Part of that interest is a bevy of reporting around possible solutions to preventing or limiting wildfire losses, which generally fall into the categories of mitigation (i.e. how do we prevent fires from growing destructive), adaptation (i.e. hardening the natural and human environment to fire), and suppression (i.e. how can we extinguish fires).

The context for fire is very important. The Marshall Fire was a grass fire, the LA Fires are chaparral fires. In both of these cases, the fuels are different than in forest fires. But it’s wildland forest fires that generate the huge smoke waves the United States experienced nearly every year since 2018. The ones that blot out the sun. The reason we get those fires is that forests across the Western United States are overstocked relative to when they were traditionally managed with fire, and chock full of fuels that will otherwise burn.

From 2023 to 2025 I worked on systems attempting to scale mitigation and adaptation, and in particular to reduce fuel loads and restore fire resilience to forests across the Western United States via thinning and prescribed burning. Stated simply, I believe the an effective way to reduce wildfire risk in the Western US is to remove excess fuels from forests and put them underground. You can read more about the approach we piloted and associated research here:

• Whitepaper: Kodama Systems’ Frontier CDR Purchase Application

• Biomass burial LCA: Life cycle emissions associated with vault storage of wood cleared for fire management in the Western United States

• Co-benefits of using forest residues for CDR: Assessing costs and constraints of forest residue disposal by pile burning

Putting wildfire risk underground is likely to be a most cost-effective and environmentally friendly option for reducing fuel loads, while being relatively safe. This ought to be seen as a form of utilization, which repurposes fuels that would otherwise be disposed of by pile burning for durable carbon storage, which can be converted to a saleable product (i.e. carbon dioxide removal, CDR), for which companies have spent $11.4B in aggregate from 2022 to 2025 (i.e. there’s a market for the carbon cycle influence achieved). (2026 edit: the current geopolitical climate is, perhaps obviously, not great for carbon markets)

There are places, such as where machines can’t go (too steep, too ecologically sensitive, etc.) where this is not a good solution. But there are many places where today piles are burned into the atmosphere, where it is costly and slow to actually conduct the burning (see ). Paying for removal of piles as biomass for CDR feedstocks is an alternative that avoids burning, but requires more machines and personnel during thinning operations.

Done right, there are several forms of burial which are likely to achieve durable CDR (durable means carbon is stored for 1000+ years) which are scalable in the near future:

• Biomass Burial: Burying stabilized, raw biomass in a geologically engineered chamber, then protecting that chamber from disturbance (whether geologic, faunal, floral, or human). [see Graphyte, who acquired Kodama’s project]

• Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS): Converting raw biomass to energy and CO₂, and injecting the CO₂ into geologically secure formations. [see Arbor Frontier application].

• Pyrolysis with Byproduct Storage: Converting raw biomass into a C-rich byproduct, like bio-oil and bio-char, and storing these forms underground in a secure manner. [see Carba Frontier application]

If projects have a willing CDR buyer (2026 edit: big “if”) this can be a cost-effective strategy which adapts forests to hotter, drier conditions.

“What are pit lakes,” you ask?

It starts with the pit. During open-pit metals mining, rock is extracted from the ground to get at ore (from which metals are extracted). Depending on the target metal and nature of the deposit, you might get ~1 unit of metal for 10 units of rock extracted (e.g. aluminum), or you might get ~1 unit of metal for every 1,000,000 units of rock extracted (e.g. gold). The rest (the other 9 to 999,999 units) is waste rock that needs to be removed from the ground to get at the metals — making very large pits. Our societal appetite for commodities (by way of energy, infrastructure, and consumer products) leaves some giant holes in the Earth.

Now for the lake… When mining goes below the groundwater table, water will start to naturally accumulate in pit bottoms. During mining, the water will be pumped out and stored or managed elsewhere. After mining, when the pit is abandoned, pumping stops and water starts to fill up to level of the natural groundwater table. 

Rocks exposed in the pit walls often have not been exposed to natural atmospheric conditions (i.e. 21% O₂, freshwater precipitation, in some cases lots of humidity), and the minerals in those rocks will start weathering. Weathering products, which may include acidity, alkalinity, salts, and metals, rinse into lakes and influence the water’s chemistry.

Due to their volume, lakes are often important components of mine water management systems. Depending on the jurisdiction, environmental regulators require them to be sampled anywhere from quarterly to annually. 

Historically, people would go out on boats in the middle of pit lakes to drop sondes (to measure profiles of parameters like temperature, conductivity, pH, etc.) and collect water samples. However, pits are not engineered for long-term stability. Landslides occur, which can cause tsunamis in lakes. Because the pit is essentially a rock dish, there is very little way for that energy to dissipate — I spoke to someone who watched a pit lake seiche for nearly a day after a landslide event.

Anyhow, we developed a way to take water samples using heavy-lift drones. We demonstrated equivalent sample quality to boat-based sampling. Regulators accepted our method. And most importantly, we kept people out of the water and harm’s way.

