Natural Gas NOW readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy.

Here’s more material sent along by Natural Gas NOW readers; great stuff highlighting the power of natural gas and the absurdity of fractivism. Check out the links and other short bits below:

Forests Threatened by A Thousand Cuts? Gas to the Rescue?

…those who try to divine the future of Pennsylvania’s privately held woodlands are focused on one especially worrisome word: parcelization — the divvying up of properties into smaller and smaller bits.

Penn State’s Center for Private Forests puts the current number of “woodland owners” at a startlingly high 740,000 — more than eight times as many as in New Jersey. Their average age is high, too: 57. Researchers would like to have a conversation about death and stewardship with every one of them…

Here’s just one way that parcelization can complicate conservation: If a 60-acre property is divided into 10-acre parcels, five like-minded owners could fight, united, against pests and invasive flora. But if the sixth owner planted fast-growing bamboo for decoration or cut down trees that blocked creek views, problems would creep across all 60 acres and the sediment would run downstream.

“This is not pie-in-the-sky theory. It’s not hype. It’s clean water, clean air, and wildlife habitat,” Finley said. “It’s absolutely vital that what we have stays as a functioning forest.”

…We know that when land changes hands, quite often that’s when things happened to it,” Muth said. “Land can be subdivided and sold individually. There’s a lot of transition that can happen.”

The properties come with a bundle of rights — layers of ownership that can be sold off to make money but also, increasingly, to conserve the forest without losing access to it. For instance, an owner could sell the rights to the natural gas beneath him to a company in Oklahoma, and sell development rights to a land trust that would bar future owners from building on it or breaking it up.

“We can’t preserve it,” Finley said, “but we can conserve it.”

How about that? Someone actually stated the obvious; if you want to save large chunks of forest, farmland and open space, you need to make it productive and natural gas is one of the ways to do that. Now, if we could just get a few others to drop their blinders…

http://naturalgasnow.org/natural-gas-now-picks-week-december-16-2017/