citizens of tower, a great many of whom descend from finnish and scandinavian settlers, are always prepared for the cold. chimneys stretch from almost every home, and on an average day in february, thin wisps of lightly colored exhaust stream from many of the stacks, a signal they’re burning natural gas or propane in the below-freezing cold. billowing smoke from burnt wood is a rare site, but a few chimneys are smoking. to save on utility bills, more will light-up as the cold sets in; diffusing clouds of micropollutants across the landscape, and inevitably, into neighbor’s noses.

at the edge of town, a 3rd generation finnish stove and furnace maker, daryl lamppa, often shovels snow off the top of lamppa manufacturing inc. when he does, he puts his head over his own wood-burning chimney and unflinchingly breathes in.

“just as a joke, you know? just cause it’s so clean,” the business-graduate-turned-engineer says.

he’s breathing in pollution – a mix of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and microparticles known to worsen and cause respiratory issues. but from a regulatory point of view, it’s the future of wood smoke – white water vapor and exhaust with so few particulates that it’s nearly indistinguishable from the modest wisps emitted by oil, propane or natural gas-fired heating devices.

the exhaust shoots up the chimney from the wood-burning kuuma vapor-fire 100, designed by lamppa and his father. it’s a furnace; a type of wood-heating device built to duct hot air to heat a whole home, usually from a basement. as of press time, it’s the only furnace to burn wood that’s been cut and then aged for a year, called “cord wood,” that the environmental protection agency (epa) has certified as clean enough to be sold after 2020. several other wood heating appliances that boil water to warm whole homes, called boilers, are also approved.

the epa under president obama’s administration enacted standards for residential wood-heating technology in 2015 that prohibit selling furnaces powerful enough to heat a whole house if they emit more than .95 pounds of particulate matter per million btus. the rule has caused three of lamppa’s local competitors to take down their websites and close, rather than pay steep fines for each non-compliant device sold.

by 2020, phase two is scheduled to take effect and will require furnace manufacturers to lower their emissions 84% more. on april 16, the epa filed a legal brief saying they intend on revising the 2020 emissions rules this spring, likely granting the industry three extra years to design compliant appliances and other forms of relief. the house already passed legislation in march directing the epa to extend the deadline, though the senate so far hasn’t.

while lamppa thinks the 2020 rule is fair and that he had ample time to refine his 30-year-old design to be epa compliant since epa first announced the standards in 2011, major u.s. furnace manufacturers that dwarf his company in sales have continually warned of an “economic disaster” for the industry.

paul williams of u.s. stove, a top selling furnace manufacturer, testified before the senate subcommittee on clean air and nuclear safety in november 2017.

“people trust us and our products enough to have a live fire in their home. we take that responsibility seriously. we test our products for safety and durability, not just for emissions. we need more time to accomplish the task at hand,” williams said in his testimony.

the lamppas wrote to the subcommittee a month later, saying their small business was able to meet the deadline years early and had to spend much of their family savings to do it.

“to change the rules mid-stream would be incredibly unfair to lamppa and any other companies that took the mandate and the timeline seriously,” they wrote.

“if we can do it, so can they,” lamppa added later. “when i look at these results, i think these companies are going to have to completely rethink how they burn wood, redesign their furnaces, and retest again. when 2020 hits, a lot of them won’t be ready.”

as epa moves to revise the 2020 emissions rules, it’s likely us stove and other major manufacturers will have until 2023 to clean up their wood-burning appliances.

dutch dresser, founding director of maine energy systems, sells another furnace that the epa has certified to be sold up until 2020. his austrian-designed and maine-assembled autopellet air furnace starts at $7,999. since the autopellet air uses low-moisture, pelletized wood, it has a natural emissions edge over furnaces that burn cord wood, as lamppa’s does.

despite the technical hurdle of having to lower efficiency to bake moisture out of cord-wood, lamppa was still able to pass all four stages of epa testing. dresser hasn’t put his device through the same testing because he doesn’t have to until 2020. for now, epa is accepting european test results that weigh particulates differently. 