You can check out my work here:

• Research Article: A Validated Method for Pit Lake Water Sampling Using Aerial Drones and Sampling Devices

• Drones Make Water Sampling Safer: 

If we were to update this work today, I’d use the current most-likely predictions of warming, which I understand to be +2.5 to 3.0 degrees C by 2100. I’d appreciate a modern reference here if any reader has one.

But with the advent of AI, and emerging geopolitical conflict vis-a-vis energy dominance, who knows what the future will hold? The biggest uncertainty in future climate change is human behavior.

I studied Earth science through college and grad school in New England, but I kept getting distracted by ice climbing. After graduating, during winters ‘14/‘15, ‘15/‘16, and ‘16/‘17, I guided ice in the Mount Washington Valley. During that last season, I started to feel the guiding life wasn’t the right long term prospect for me, so I applied for and won an Early Career Grant from National Geographic for a project titled “The Effects of Climate Change on Ice Climbing in the Northeastern United States.”

This work blossomed into a wonderful — albeit extended — collaboration with Liz Burakowski, Graham McDowell, and Taylor Luneau. We evaluated the historical impacts of warmer winters on ice climbing in the Mount Washington Valley (using Al Hosper’s amazing archive of repeat photography, NEClimbs.com, coupled with historical meterological data from the Pinkham Notch observation station) and simulated the likely impacts of future warming on ice climbing season length. We also conducted a survey and focus group with stellar local guides to assess the impacts of warmer and colder winters on guide and client experience, and assess guides’ adaptive capacity under a future of generally warmer winters.

The work was supported by the Petzl Foundation, Black Diamond Equipment, and The American Alpine Club in addition to National Geographic. In 2023, we ended up publishing a research article, extended policy feature in the AAC’s Guidebook, and a film about the project. All linked below.

• Research Article: The implications of warmer winters for ice climbing: A case study of the Mount Washington Valley, New Hampshire, USA

• American Alpine Club’s Guidebook Policy Feature: Ice Evolution

• freeze // thaw: Ice Climbing in a Changing Climate:

Transportation is by far the biggest portion of my carbon footprint. In the past five years, I ranged widely across the American Cordillera to study geology and to climb. I drove across the country headed east and west, in five different vehicles (two minivans, one cargo van, an SUV, and a compact hatchback). Three times, I flew a quarter of the way around the Earth to climb on faraway ice and snow.

Recently, I rode my iron pony west, entering Wyoming from the prairies of northern Nebraska. A railroad paralleled the highway; a train steamed in the opposite direction. Its buckets were overtopped with coal en route to midwestern power plants and destined for the atmosphere.

In a lot of the media I take in there’s a focus on the benefits of clean energy over coal. Common arguments are that clean-energy jobs are probably healthier, safer, and better than coal jobs and that clean energy technologies are better for the environment than coal could ever be. I won’t argue about what constitutes a ‘good job’ but I’ve long wondered about the extent of the environmental impacts of renewable energy versus fossil energy. Regardless of which energy source we develop, literally everything humans use today stems from our creative use of mineral resources. If we magically, totally switched away from fossil fuels we would still consume mind-boggling quantities of virgin minerals. There’s just no moving away from extraction.

Watching those buckets roll by, I wondered: how much CO₂ do we produce when burning enough coal to supply one person energy for one year? How much do we produce to create enough solar capacity for a year (forgetting the intermittency and storage problems)? Let’s consider the impacts of producing coal versus the impacts of producing photovoltaic panels (solar pv).

Based on numbers for utility power generation in 2016, 30.4% of all electricity in the United States comes from coal, while 14.9% comes from renewable sources (0.9% of the total comes from solar). 68% of total carbon emissions come from coal power; less than 1% come from renewables. So, while in production, coal is at least 32 times more carbon-intensive than renewable sources in the United States.

However, this kind of analysis does not take into account the emissions associated with extraction and refinement of mineral resources, refinement of those resources into usable materials, and transport of these materials and products throughout their functional life. This type of overarching analysis is called a life-cycle analysis. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory led LCAs for every imaginable energy source to determine their impacts in terms of CO₂ emissions. Solar pv systems produce 40 g of CO₂ emissions per kWh of produced energy. Coal power produces 1,000 g of CO2 emissions per kWh of produced energy. Coal is 25 more carbon-intensive than solar pv.

Coal is literally stored energy, while energy produced from solar pv needs to be used right away or stored for later. That’s an issue with solar power because of the intermittency of sunshine (not a problem in the desert Southwest, a very big problem in the Pacific Northwest, a minor problem in the Northeast). Solar power creates other requirements – the need for batteries to store energy and infrastructure to produce power for when the sun isn’t shining. Those things should factor into a comprehensive life-cycle analysis for energy systems.

I like to think about fossil fuels in terms of digging. If you had to dig your fuel out of the ground, how big a hole would you leave? Well, the average U.S. residential utility customer uses 10,812 kilowatthours (kWh) each year and there are 2.6 people per household. So, if each person were responsible for her supply, she’d need to stockpile about 2075 kilograms—a solid block of high-grade coal the size of a very large refrigerator. What kind of hole would an equivalent amount of solar capacity create? It’s an interesting question to ponder.