbon. You’re keeping that added growth from happening.”
This is often called the “opportunity cost,” i.e. “the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen,” as the Oxford dictionary puts it. Not all researchers agree that it’s always appropriate to account for this kind of what-if scenario. Some told me that you can't assume forests have the ability to perpetually accumulate more carbon — mature forests reach a sort of stasis.
But Searchinger and his co-authors highlight another frequent accounting error with mass timber. Only a small portion of the wood harvested makes it into the final product. Some of it is lost to roots and bark and other debris left behind in the forest or burned, and some of it goes into shorter-lived products like wood chips and paper that decompose and release carbon in a matter of years. “So only a small amount actually gets into the building. All that other carbon is emitted. That is what they’re ignoring,” said Searchinger.
The authors analyzed a number of different scenarios with different types of wood sourced from different types of forests, with greater and greater amounts diverted to construction, searching for any conditions that would make mass timber pencil out as a net benefit for the climate compared with concrete and steel. Few did.
There were more or less two conditions that had to be met to see significant carbon savings. At least 70% of the wood harvested had to make it into the construction product, and the wood needed to be sourced from a fast-growing tree farm. The problem with that, Searchinger told me, is that all of our existing tree plantations are meeting existing demand for other wood products. “So there’s no free lunch out there.”
The calculus could shift if we’re able to reduce demand for other wood products, he said, but by then we may have figured out how to affordably cut emissions from the production of steel and concrete.
I sent the paper to several outside experts who were critical of its findings. One issue they raised was that some forests, when they are not managed, become more susceptible to severe wildfires, disease, and other disturbances, and can thus turn into net sources of carbon emissions as trees burn or rot. Austin Himes, an ecologist at Mississippi State University, told me that in the western U.S., for example, there's good evidence that removing timber and excess fuel can make the remaining forest more resilient and enable it to suck up more carbon.
Himes also stressed that this kind of analysis is complex, and the results are sensitive to tons of assumptions about location, transportation, manufacturing, and what happens to any material that doesn’t make it into the final product. But most of the literature he’s seen strongly suggests that using wood in construction to meet growing demand in our cities is going to have long term benefits.
“There’s uncertainty around that conclusion and this report highlights some of that, and so there’s obviously need for continually assessing a lot of those assumptions,” he said, “but this is one report based on one model and one set of assumptions.”
I also spoke with Beverly Law, a forest ecologist at the Oregon State University, whose research is cited extensively in the report and who praised its findings. She echoed Himes' statement that there is a lot of uncertainty about how to accurately account for the emissions benefits of substituting wood for concrete or steel, but she agrees with the new report that those benefits have been widely overestimated. “Substitution gets really hard,” Law said. “It’s a number that people can fiddle with.”
She pointed me to a 2019 paper by ecologist Mark Harmon which questioned common assumptions made when calculating the emissions benefits of substituting wood for concrete or steel, including not accounting for the fact that the energy used to produce concrete and steel is getting cleaner as coal is replaced with natural gas and renewables on the grid. Innovations in concrete also have the potential to turn the material into a carbon sink.
The bigger picture painted by the land squeeze report should give any mass timber advocate pause, even putting the carbon analysis aside. Demand for wood is expected to rise dramatically between now and 2050, without a growing mass timber industry. The authors estimate that an area roughly the size of the continental United States could be harvested for wood by then, releasing 3.5 to 4.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, or more than 10% of recent annual global emissions.
Searchinger’s team does offer recommendations to shrink those numbers, including expanded recycling of wood products, reduced use of packing materials, the adoption of more efficient wood-burning stoves, and aid to developing countries to move away from wood-based heating systems. There's also potential to increase yields from existing tree farms.
Beyond wood products, the report also raises big, difficult questions about how we might use land more efficiently to feed and house a growing population on a finite planet, especially as tackling climate change requires preserving and restoring natural habitats to store more carbon.
As Searchinger and his co-authors wrote in a blog post about the report, “Given this squeeze, it is dangerous to adopt policies that encourage yet more human demands for land and its outputs.”
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.