“temporarily, the epa is recognizing the european testing as suitable demonstration of compliance. what i would like them to do is continue recognizing it as suitable beyond 2020 or 2023 if current legislation passes,” dresser says. 

a war against smoke

daryl lamppa wasn’t always interested in the family stove-making business. but when the gulf war was in full swing and fossil fuel prices skyrocketed, he saw a business opportunity. initially he set out not to make another heating stove, which are small and ill-equipped to heat a whole home consistently. rather, he chose to design a wood-burning furnace, which along with boilers, are built to heat whole homes.

he bought a furnace from a manufacturer in wisconsin to heat his new home, and swiftly took it offline after a dangerous chimney fire.

“i used to load that thing at night and sit down in the basement for hours on end, looking and worrying, and then after that happened, i said, ‘no more of this, boy,’” lamppa says. “when you’re sitting there chewing your fingernails every night, you can’t relax.”

in reverse engineering the furnace, he found the problem: smoke. it was only used for a short amount of time before the furnace lined his brand-new chimney with a flammable resin called creosote. the substance eventually ignited, though the fire didn’t escape the chimney, it just forced flames and ash out of the stack, blanketing the snow around his home with black soot.

the experience convinced lamppa to design a replacement furnace that would emit far less smoke. in 1982, he and his father filed a patent for their “kuuma” design, which touted what lamppa now calls gasification.

“the only way to get rid of the smoke is you have to burn all the (liquids and) gases. and that’s what we’re doing,” he says. “i haven’t had to clean my chimney in 30 years.”

smoke coming from a chimney represents wasted energy. in contrast to his now-shuttered competitors who opted to expel smoke as it was made, lamppa designs provide the right amount of air, temperature, and time to completely burn the energy contained in smoke while keeping the furnace at a constant 220-degree temperature. as the smoke burns, inhalable particulates settle into a bed of ashes inside the fire box.

what’s ultimately emitted is exhaust that carries the same co2 that would be generated by burning the same amount of wood in a bonfire, though the reaction releases far fewer carbon monoxide and inhalable particles.

lamppa says the fundamentals of his kuuma design haven’t changed much over the 30 years since he first started manufacturing them. like the sauna stoves he also makes, the wood burns in a finnish fashion – from front-to-back rather than from bottom-to-top.

in the late ‘80s as they started to sell their new furnaces, the lamppas and every other stove maker in the country were hit with a regulation: to bring the weight of particles emitted per hour by stoves down to 7 grams.  

at the time, only heating stove manufacturers had to clean up their emissions. the epa left wood furnaces and water boilers capable of warming whole homes alone, all the way up to 2015. the lamppas successfully cleaned up their line of stoves to avoid fines that caused 90 percent of stove manufacturers to go out of business, says john ackerly, president of the alliance for green heat.

furnaces and boilers were hit with new emission regulations for 2015 and 2020 along with stoves. since stoves went through it before, ackerly says almost all manufacturers that specialize in that technology are weathering the storm.

“this time around, in the stove side of things, nobody has gone out of business, and it’s not clear that anybody will. the boiler and furnace industry is different,” ackerly says. “you did have some mom and pop kind of shops that didn’t have any real capacity to improve much, so there have been a bunch of those that have gone out of business.”

while ackerly says he doesn’t like businesses shutting down, he argues it’s necessary. the rules were generated by the epa in part as a response to a lawsuit by states that wanted an emissions standard for whole-home wood-heating technology.

“if you’re having a big fire in your house to keep your house warm, there should be some safety and emissions regulations,” ackerly says.

“it’s one thing if you’re in the middle of nowhere and your boiler’s just cranking out smoke 24/7. but with a lot of these, if you’re in a valley, even the next farm or house is a mile away. these valleys have inversions and that still poses a pretty serious ambient air quality issue,” he adds.

regulations make wood heat more expensive

since the 2015 rule went into effect, water boilers have drastically risen in price. furnaces have too, but stove prices have remained fairly level. with the rise in prices, retailers are struggling to sell to the historic audience of wood heating – the rural middle class.

