Bill Hocker | Nov 3, 2015

The Napa Sierra Club is hosting a community meeting on Nov 5th to explain how the latest climate science shows global warming can be slowed and discuss specifically what we in Napa can do.
Location: Napa Main Library
Contact Christina Benz

Jim Wilson LTE: Why not value oak woodlands for climate effects?

Jim's LTE is the latest in a string in a buildup to the county's Climate Action Plan discussions on Nov 9th.

Patricia Damery LTE: Response on vineyards and carbon dioxide
Christine Tittle LTE 10/20/15: On forests and vineyards
Mark Luce LTE 10/16/15: Vineyards also offer environmental benefits
Mel Boybosa LTE 8/3/15: Vineyards don't do better than forests
NVR 7/2015: Napa County resuming work on a climate action plan

Documents:
Merenlender et al. conversion of native habitat to vineyard case study
Grismer, Asato: woodland to vineyard conversion stresses groundwater supply
Carlisle et al: Effects of conversion of woodlands to vineyards synopsis
Williams et al: Carbon assessment across vineyard-woodland landscape
Lawrence L Lab: Forests contribute to golbal warming
County's Climate Action Plan page
County voluntary oak woodland management plan
Napa County 2012 Climate Action Plan (too hard on the wine industry apparently)

Supervisor Luce seems to have thrown down the gauntlet with the recent editorial on the environmental benefits of vineyards as opposed to woodlands. I'm sure that the issue of vineyard conversion will be a major topic in the climate discussions.

As the studies above do or don't show there may be difference in the global warming contribution of CO2 between woodlands and vineyards. The facts presented by the studies are, like many facts, interpreted to the benefit of a thesis on the part of the researcher. (Are eggs healtful or not?) But intuitively, in the short term, the conversion of woodlands to vineyards can't be a good thing CO2-wise. Hundreds of years of stored carbon in wood and soil are cut down, dug up, released and burned back into the atmosphere by D10 cats belching smoke for months. And then the vines are tended ever after by diesel tractors and watered by pumps running most of the year (depleting aquifers that may be thousands of years in the making). The forests just sit there storing carbon and replenishing the aquifer. (OK, there is the occasional forest fire.)

Once the climate change horror of the conversion has taken place, I suspect that the climate impacts of forests versus vineyards when considered as abstract ecosystems are really small when compared to the impacts of the hundreds of thousands of vehicle trips that new urban growth and tourism, heavily promoted by the municipalities and county (and Supervisor Luce), will bring into the valley each year. The conversion of forests and vineyards into buildings, roadways, parking lots and gravel pits (and vineyard-themed subdivisions) should play a much more important role in the discussions.

Little will be accomplished in the way of global warming until we stop the real growth problem causing it: the growth in the world's population and the urban development necessary to accommodate it. Unfortunately, real population control is probably not something Napa governments have the courage to take on. But they can make some effort to stop promoting the influx into the county of a transient population (tourists and workers) and of creating the urban development and greenhouse gasses necessary to accommodate it. Napa in the last 50 years has done a good job on the urban growth front, which is why many of us are here. Unfortunately that commitment is wavering, and an attitude that selling things is a higher use of the land than growing things has begun to take hold. A recommitment to the original intent of the ag preserve, to protect a rural place from urban development, is one local way to combat climate change and should be a part of the CAP discussion.

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