Wood biofuel project could worsen air quality, critics say

STOCKTON, Calif. —  For Laura Ornelas and thousands of other South Stockton residents, harmful air pollution is a fact of life.

Hemmed in by freeways and rail lines and bordered by heavy industry and the Port of Stockton, the area has been dubbed an “Asthma Capital” by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

Ornelas, who rents a house in the Boggs Tract neighborhood, says she has to wear a mask just to work outside, or to clean the soot off her car every few days. She said her 91-year-old mother’s mysterious cough worsened after they moved in at the start of the year.

“We just need to get out of here,” she said.

For Ornelas and her neighbors, local air pollution could get even worse if officials approve plans for a massive forest management and biofuel project that would harvest trees across California through wildfire mitigation work, process them into wood pellets at facilities in Lassen and Tuolumne counties and ship them off to Europe and Asia to burn for electricity.

All of the wood — more than 1 million tons of it every year — would converge at storage facilities at the Port of Stockton.

The proposal has alarmed local groups that say the community has suffered poor health and government neglect for far too long. They question whether the proposal will actually reduce the threat of wildfire, and wonder why South Stockton should shoulder the burden of increased truck and shipping pollution.

Environmental advocates also worry that the forest thinning portion of the project will focus more on biofuel companies’ bottom lines than forest health, doing little to prevent wildfires.

The enormous project has been proposed by Golden State Natural Resources, a nonprofit created by a coalition of rural county governments.

Heavy machinery transports logs at a Tuolumne County property where GSNR hopes to build a pellet processing plant.

(Noah Haggerty / Los Angeles Times)

GSNR’s leaders — as well as many residents from Stockton to the Sierra foothills — view the project as a bold and much-needed step toward protecting California’s people and forests from wildfires, creating a renewable energy source and generating jobs.

GSNR claims that, although the project will release a significant amount of carbon into the air through operations and the trees that are burned for energy, the project could ultimately be carbon neutral — or even carbon negative — through the wildfires it prevents and the carbon re-absorbed by forests after they’re treated.

However, scientific studies have found that biofuel projects often fail to meet this benchmark, and sometimes even perform worse than coal. But researchers note that using more sustainable harvest practices, such as the wildfire mitigation work GSNR says it will perform, can result in lower carbon emissions.

“I think what differentiates us is that we’re coming from this from a public agency ethos,” said Patrick Blacklock, president of GSNR. “We’re here to help our communities and invest in our communities.”

Megan Fiske, an environmental advocate with Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch, photographs a dogwood tree in Stanislaus National Forest.

(Noah Haggerty / Los Angeles Times)

Sixty miles inland from Stockton, Megan Fiske, an environmental advocate with Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch, drove through the winding dirt roads of Stanislaus National Forest in her black Tacoma pickup. The understory of the ponderosa and sugar pine forest was speckled with manzanita, oak trees and dogwoods with yellow leaves, marking the start of fall.

Piles of twigs, pine needles and larger logs are scattered through the forest. The bases of many pine trunks were charred black — but the culprits weren’t a logging company or a wildfire. It was the U.S. Forest Service.

The agency’s SERAL project is one of the Forest Service’s 10 initial projects trailblazing an ambitious national, interagency plan to confront the crisis of worsening wildfires and protect vulnerable communities. (SERAL is short for Social and Ecological Resilience Across the Landscape.)

GSNR hopes to use leftover wood from projects like these to produce more than 1 million tons of pellets annually.

Many forest health experts view prescribed burns as the golden standard of forest health management tools. But in many places where fire has been suppressed for decades — if not centuries — there’s often so much vegetation that even controlled burns run the risk of exploding into a megafire.

When the Forest Service performs mechanical thinning, it often leaves piles of logs that cannot be sold. The GSNR project hopes to use such logs in its biofuel business.

(Noah Haggerty / Los Angeles Times)

So, forest experts must turn to another tool.

Mechanical thinning does much of the work of prescribed burning methodically by hand: cutting down small trees, removing brush, pruning the lower limbs of larger trees so fire can’t climb up into the canopy.

Once all this vegetation is chopped, it’s typically thrown into piles in the forest, which are then burned.

GSNR wants to process this wood instead, and also conduct its own mechanical thinning work.

In 2021, a task force created by Gov. Gavin Newsom found that California needs to treat roughly 1 million acres of forest with mechanical thinning and prescribed burns every year to prevent the dangerous buildup of flammable vegetation that can fuel devastating wildfires, but in the 2023-24 fiscal year, California treated just over 130,000 acres.

Megan Fiske stands in a clear-cut logging site. She and other forest advocates fear that the GSNR biofuel project would open the door to similar practices.

(Noah Haggerty / Los Angeles Times)

GSNR plans to thin up to 85,000 acres every year. But whereas mechanical thinning projects like SERAL are backed by decades of forest science, some activists and forest watchers worry financial pressures could push GSNR to go too far.