“i think the epa is going about cleaning up the air the wrong way, because they allow all the existing stock of wood burning appliances to exist. and they have driven the costs for new and cleaner equipment so high,” says scott nichols, a boiler retailer in new england for tarm biomass.

nichols doesn’t sell outdoor boilers, but rather an indoor variety of wood-fired water-heating boiler mostly manufactured in europe. he says emissions standards in america are stricter than in europe. he believes under the upcoming 2020 rule, retailers won’t be able to sell and install boilers that burn cord wood without a thermal storage component, which costs somewhere in the ballpark of $3,000. boilers that burn pellets, he says, don’t necessarily need the costly addition.

“i’ve got customers who have boilers that are 40 years old, hs tarm boilers that are 40 years old. and i couldn’t discount my new boiler packages enough for these people to switch in most cases to a newer boiler. and meanwhile i continue to sell parts,” nichols added.

states and non-profits have offered various buyback programs aimed at the oldest wood heat technology. in minnesota, the environmental initiative is wrapping up a program called “stove swap,” where they would discount a brand-new wood-heating device by hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars if a resident turned in a stove, furnace or boiler built before the early ‘90s.

according to the initiative’s website, swapping out such old technology can be the equivalent of removing 700 cars from the road per year, in terms of the particulates and carbon monoxide that’s prevented from reaching the atmosphere. likewise, towns across the wood-burning states, like tower, minnesota, have put bans on smoky outdoor boilers.

nichols says the epa regulations give states a standard to work with. communities can welcome boilers back in if they are epa certified, and air quality would remain safe.

“we’re in a very different market than we were 10 years ago when outdoor boilers were at the height of popularity and there were no regulations. at that time, outdoor boilers were nothing more than a barrel in the middle of a box full of water,” nichols says.

nichols says buyback programs help, but that they don’t come close to stopping a worrying trend: his residential customer base has shrunk, and so he’s expanded his offering for commercial customers and parts.

“you can imagine someone sort of spreading out over thin ice. the wider you go, the less likely you are to fall through the ice,” nichols says.

the regulations, he says, are hitting at a difficult time. fossil fuel prices have been relatively stable and low, which harms wood-heating sales.

“when oil goes up, we sell more boilers. when oil is cheap we don’t sell as many,” nichols says. he adds that the rise in price for wood heating is driving many to invest in heat pumps that store heat and pipe it back into a home gradually. the technology is inexpensive and subsidized, but in most cases, it can’t be used as the main central heating source of a home as boilers and furnaces are.

“we’re going to try to take market share from the smaller pie that’s left and hope that over time there are more policies that favor what it is we do,” he concludes.

furnace industry sues epa

when daryl lamppa became the first person to get on the epa’s list of furnaces approved to be sold after 2020, he likely made the job of lawyers of the industry group he chooses not to be a part of, the hearth, patio & barbecue association, a little harder.

hpba has publicly endorsed the less strict 2015 regulations as necessary, opposing a bill that would have repealed the rules wholesale. however, in a lawsuit hpba brought against the epa, the group contends it’s unreasonable to ask that furnace, boiler and stove manufacturers achieve stricter compliance by 2020.

“(but) we got proof that it’s possible to do it,” lamppa says, adding that the $5,000 pricetag of his kuuma furnace hasn’t changed much over the past 10 years as he’s made improvements.

even though building compliant devices can be done, hpba argues in public comments from 2014 that following through on the rules will cause prices to soar too much, driving potential customers to hold onto older and dirtier wood heaters.

