Because old growth is also the most desirable wood and therefore valuable, and money is more important than literally anything else in the history of everything?
(I'm just spit-ballin' a guess here, as I don't really know the answer either…)
Fast growing trees tend to make inferior lumber. This is readily apparent with modern plantation grown species like fir and poplar that are not as high a quality as the same trees grown in natural forest conditions where their growth is slowed by competition for space.
>Fast-growing oak has widely spaced annular rings, sometimes up to 1/4″ per year (see fig. 3.3, above). This timber is exceedingly strong because it has fewer rings, which creates a great concentration of the dense latewood that grows in the summer. But the resulting timber is visually distracting. Its radial face comes out looking heavily striped. It can also be difficult to work; it has an
uneven texture resulting from the widely spaced transitions between the earlywood and latewood.
Faster growth is generally less dense growth as well. In the physical sense that is - tree rings are bigger, the material is lighter, and as you might guess - weaker.
Unscientific guess - trees are mostly carbon, so more CO2 can support more wood. Of course, we aren't simply adding CO2 while keeping everything else equal. Worse growing conditions due to drought or whatever don't help trees.
For reference there has been a significant amount of protests in recent months about old growth logging in BC so this is a controversial issue.
The current government has "deferred" a bunch of old growth logging licenses as part of damage control efforts in response to the criticism.
A complicating factor is the fact that indigenous nations of BC are gaining more and more strength and control over their traditional territories and are not necessarily opposed to logging. Recently a nation on Vancouver island asked protestors to go home.
resources are a provincial thing so I'm not even sure if it's really possible for this to be a federal license. I mean, maybe so if the feds owned a bunch of land (ie. say from an old military base) that was wooded and they logged it, but this seems like an edge case.
The "crown" land in BC is controlled by the Province.
This is extremely strange article from American perspective, but it probably hits British sensibilities.
As I understand it, a company got a logging license in BC, cut down a square mile of forest, sold most of the logs to a lumber company to be processed into lumber, and the rest of the logs that the company couldn’t use for lumber, and the logging waste, got ground up and used as biomass for energy. Sounds like… completely normal day in Pacific Northwest?
I think this might be affecting British sensibilities negatively simply because the scale of forests here is completely different. British Columbia alone has size which is more than than triple the size of the entire United Kingdom, and most of it is indeed covered in forest, most probably being old growth too. Cutting down a few square miles of it is really not a big deal, unlike in Europe, where similarly old forests are comparatively extremely rare. Canadian government shares this view, which is why it sold a license to log these trees in the first place.
> Cutting down a few square miles of it is really not a big deal, unlike in Europe, where similarly old forests are comparatively extremely rare.
Ancient forest is so rare as to be almost non-existent in Britain. This is because we gradually cut it all down over a long period of time [1], presumably on the iterated basis that there was a lot of it and that cutting down a few square miles was really not a big deal.
Some of it has been replaced in the last hundred years, but the replacement is of a very low quality, relatively speaking: mostly just fast growing conifers.
> This is because we gradually cut it all down over a long period of time, presumably on the iterated basis that there was a lot of it and that cutting down a few square miles was really not a big deal.
This feels like a critique of the parent, but if so it ignores the key point: BC's forests cover 230k square miles [0]. The entire island of Great Britain is only 80k square miles, 15% of which (12k square miles) was estimated to be forest in 1086 [1].
To put this in perspective: If British Columbia deforested itself at the rate Britain did (an average of 9 square miles of forest lost per year), it would take 25 thousand years to finish the job.
Yes, BC needs to log responsibly, like everyone else. But "responsibly" for BC has a very different definition than it does for Britain, and imposing British sensibilities on Canadian logging isn't useful.
Unfortunately British Colombia isn't deforesting at a rate of 9 square miles per year, it's been deforesting at an average rate of ~1579 square miles/year for the past 21 years. [0] At that rate it'd take about 145 years to finish the job.
Depite the seemingly limitless bounty of British Colombia's forests modern technology will let us wipe them out in a fraction of the time it took pre-modern Europeans to do it to their own continent.
There are definitely more pressing concerns around the world with regards to deforestation than BC - at least BC are making some efforts to preserve their forests and replant, unlike many equatorial countries with arguably more precious rainforest ecosystems. But a net loss is still a net loss, and tree farms are not a one-for-one replacement for old-growth forest.
