Wildfire risk reduction in California is a climate conundrum. In early 2021, the state set a goal of reducing wildfire risk on a million acres of forest per year through prescribed burning and forest thinning. However, thinning treatments lower the forest's capacity to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the harvested smaller, low-value trees are typically burned or left to decay, which releases even more carbon. In a study published early this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, provide a possible path to limiting both carbon emissions and wildfires by turning the low-value wood harvested during forest thinning into new products.