“unregulated woodstoves are undoubtedly the largest contributor of national emissions, and the largest emission reductions necessarily must result from targeting them,” hpba writes.

public comments from hpba also point to several other arguments that may be taken to court. first however, both the epa and hpba need to submit finalized legal briefs, and since the epa is revising its rules, those finalized briefs aren’t due until the fall. depending on what changes are actually made to the epa rules, hpba may tailor its case to a few contentious issues, like the test method. if the case goes to court, ackerly says one possible outcome for hpba would be a settlement agreement that puts part of the standards on hold until another rule is made.

but for now, lamppa’s vendetta with smoke seems to be paying off. he’s fought smoke since before the epa even thought about regulating whole-home wood heat. his motivation has always been for safety – he says he won’t burn wood in his home “if there’s smoke … it’s just not safe to me.”

as the only manufacturer with a corner on the post-2020 furnace market, his focus on safety for now is putting him ahead of his furnace-manufacturing competitors. he’s just broken ground on a new track of land in tower for a whole new manufacturing facility. they’re jumping from one welding bay to four, anticipating high demand.

a study published in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences on jan. 22 uses grace satellite data recorded between 2002 and 2014 to track water storage in 186 river basins around the world. lead author bridget scanlon, a senior research scientist at the university of texas at austin, and her coauthors compared satellite observations to seven models commonly used by scientists investigating the water cycle, a topic of growing importance as the climate changes and population grows.

“sometimes the models simulated the opposite trend” to what satellites observed, scanlon said. “if the satellites go over an area that’s getting wetter or flooding, then the gravitational attraction would increase, and the leading satellite would speed up. the distance between the two satellites would then increase,” scanlon said. “so these changes in distance between the satellites … provide an estimate of changes in water storage, from up in the atmosphere, to deep in the subsurface.”

scanlon found that the models underestimated large changes in water storage, both with declines mostly caused by human-driven depletion, and rises related to precipitation and climate variability.

the models she investigated are split into two categories. five of the seven were land models, components of global climate models, while the two others were expressly built to focus on human water use and predict scarcity in the future.

“most of the land surface models only simulate soil moisture storage, not surface water or groundwater storage. all of the models may not have sufficient storage capacity in the soil profile to accommodate the changes in water storage that we get from wet and dry periods,” scanlon said.

the grace data indicate there was a net increase in land water storage from 2002 to 2014, whereas all the models simulated a net decrease. from basin to basin, the grace observations vary: showing increasing storage in places like the amazon and decreasing storage in the ganges in india.

many of the models the researchers looked at estimated the ganges would gain water over the 12-year period, but grace observed a loss of 12 to 17 cubic kilometers per year. scanlon said the decline was likely caused by human extraction, something many land models don’t capture.

“the results suggest that past studies that have used models to estimate global-scale water storage could have underestimated the effects of humans and climate variability. it means the potential effects of human water use and climate change in the future could be worse than we thought for some regions of the globe,” said simon gosling, a climate risk professor at the university of nottingham who was not involved with the study.

one of scanlon’s coauthors, hannes müller schmied, a senior researcher at goethe university frankfurt, works on improving a global hydrological model that focuses on human alterations to the water cycle.

“the focus should now lay on the models themselves and bridget provides the basis for it,” he said.

they pockmarked hard rock with acid while storing earth’s carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere into the ground.

years later, plants and bacteria followed — establishing themselves in the porous beachheads the fungi carved-out.

the three kingdoms became fast allies, and across a geological timescale of about 400 million years, have partnered in various ways to make earth the oxygen- and soil-rich world it is today.

but human activity is throwing off the storied balance the kingdoms have built — most notably by emitting carbon dioxide that warms the planet. thankfully, earth’s ecological system will step up to bat, and store or eat the problem greenhouse gases just as it always has. while the system can’t wholly make up for a human-induced imbalance of atmospheric carbon dioxide, scientists are finding ways for humans to resolve the crisis. the solutions, they say, are literally underneath our feet.

what about gas released from thawing ice?

methane, a greenhouse gas frozen by the megatons in earth’s melting ice, holds the potential to dramatically turn up the thermostat for the planet. but new research shows that a bacterial hero from earth’s soils and seas will keep the thawing gas at bay.