As an aside: the 15% forest cover Britain of 1086 wasn't its pre-human state - it was aleady heavily deforested by humans. Prehistoric and ancient humans were very effective at deforestation, since the most popular method of early agriculture in Europe involved burning swathes of land, farming the nutritious soil left in the fire's wake, and then moving and burning more forest when the soil became useless.
By the beginning of recorded history Europe had already achieved most of the deforestation it ever would.
One of the most worrying attitudes I see held by humans is “don’t worry we have near limitless sources of X” — whether X be water, forests, land, energy, atmosphere, etc.
I really liked Isaac Asimov’s “The Final Question” for exploring the attitude that humanity has near limitless resources. Unfortunately for us, we may not have faster than light travel to exploit the resources of our universe.
Also resource total isn't resource density. we're basically at carrying capacity in tens of different ways.
Whatever we do on jupiter is irrelevant. Using more than about 100kW/person on earth will cook it even if it comes from thermodynamically limited 85% efficient solar panels due to albedo increase. Making your exponentially increasing pile of garbage in the asteroid belt and importing it doesn't work either because just getting it down will produce heat and NOx.
In the past 250 years, people have destroyed the vast majority of old-growth forests in North America, especially in Canada (much of it exported), in the pursuit of quick money.
I hope there are massive protests in British Columbia, against all of this old-growth logging nonsense, at the scale of truck protests. Protests so massive that the supposedly pro-environment NDP government of British Columbia bans this large-scale environmental destruction.
The article you linked seems to quibble on what “old growth” means. Apparently, they only consider something to be “old-growth” if it’s both old and big. According to BC government, however, a quarter of BC is old growth. And, apparently, the government was totally fine with the logging at hand. So, again, a completely normal day in Pacific Northwest.
This “we have lots of it!” attitude is why we have very little old growth left.
But the story here isn’t “company that makes power by burning wood burns wood” it’s a company that receives money from the uk gov for “sustainable practices” and says they only burn waste wood is actually burning old growth.
The article says that they only burned waste from logging process. This might be unclear, because the article is written in a (probably purposefully) confusing way, but they very much did not cut and ground up massive old growth timber for pellets.
Setting aside the issue of logging an old growth forest, in any logging operation you’ll always end up with some material that’s not practically usable for various reasons. Using it as fuel sounds to me like rather effective use of resources.
> The article says that they only burned waste from logging process. This might be unclear, because the article is written in a (probably purposefully) confusing way, but they very much did not cut and ground up massive old growth timber for pellets.
The article tells you what Drax claims, and then it explains the reality their investigators found, repeatedly contrasting what Drax says, then what they proved, then what Drax said about that, back and forth showing what desperate liars they are.
> Reporter Joe Crowley also followed a truck from a Drax mill to verify it was picking up whole logs from an area of precious forest
Drax tried insisting those weren't Drax trucks, it told the BBC third parties do the logging. This wasn't true, it's a matter of public record. So then Drax said ah, OK, well we do turn some logs into pellets, but only if there's a problem with them. Reporters showed it's whole forests. Drax said, ah, well those forests were the wrong sort of woood.
whole forests are waste according to Drax
> Drax later admitted that it did use logs from the forest to make wood pellets. The company said they were species the timber industry did not want, and they would often be burned anyway to reduce wildfire risks.
They did not. Again, the article doesn’t say that, though, as I said, it’s written in (likely deliberately) confusing way, so it’s not very surprising that you came out believing that after reading it.
Reporters filmed a logging truck, full of logs, going from these forests to Drax's pellet plant. That's all the plant does, it makes pellets for fuelling the vast power station.
There's no sign of other magical trucks, maybe taking logs to be milled for IKEA or for sale in US hardware stores, and unsurprisingly Drax doesn't try to pretend such trucks exist. Drax has the license, Drax does the logging, Drax is the exclusive consumer of these logs, all the logs are "waste".
According to the Canadian government 89% of the logs going into that plant were of a grade that a conventional timber mill would process for commercial use. Except no need, these logs are all "waste" turned into pellets to be burned for "green" credits.
It isn't just the UK government who were hoodwinked. The pellet plant itself is the same scam. It originally told the Canadian government it would convert waste from nearby mills into pellets. "At least 95%" of the pellets would be from sawmill waste, free money for the Canadian economy. Except oops, turns out that wasn't quite true. Almost immediately they needed to import waste from further afield, and then they found a much cheaper option, instead of paying to haul waste from other mills just buy whole trees. Soon the majority of the "waste" for the pellet plant was perfectly good logs.