Most forest health experts agree that trees with a diameter at chest height of around 16 inches are fair game for mechanical thinning work. But while GSNR’s draft environmental impact report guides its projects to follow this consensus, it leaves the door open for the nonprofit to chop down trees with a diameter of up to 30 inches.

GSNR says that it will do its best to stick to 16 inches and under, but that some situations may warrant larger trees to get the chop. It has yet to explicitly define which situations would allow for this exception.

Activists worry that, if GSNR is struggling to meet its production goals, it could abuse this ambiguity to cut larger trees in a wide range of circumstances.

“That’s why we’re going through this process — to get that feedback, to get the recommendations,” Blacklock said of concerns about the size of trees allowed to be taken. “Are there ways to tighten it up, to alleviate those concerns? … If so, then we would absolutely consider it and build it into the final” environmental impact report.

Parts of South Stockton already have worse air quality than 99% of the state.

In the most affected neighborhoods, residents have a life expectancy 13 years lower than the state’s average. They are also 60% more likely to die of a respiratory disease and almost twice as likely to die of heart disease.

“Asthma is so accepted in our community that it’s like getting glasses,” said Dillon Delvo, co-founder of Little Manila Rising, a group that was created to protect the city’s Filipino neighborhood — once the largest population of Filipinos outside the Philippines — from getting bulldozed.

The air near the Port of Stockton already fails to meet state and federal regulations on particulate matter made up of soot, metals, construction dust and smoke. A draft of GSNR’s environmental impact report found that the project would worsen the pollution by roughly 2%.

The pellet facility operations would also exacerbate nitrous oxide air pollution — which can cause eye irritation, nausea and respiratory issues — by roughly 18%, in violation of local air standards, according to the report.

“It’s not just the fact that they’re trying to bring these industries in,” Delvo said, “but they’ve come at a cost specifically to the health of South Stockton residents.”

In 2015, a San Joaquin County grand jury found that South Stockton — cut off from the north by a cross-town freeway — had been largely neglected by City Hall for years.

Through the early 2000s, Delvo and Little Manila Rising co-founder Dawn Mabalon successfully got the city to designate the Filipino neighborhood within South Stockton, just a few miles southeast of Boggs Tract, as a historic site and fended off an eight-square-block project to demolish homes and replace them with a strip mall. But they struggled to get environmental justice programs off the ground.

Gloria Estefani Alonso Cruz, environmental justice advocacy coordinator at Little Manila Rising, reflects at an altar for co-founder Dawn Mabalon, who died of an asthma attack in 2018.

(Noah Haggerty / Los Angeles Times)

“The city refused to partner with us, which is insane,” Delvo said. “All the data shows — obviously, it’s in the 100% percentile for asthma-related issues. You built a freeway next to places where there are families and children and schools. They’re all breathing that air.”

Then, in 2018, Mabalon suddenly died of an asthma attack at age 46.

“I didn’t really understand that a diagnosis at the age of 11 could mean a death sentence at the age of 46,” Delvo said. “It took Dawn’s death for me to understand that.”

In the years since, Little Manila Rising has seen significant progress. It started a program — Decreasing Asthma Within Neighborhoods (DAWN), named after Mabalon — aimed at helping residents manage their asthma.

The city is also starting to see millions from investments announced in 2017 to clean up its air and address environmental inequities.

Delvo and Gloria Estefani Alonso Cruz, Little Manila’s environmental justice advocacy coordinator, view the GSNR project as a betrayal of these promises.

Although GSNR’s environmental review found that an increase in pollution in violation of current standards is unavoidable, Blacklock said GSNR hopes to support efforts to electrify port operations to reduce pollution. In October, the port won a $110-million federal grant to do so.

GSNR also claims the pollution from the port would pale in comparison with pollution created from wildfires — including in the Stockton area.

Particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers in size, PM2.5, sits at a concentration around 40 micrograms per cubic meter in Stockton, but the 2020 August Complex fires raised that level to more than 70 for multiple days. GSNR’s project would raise pollution levels by roughly 1 microgram per cubic meter for the duration of its operations in the port area.

Industrial buildings stand at the Port of Stockton.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

In general, chronic exposure to PM2.5 can result in health outcomes eight times worse than short-term exposures from sources such as wildfires, according to Joel Schwartz, a professor of environmental epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

However, he noted, GSNR’s project could potentially reduce short-term exposures for many more people than the number for whom it would worsen chronic exposures, likely resulting in a net positive.

That’s a troubling prospect for area residents.

“I want prosperity in our community, “ Delvo said. “I am not against economic development. I want more of our young people to be able to go off to college and come back and have jobs here. … We’re just concerned about — why is the cost always the health of our community?”