PAForests and Beyond

The Rendell administration led by DEP has been active over the last year or so developing an Climate Action Plan for PA. The Committee report is here and I recommend checking out the forestry chapter. However the industry don't like ion a pretty interesting letter to DEP here:
ClimateChangeActionPlanComments11-09-1.pdf

Remember the budget - $60 million needed from Marcellus. Well the the DCNR has just released bids on 32,000 acres. Read the news here and here and here for the bid prospectus info. They expect $2,000 per acre, My guess it will bring more.

"According to the DCNR, there are about 660,000 acres of state forest land under lease for gas production and 750 wells in production. If the just-proposed leases are successfully bid, the leased total would rise to 692,000 acres, about one-third of the 2.1 million acres of state forest"

I think this is whats has been leased historically - not all active. It brings the Marcellus shale leases to about 100,000 acres. They had that lease in 2008 bringing in $190 million on 74,000 acres.

Only about 0.03% of estates are liable for federal estate taxes under current rules. However, PA residents can't avoid the PA inheritance tax. This article and map show the states that have estate/inheritance taxes. Most don't. PA is flat 4.5% to heirs.

I remind landowners at workshops that estate planning is not just about taxes, its about the forest legacy.

The perfect storm is brewing. Check out the video. All the ingredients - economics, ecology and social. Neighbor vs neighbor.

The next few months will be interesting. Smart money says Congress will extend the 2009 law for 2010--a $3.5-million exemption and a 45% tax rate--and then consider a permanent fix when they deal with the scheduled 2011 sunset of almost all of the Bush tax cuts.

Read this article to see whose affected. And check this graph out.



Call it the incredible shrinking estate tax. Whose affected? About 5,500 nationwide and a few hundred in PA. So whats the issue with the forest lobbyists complaining about its impact on selling/cutting timber to pay the tax?

Woody biomass is slowly but surely get air media time. Here is a TIME article.

In a piece in the journal Science Wood Energy in America Science.pdf last March it was stated that 90% of the solar energy stored in wood is transformed into heat and power by AWC technology, compared with 20% to 40% by simply firing wood. Furthermore, AWC burns so efficiently that it is considered to be virtually carbon neutral. 

One-third of U.S. energy supplies goes toward heating, making use of electricity, natural gas, oil, coal, propane and some wood. Advocates of technology like AWC say that one-third of that could be provided by modern wood combustion, which would eliminate significant outlays for imported oil and cut net contributions of carbon emissions.

AWC stands for Advanced Wood Combustion.

According to the proponents of the bill we get:

• 1.7 million clean energy jobs,
  
• health and well-being of the next 50 generations,
  
• and in this study OtherSideoftheCoin.pdf , by NYU Law School's Institute for Policy Integrity, we get benefits of $1.5 trillion between 2012-2050 using the value of $19 per ton of carbon pollution avoided

For commentary see Climate Progress

As the climate debate heats up in Congress there is so many studies on both sides of the debate on can get lost in details.

Here's and interesting one from CBS news Taking Liberties:

The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent.

A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration's estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.

A second memorandum, which was prepared for Obama's transition team after the November election, says this about climate change policies: "Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1 percent of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation."

A nice local story about chestnut restoration

The latest from the budget-less state governor