>It isn't just the UK government who were hoodwinked. The pellet plant itself is the same scam. It originally told the Canadian government it would convert waste from nearby mills into pellets. "At least 95%" of the pellets would be from sawmill waste, free money for the Canadian economy. Except oops, turns out that wasn't quite true. Almost immediately they needed to import waste from further afield, and then they found a much cheaper option, instead of paying to haul waste from other mills just buy whole trees. Soon the majority of the "waste" for the pellet plant was perfectly good logs.
Citation please.
There are more economically fruitful things to do with "perfectly good" logs than sell them to the nearby chip plant let alone the one far away.
The Canadian company ("Pinnacle Pellets") which was set up to do this no longer exists. Guess which company bought them... Did you guess their main customer, Drax? Because that's correct.
What's left, at least on my first attempts is one lonely page of Drax's site:
> There are more economically fruitful things to do with "perfectly good" logs than sell them to the nearby chip plant let alone the one far away.
No need to "sell them" at all. Drax owns the logging outfit, the pellet company and the converted coal plant in the UK to burn the pellets. It is converting Canadian forests into cash in the UK, any "prices" which exist internally are notional and don't represent actual money anybody actually paid for anything.
Now, that UK plant gets paid market prices for electricity, which is currently a very reasonable (by recent standards) £115 per MWh, which is equivalent to if you were charged about 12¢ per kWh before anybody pays their overheads or makes a profit. But earlier today it was £439 per MWh. But, on top of those prices, it also get a green subsidy because it persuaded the British government that this is just waste you see, it's not chopping down perfectly good trees, they're waste and so this is carbon neutral, see ?
Somehow Drax was profitable when prices were about £45 per MWh. So, now their income from burning the same amount of wood is more than double, sometimes closer to ten times what it was, and yet you think there's no incentive for them to do the thing the documentary showed they are doing ? Why?
Edited to add: Here's a news release from the acquisition
> There are more economically fruitful things to do with "perfectly good"
at current energy prices in Europe? not necessarily.
but it should be easy enough for Canada and/or the UK & EU to get to the bottom of this. after all they have some customs enforcement, so they know what goes out and comes in on the ships.
Perfectly good according to whom, exactly? Expert journalists? I can scarcely believe that pellet plants are paying nearly as much for good logs as sawmills.
Sounds to me like subsidizing old growth logging. More of those trees would have stayed in the ground if someone wasn’t buying 11% of the logs they cut to burn.
Wood pellet is around 4 times cheaper than construction lumber per pound. That means that these 11% of the logs capture less than 5% of the revenue of the entire operation.
The economics of sawmilling are absolutely brutal, and everything is done for profit maximization on every tree harvested. Sometimes perverse incentives will drive things like eg the price of 7' studs surges so all the 14' 2x4 or 2x6s are cut in two, or in an extreme example if the price of chips surges enough then maybe perfectly good lumber would be chipped instead of sold as lumber (this happened briefly in the 80s if I recall correctly)
To go over how from seedling to end product every single part of the usable tree is used to maximum economic advantage would take more time than I have available, but suffice it to say that in Canadian lumber, plywood, osb and paper there is as close to zero waste as is humanly possible.
Also, as a footnote, there is a lot more thought given to future harvests, environmental concerns (carbon capture, riparian areas etc) and social license (work with first nations, community involvement, worker safety) than the average person would believe.
> It seems safe to assume they aren't burning valuable logs just to be cartoon villains.
Perhaps are they chopping down more wood than would be normally chopped because they are being paid above market rates for it and thus is becomes profitable to do so
If you scroll down, way past when most people give up reading, you’ll find that apparently 11% of the logs from that area is unusable for production lumber, ie. are a waste.
Every Summer, the State of Oregon seems to have at least one 50,000 acre fire, which is about 78 SQ miles. last few years have been more like 400,000-600,000 acres over a few very large fires.
Most of these fires are caused by lightning. Either way, its losing forests to fire, but at least the power plants the smoke is getting treated to remove particulates, filtered, etc, plus generating power.
You can’t justify clearcutting logs for power generation by citing forest fires.
