For Peat's Sake

The Sunday Star Tribune had a big exposé about the failures of Minnesota's charter schools (which managed to not mention the financial debacle at the Saint Paul's Hmong College Prep Academy, where the school's leader lost $5 million through questionable investments and the board, who never heard of the idea of fiduciary duty, did nothing to hold her accountable). 

It was a pretty good piece, despite that omission, but the story that ran in the same issue and won't get as much attention is the one called As Minnesota spends millions to restore peatlands, it sells mining rights for $12 an acre.

This has got to be the stupidest thing I've heard in quite a while. Minnesota has more peatland than any state except Alaska. These layers of partially decomposed organic matter store more carbon than all of the state's forests and other trees, combined. If you drain an area of peatland, that stored carbon is released, so that's bad. 

And yet we have the state's Department of Natural Resources charged with two opposite missions: the obvious one, to preserve our natural resources (including the climate overall). And a second, much less well-known one: to sell off peat to fund the state's schools, because some of the peatlands are on state School Trust Lands. 

So the DNR sells that peat for tiny amounts of money because it is "required by state law to 'secure the maximum long-term economic return ... with sound natural resource conservation and management principles'." And then they spend $1,250 to $3,000 per acre (or more!) to restore the peatland, which only works 30% of the time, and then only over decades and decades.

This mismatch is absurd, even without the climate effect. And the amount of money generated is tiny:

The School Trust earns the vast majority of its money, more than $35 million a year, from iron and taconite royalties and timber sales. Since 1980, peat leases have earned the fund an average of $43,000 a year, which would be enough to give each of the 510 school districts, academies and charter schools in the state about $84.

This is obvious low-hanging fruit for climate change mitigation. Peat is not a renewable resource and should be removed from the list of things to sell from the School Trust Lands.