The Yurok tribe has sold millions of dollars’ worth of carbon credits, known as offsets, to some of the state’s biggest polluters. The tribe’s forestry program is one of more than two dozen operations across the nation that have generated offsets for California’s growing carbon market.

The initiative is giving the Yurok tribe a new way to make money while it improves wildlife habitat, expands its forestry staff and acquires land in its ancestral territory near the mouth of the Klamath River in Del Norte and Humboldt counties.

Driving the new activity is the state’s 2006 global warming law, AB 32, which aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The state’s cap-and-trade program, which launched in 2012 for hundreds of the state’s top carbon emitters and is set to expand Jan. 1, is key to meeting that target.

Cap-and-trade sets a statewide limit on greenhouse gas emissions and requires companies to buy one permit, called an allowance, for each metric ton they emit. Allowances can be purchased in government-issued auctions or on California’s carbon market.

The amount of pollution permitted declines each year, making allowances more scarce and expensive over time and giving businesses an economic incentive to cut emissions.

Companies can use less-expensive carbon offsets — credits obtained by essentially paying others to reduce greenhouse gases — to cover up to 8% of their emissions. If used to their full potential, offsets could account for as much as half of the required pollution reductions over the next several years.

The California Air Resources Board issues offsets to businesses that destroy planet-warming refrigerants, to dairies that capture the potent greenhouse gas methane, and to landowners, such as the Yurok tribe, who commit for the next 100 years to manage their forest to pull more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

“The value of preserving trees for 100 years is something that was unheard of from an economics perspective in the past,” said Timothy O’Connor, who directs the California Climate Initiative for the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit advocacy group that supports the state’s cap-and-trade and offset programs. “This new dimension is enabling landowners to make decisions that are both good for the planet and good for their pocketbooks.”

Carbon offsets can also produce reductions outside of California and in industries that wouldn’t otherwise be required to cut emissions under the cap-and-trade regulations, such as livestock and forestry.

But critics of carbon offsets, including some environmental groups, say there is no way to know whether additional carbon stored in forests is a result of cap-and-trade or whether it would not have occurred otherwise.

The state Air Resources Board says its rigorous rules ensure that every carbon credit issued meets the law’s requirement that all reductions in greenhouse gas emissions be “real, permanent, quantifiable, verifiable and enforceable.”

The state’s 113-page protocol for forest offset projects details steps for measuring and calculating the amount of carbon dioxide that trees remove from the atmosphere and includes extensive monitoring, reporting and verification requirements.

In April, the state Air Resources Board issued the Yurok tribe more than 800,000 offset credits in one of the first forestry projects approved under cap-and-trade. At current market rates, they can be sold for around $9 a credit, making them worth several million dollars.

Nathan Voegeli, an attorney for the tribe, said it usually sells offsets directly to carbon emitters in large transactions. He declined to identify the buyers but said they include major oil companies.

http://www.latimes.com/science/la-me-carbon-forest-20141216-story.html#page=1