California’s unprecedented drought is finally bringing down some of the big trees in the state.  After four years of little rain, they’re starting to succumb in droves.  I was struck by this when in Yosemite a few weeks ago.  Huge stands of pines looked like ghosts, dotting the mountains almost like fall colors in the east.  The picture above (not mine) illustrates it to some extent.

The Brown Administration in California is trying to make lemonade out of these lemons.  Specifically, they want to clear the trees out rather than have them burn in destructive, out-of-control wildfires and then use the biomass to generate electricity.  As the San Gabriel Valley Tribune reports:

The governor is asking various state agencies, including Caltrans and Cal Fire, to identify the areas where dead trees pose the highest risks. “He is directing state agencies to remove dead and dying trees in those areas,” said Greg Renick, information officer with the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services Southern Region.

He said the governor is asking the state to provide counties in affected areas with heavy equipment, such as wood chippers. Caltrans can use the wood chips as mulch, according to the proclamation. Brown may use his emergency powers to increase the days allowed for burning tree waste. He may ask the California Public Utilities Commission to fast track new bio-fuel plants using tree waste from impacted areas.

I’m all in favor of using this kind of biomass, as well as biomass from thinning forests more generally, as feedstocks for energy production. Our forests in California and across the west are badly overgrown after 19th century clear-cutting followed by a century or more of forest fire suppression. We need to improve the health of the forest and ensure that these feedstocks don’t just burn up in catastrophic wildfires, returning more carbon to the atmosphere. Instead, we can use that carbon to offset petroleum and other fossil fuel emissions through bioenergy.