This Oregon forest was supposed to store carbon for 100 years. Now it's on fire.
September 18, 2020
The Lionshead Fire, one of the many burning during the 2020 Wildfires, is burning almost all of Oregon's largest forest dedicated to sequestering carbon dioxide. This is one of the forests California uses to balance its Carbon Offsets law - meant to counterbalance extra emissions from companies buying carbon offsets. "If a forest burns down, you didn't keep carbon out of the atmosphere. So if you let a refinery pollute more because they bought an offset premised on those trees, you have a problem." - Danny Cullenward, energy economist at Stanford.