methane-eating soil microbes will prevent large plumes of methane from reaching the atmosphere as frozen deposits of it begin to thaw due to climate change, according to a paper in nature published by vasilii petrenko and jeffrey severinghaus of the scripps institution of oceanography at the university of california, san diego. while severinghaus doesn’t study microbes directly, he’s able to show their effect on past climates by going to antarctica and sampling ancient air.

scientists previously thought thawing methane deposits may have caused an abrupt 50% rise in atmospheric methane concentration during a rapid warming period at the end of the younger dryas, a cold period that ended 11,600 years ago. the prospect raised alarms to a potentially devastating climate feedback from methane, which, molecule for molecule, traps at least 25 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

through 10 years of sampling ancient air, severinghaus, his graduate students and the rest of his team were able to show, however, that during the warming period, no detectable methane in the atmosphere came from thawed deposits.

they demonstrated this by looking at the radiocarbon content of 11,600-year-old antarctic ice, exhuming a ton for each measurement at a precise and narrow vein of ancient ice originally deposited by snowfall on younger dryas glaciers. they gathered a corresponding control of modern-day air, cleaned of carbon-14, for each measurement as well.

carbon-14 is a naturally occurring radioactive carbon isotope. it builds up in the air and in all living organic things, as cosmic rays bombard atoms in the atmosphere, and is used in carbon dating. 

the carbon-14 distinction is important because methane released from thawed deposits has no carbon-14 — it’s so old that the radiocarbon content decayed long ago. but methane released from natural sources such as wetlands is fresh, and does have detectable carbon-14. 

severinghaus said: “if that 50% increase in methane concentration was actually caused by the tundra getting warm and burping out all of this methane, then the concentration of carbon-14 relative to the abundant carbon-12 should have gone down by 30%. we should really see a huge signal if this idea is correct … and we don’t.”

he goes on to explain that methane-consuming soil microbes must have stopped most of the thawing methane from reaching the atmosphere — just as their oceanic cousins did when they ate 99.9% of the methane released during the deepwater horizon oil spill in 2010.

wetlands, which belch methane when it rains, and other natural sources were the main culprits for the rise in methane during the younger dryas warming period, severinghaus said.

“if it didn’t happen back then, it won’t happen now and it won’t happen in the future,” severinghaus said. “we can focus our attention back on carbon dioxide, which really is the problem, and not worry so much about methane. so check one thing off the list.”

but how do tiny soil microbes store carbon? 

pockets of soil with low oxygen levels are the key to slowing dead-plant-eating and carbon-dioxide-emitting microbes.

new research fleshes out the role these bb gun pellet-sized granules and clumps of dirt play in the global carbon cycle, concluding they help offset emissions from well-aerated soil. so-called “aerobic” soil contributes a third of annual carbon dioxide emissions, and that may grow as low-oxygen, “anaerobic” pockets get disturbed by warming and human activity, the authors report in their study published in nature.

study coauthor scott fendorf, professor of earth sciences at stanford, said, “your food might spoil faster at a higher temperature; that’s because the microbes are eating faster. so, in the soil, the same thing [happens], the microbes start decomposing the plant material more rapidly, and that means carbon dioxide is being made to a greater extent.”

fendorf and his team were able to show how the current understanding of soil is flawed. climate models that deliver temperature projections often treat all upland soil — literally soil at a higher elevation — as aerated. the team found that pockets of asphyxiated soil can and have existed in such environments — thanks to periodic flooding or any number of oxygen-depriving natural occurrences. 

fendorf and his coauthors found spots where old, carbon-rich plant parts still existed. in a 100% aerobic environment they wouldn’t be there, because energized-by-oxygen microbes would eat all the carbon and send it up to the atmosphere as a gas.

the team learned that when microbes have to use a different gas for air, they work far less efficiently — emitting carbon dioxide at a tenth of the speed than well-aerated soil would.

fendorf added that climate models are evolving to accurately portray the impact low-oxygen pockets have on the global carbon cycle.

