The Department of Natural Resources has announced partnerships with 4 pilot biomass projects, including one involving IWF and our partner Atlas Pellets, the largest wood pellet producer in Washington State, to move renewable energy from woody biomass along in Washington State.  In a Press Release, Lands Commissioner Peter Goldmark said that the four partnerships "will put their technologies to work using forest products they purchase from state trust lands to produce clean, sustainable energy and rural jobs".

As we hear about the Copenhagen talks and what is coming out of them, very little is being discussed about the impact of US agricultural practices and climate change.  The Seattle Times had an article up last week about a UW climate scientist, David Battisti, and his shift in interest from the looking at the regional impacts of global warming to understanding the impacts of climate change on crops around the world. 

David Owen, New Yorker staff writer and author, has written a book, "Green Metropolis" about the energy savings inherent in living and working in highly populated and dense areas.   Owen says that the most realistic way to reduce our carbon footprints is to live in "densely-settled, pedestrian-friendly, public-transit-oriented cities like New York".  Furthermore, he suggests that cities such as New York stop worrying about what he calls "environmental fixations" such as residential solar panels and LEED-certified buildings and instead concentrate on “old-fashioned quality-of-life concerns” such as education, crime, noise, and recreational amenities in order to draw people back into the cities.

Just two weeks before the the start of the international climate meetings in Copenhagen, both the US and China have set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  President Obama pledged a provisional target, the first time that the U.S. has offered even a tentative promise on Wednesday.  Obama made a commitment to cut emissions by 17% of 2005 levels.

Today, the Chinese government announced that it had set a target to reduce "carbon intensity" by 40-45 % of 2005 levels. 

Libby, Montana, is one of those old mining towns that got the short stick environmentally after the logging and mining companies closed down, leaving severely polluted earth and air behind them.  It was designated as a Superfund site in 2000 as a result of the asbestos-contaminated soils left in the area when W.R. Grace closed down the last vermiculite mine.  Much has been written and chronicles about the asbestos dangers to the population of 2900 remaining folks.

There appears to be a very clear linkage between the increased severity of wildfires and a little as 1-degree of increase in global warming.  Kevin Drum writes at Mother Jones about why California's wildfires have been getting worse, larger, and more frequent.  It may be even worse in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest.  Drum says that roughly half of the increase in western wildfire activity is due to land use issues - people building in undeveloped areas they ought not to build in, basically.  The other half is due to global warming.  Higher temperatures lead to reduced snowpack and an earlier melt, producing a longer and drier fire season.