Two Energy Efficiency Resources Brought to You by the Climate And Energy Team!
March 22, 2023 No Comments
The Climate & Energy team provides two resources to help reduce energy use and save on energy bills!
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California is in the midst of what is shaping up to be one of the largest wildfire seasons on record… yet again.
Over the last several years, advocating for increased wildfire funding, forest management, and the accelerating need to reestablish a natural fire ecosystem has been a priority here at SBC. In this time, we’ve seen progress on how the state understands the importance of forest restoration and wildfire mitigation.
But unfortunately, the rate of progress we’re seeing is simply not enough.
In order to actually restore our forests and protect the safety of Sierra communities, we need to deploy every tool in the toolbox we have at our disposal. Forest biomass is an underutilized, underfunded, and often misunderstood tool that can help us meet our forest health, community well-being, and climate resilience goals.
Forest biomass utilization, in which excess material from forest management treatments is converted to create electricity and innovative wood products, can restore our forests and reduce the risks of catastrophic wildfire, all while bolstering rural economic activity and expanding renewable energy resources.
In 2019, SBC explored the nuances and benefits of forest biomass utilization in Biomass in the Sierra Nevada: A Case for Healthy Forests and Rural Economies.
Our follow-up to this white paper report is a three-part video series, Balance & Biomass: A Solution to Emissions, Catastrophic Fire, & Communities in Crisis, that identifies the opportunities of forest biomass utilization at both the local and statewide levels and begs the question, why isn’t the state doing more to support appropriately scaled forest biomass utilization in the Sierra’s communities?
Forest biomass is a pragmatic piece of the puzzle that can solve our wildfire crisis, a crisis that state legislators are underestimating – and consequently underfunding – what it will take to fix.
Sierra Business Council is calling for the State of California to invest $3 billion in forest restoration efforts over the next 10 years. Without this level of investment in forest resilience solutions that we have at our disposal, including landscape scale restoration, prescribed fire, workforce training and development, ecological thinning, as well as forest biomass utilization, our wildfire crisis will continue to worsen year after year.
We can meet our forest health, community well-being, and climate resilience goals. But we need to invest now in our future.
Balance & Biomass makes the case for this investment in biomass utilization in the Sierra Nevada through the following chapters:
Balance & Biomass was made possible through the support of the BlueTechValley Innovation Cluster funded in part by the California Energy Commission EPIC program. Sierra Business Council would also like to thank the following individuals and organizations that made this series possible:
Walk Scherer, Paradise Resident
Judy and Bob Dean, Calaveras County Residents
Matthew Cunha-Rigby, HDR Architecture, Inc.
Julia Levin, Bioenergy Association of California
Jan Buck, Sierra Booster
Dan Sanchez, Joint Institute for Wood Product Innovation, UC Berkeley
Glenda Humiston, Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of California
Ryan Emmett Tompkins, Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of California
Teal Brown Zimring, Galvanize Partners
Thurman Roberts, Sierra Nevada Alliance Forestry Corps
The Climate & Energy team provides two resources to help reduce energy use and save on energy bills!
The Sierra Healthy Refrigeration Program will provide technical assistance for refrigeration rebate applications and access to free refrigeration units to bring healthy food options to low-access areas.
CERF Announcement Sierra Business Council Receives Eastern Sierra CERF Region Contract FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 14, 2023 MEDIA CONTACT Jill Sanford, Communications
we’d be poor advocates of the region if we failed to acknowledge the history and current role of the original stewards of the Sierra Nevada. From the Maidu to the Miwok, the Niesenan to the Shoshone, the Paiute to the Washoe, and all the other diverse cultures throughout the region, the Indigenous peoples of Sierra Nevada were the original caretakers of this landscape, and they are critical partners that should be respected and involved in this region’s future.
For fear of sounding like a broken record, I will skip over the detailed account of how my fellowship/life is not exactly as I expected it to be, thanks to the pandemic. It’s 2021 but you could also call it December 56th, 2020. It didn’t become a brand new world January 1st, we are still wearing masks, working from home in our sweatpants, and trying to avoid refreshing the news. At the same time, I have been pondering the beauty of my unexpected journey to CivicSpark and SBC.
I entered college knowing I would major in environmental studies. This interest in the environment was the constant in my ever-changing adolescence (and involved many phases, including when I only wore green, yikes!) and it helped direct me when I arrived on campus as one of the 45,000 students at the University of Washington. I started taking environmental classes right off the bat and didn’t have to flounder around, searching for some deep unstoked passion. It was already there.
Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, I have grown up with the luxury of beautiful mountains, trails, rivers, and beaches. I spent most of my free time recreating outdoors and waited for any opportunity to venture to new places. Studying the environment seemed like an extension of the things I love. I could learn about the birds, trees, and rocks that I saw. I could learn about the tides and the rivers that I know. I could become an expert on my home.