“if the temperature and moisture content was all the same, then you could just calibrate models and you’d be fine,” fendorf said. “but when it starts shifting — if it gets warmer or it gets wetter or drier — then your model has to account for those changes” within both aerobic and anaerobic soils, allowing scientists to better track the resulting carbon dioxide levels.

the authors say we can help retain the pockets where microbes are less efficient — and help reduce carbon emissions — by tilling soil less. the fewer passes a tiller makes, the fewer pockets spill their uneaten bits of carbon to hungry microbes. an increasing number of farmers already have reduced tilling to help reduce their carbon footprints.

but the authors also warn of an increase in the range of dry conditions caused by climate change. anaerobic pockets surrounded by compacted and moist dirt will bake and turn aerobic, and that will lead to more emissions, as long as it doesn’t get too hot for the microbes to function efficiently.

‘re-greening’ could cover 37% of co2 cuts needed by 2030

carbon capture and storage technologies are being deployed in a piecemeal way, ensuring a negligible impact on the atmosphere and its growing concentration of planet-warming carbon dioxide. photosynthesis however is alive and well, storing billions of tons of carbon each year.

via giphy (nasa photosynthesis visualization from 2013)

a study published in october by the nature conservancy and 15 other institutions identified the cheapest ways humans can leverage nature to reduce emissions, factoring in a number of cost constraints, like not reducing food production. they found replanting forests and preventing their loss in countries like brazil and russia can have the greatest, cost-effective impact on the atmosphere. in other countries, the study identifies better agricultural practices and wetland preservation as major emission-reducing pathways.

all told, the pathways can account for 37% of the cuts needed to atmospheric carbon dioxide to keep the world from warming past 2 degrees celsius from pre-industrial levels.

“the vast majority of the scenarios that have been modeled by climate scientists include a very large contribution of what’s called negative emissions technology. carbon capture and storage would be an example of that,” said coauthor bronson griscom, an ecological accountant for the nature conservancy.

“natural climate solutions are the only mature negative emissions technology that we have right now, the only form of negative emissions that we can deploy globally, today, at a cost effective level,” he added.

the researchers assume a social cost for carbon dioxide pollution, and that carbon has value, as is the case in cap and trade deals. cap and trade is where government comes in and “caps” the amount of carbon dioxide a company can emit. if they want to emit more, all they have to do is buy carbon credits from another company.

for example, chevrolet paid the university of illinois at urbana-champaign $1 million in 2014 for 150,000 metric tons of carbon credits. the university has since used the money to invest in a grass-fed boiler to heat a greenhouse on campus, which used to be heated by propane.

locally sourced and grown fuel has a much smaller impact on the atmosphere. additionally, the feedstock used in the boiler, like the crop miscanthus, grows year-round and therefore the fields it comes from aren’t tilled nearly as often as a corn field.

tilling spurs microbes to emit more carbon, and if all corn in the midwest were changed to miscanthus, the region would turn from a net carbon dioxide contributor to a carbon storehouse. that’s according to a study published in 2011 that didn’t account for economic factors. they followed it up with another in 2016 that did.

“we considered including a pathway like grassland restoration, and at a global level, we concluded that it wasn’t likely going to be a sizeable pathway. because of our basic constraint that we maintain the current footprint of agriculture,” griscom said. “having said that, as countries start to look at their options, there are some countries that should be looking into grassland restoration as an important opportunity.”

griscom’s next study, likely to be published sometime this year, focuses on the united states, and one pathway they investigate is grassland restoration. he said the united states has a wide range of options available to it to help the earth system make up for an imbalance in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

“nature is often seen as a victim of climate change, but it’s also a huge part of the solution,” griscom said. “if you think of nature as a machine, it’s an incredibly powerful machine. it would behoove us to turn that machine on full power.”