Global warming threatens our White Chistmases with winter heatwaves. And our Arbor Days with record wildfires. And now it imperils our Independence Day fireworks with ever worsening droughts.

The Drudge Report headline blares “No Fireworks.” As USA Today reports:

Dozens of communities in drought-stricken areas are scrapping public fireworks displays and cracking down on backyard pyrotechnics to reduce the risk of fires.

“From a fire standpoint and a safety standpoint, it was an easy call,” Burbank Fire Chief Tracy Pansini says. He recommended calling off fireworks at the Starlight Bowl because they’re launched from a mountainside covered with vegetation that’s “all dead.”

The record droughts around the country have nixed fireworks in a half dozen states. What will happen to July 4th’s over much of the country if as predicted in an April Science article, we have “a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest“?

Here are some of the places canceling fireworks this year:

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports today that Range Fuels Inc., which will make ethanol from pine tree wood chips (and other biomass) has received “key environmental and construction permits from Georgia for a proposed $225 million cellulosic ethanol plant.” The company “plans to break ground on its 100-million-gallon-a-year factory in Soperton this summer.”

Kudos to Vinod Khosla, the Energy Department, and state of Georgia for making this important commercial breakthrough possible.

Global warming is not a political issue whose box we can check and move on; it is an intricate web of moral obligations, resource management, development, and an extensive network of once- or twice-removed consequences that are no less important.

For example, in a piece I helped put together with Kit Batten and Nat Gryll (at the Center for American Progress), we look more closely at what global warming means for the immigration debate – it is easily forgotten that the U.S. will not be exempt from global migration pressure as a result of warming.

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Trees are terrific in every way but one: They make lousy carbon offsets. That was the point of the First Rule of Carbon Offsets. But a number of comments at the Grist blog, and some media queries, have led me include two rare exceptions: certified urban trees and certified tropical forest preservation. The word “certified” is key in both cases.

For these two rare cases, I would allow trees to comprise no more than 10% of an overall offset portfolio (which should be heavily weighted toward efficiency, renewables, fuel switching, and perhaps carbon capture and storage). Also, their offset value should probably be discounted over time (because urban trees are unlikely to be permanent and tropical forest accounting is quite uncertain).

Let’s start with urban trees. I am a big fan of those — I have coauthored a Technology Review article and blogged on how shade trees in particular reduce the urban heat island, providing direct cooling as well as reduced air conditioning use. A good article on urban trees as offsets is here.

I would especially support urban trees that were 1) planted as shade trees and 2) part of an overall heat island mitigation strategy that included lighter color roofs. That said, I am unaware of any tree offset program that actually focuses on urban trees — primarily because they tend to be more expensive to plant and more expensive to maintain and monitor then trees outside of cities, which can be planted in large number in a small space (rather than individually over a large city).

The tricky part of urban tree planting is to set up a certification system that ensures these trees are permanent — and not, say, cut down by some landowner expanding their house or lost in a storm. I expect these will be rare offsets.

Now to tropical forest preservation, which is clearly both important and difficult. These are rare offsets for two reasons.

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This crucial question is examined in a recent article by SocialFunds.com and a major study by the Dutch.

The article lays out the various problems. Corn ethanol has a much poorer energy balance than sugar cane ethanol, and it’s driving up the price of corn “thereby making it harder for poor families to put food on the table.” And “biodiesel plantations of soy and palm are already encroaching on major carbon sinks like the Amazon and tropical forests in Indonesia.” That trend, if unchecked, will only make global warming worse.

In addition, “if farmed unsustainably, monocrop plantations of biofuel crops could severely deplete soils, as well as contaminate water supplies and aquatic environments with toxic chemicals and synthetic fertilizers.”

Finally, there are security concerns: “Poor farmers have been massacred and driven off their land by paramilitary groups in Columbia who are betting on huge profits from cultivating palm oil for biodiesel.”

So how to ensure biofuels are sustainable? Establish rigorous criteria, as in a Dutch report, “Sustainability of Brazilian bio-ethanol,” by the Copernicus Institute. Here they are:

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A newly released CalEPA report says the state should not adopt a safety valve as part of its greenhouse gas reduction strategy. Interestingly, the same California Air Resources Board (CARB) report says the state should consider an “allowance price floor”:

CARB could enforce a floor by purchasing allowances and removing them from circulation whenever the allowance price reached the lower limit…. A price floor has the attraction of giving investors certainty that the price of emission allowances would never fall below a specified level. While a price ceiling [i. e. safety valve] could jeopardize environmental integrity and reduce the return on investments in clean technologies, a price floor would reinforce environmental integrity.

Here is everything CARB’s Market Advisory Committee has to say about the safety valve in its report, “Recommendations for Designing a Greenhouse Gas Cap-and-Trade System for California“:

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