Forest fires are happening in part because of forest management practices that support logging. Not to mention climate change causing more heat, and bringing invasive species that kill trees. This is a positive feedback loop that would have all of north america as treeless as ireland if we accept “it’s gonna burn anyway”
Forest fires are a natural part of the ecosystem - when the forest is managed well a fire can burn through quickly killing VERY few trees.
As someone who resides in the province, and near the site in question. You're wrong. There isn't much old growth left. Lots of replanted timber stands, not much old growth.
The article made it pretty clear that the company was lying about nearly everything.
>-------------------------------------------
Drax told the BBC it had not cut down the forests itself and said it transferred the logging licences to other companies.
But Panorama checked and the authorities in British Columbia confirmed that Drax still holds the licences.
The company says it does use some logs - in general - to make wood pellets. It claims it only uses ones that are small, twisted, or rotten. Felled trees in British Columbia
But documents on a Canadian forestry database show that only 11% of the logs delivered to the two Drax plants in the past year were classified as the lowest quality, which cannot be used for wood products.
>-------------------------------------------
So the very first issue is that its leadership ought to be fired for same. People adjacent to the burning wood might as well take up smoking as far as health effects and it should no way no how profit from any credit for "green" energy.
I seem to understand that the issue is about the "most of the logs" and on the company statement about their pellets being generally made not from logs (at first only by those that were "small, twisted, or rotten" and later also from "good" logs but of " species the timber industry did not want").
So possibly a good question would be which species these forests of woods are made of and in percentage how much timber is directly processed into pellets from logs.
That would make sense, except the investigation revealed that they are not using just the waste, the timber goes directly from the forest to the pellet manufacturer.
> Panorama wanted to see if logs from primary forests cut down by logging companies were being transferred to Drax's Meadowbank pellet plant. The programme filmed a truck on a 120-mile round trip: leaving the plant, collecting piles of whole logs from a forest that had been cut down by a logging company and then returning to the plant for their delivery.
> Drax later admitted that it did use logs from the forest to make wood pellets. The company said they were species the timber industry did not want, and they would often be burned anyway to reduce wildfire risks.
Yes, Drax alleged that the logs turned into pellets were waste.
What the journalists could have done is to not follow the truck that was certain to take logs to process them into pellets, but instead follow random trucks taking logs from the site and see where they are destined to. If they did it, and then claimed that all trucks from the site went to pellet plant, that would have made this article much more heavy hit. Given that the article does not allege (despite confusing language) that every, or even majority of the logs were turned into pellets, I conclude that it is more likely that they were not.
I am a Canadian logger from western Canada. This article is nonsense and I have seen similar ones peddled locally.
The wood used in pallets is garbage wood, all wood is graded. You cannot cut down high end old growth and chip it. You will loose a lot of money due to chipping high end wood into low costing pallets and you would get fined by the government.
It is plausible the company was using garbage and blown down wood as well it is plausable that their cutting is to reduce fire risk. Logging has a terrible rep alot if people watched scary American clear cut documentarys when they were young and assume we wrecklessly mow down forests without thought or planning.
If people don't want forests to be logged they can quit using wood. As well you'd need to stop putting out forest fires and let nature reset itself as it always did before humans showed up.
Does that picture show huge empty field were a forest was or sections of logged areas with large patches of trees between sections? It is not selective logging but it is also not a clear cut.
In the past you would see a similar cut block with select large trees kept in the empty areas but that practice was stopped years ago due to safety. The large trees left in the open had a high chance of being blown over.
Do you think that all "old growth" forest is huge, healthy, high quality trees? In 30-40 years the planted trees will be large enough to harvest again. The cut block is not as large as you assume , that ecosystem will be fine.
I'm just judging by the multiple 200+ year old trees in my own yard. There is no way anything remotely close to these trees will grow back in 30 years. Or go walk around Olympic National Park, which is very close to BC both in distance and climate. Ask yourself if it's possible to replace that forest in 30 years.
I could not edit my post 40-50 is what I meant. I have logged blocks with people that logged them as teens 40-50 years earlier. Not ever tree logged is 100 feet long and a meter wide.
What’s not clear to me from the story is if Canada doesn’t want people harvesting trees from those forests, why are they issuing licenses for logging them?
I'm not sure what the situation is in this case, but in the past there have been a lot of licenses which were sold under previous laws and/or previous government administrations that can't easily be _legally_ limited.
As a result, the current administration can't force them not to use those licenses, but are still likely to put at least _some_ pressure on them to minimize their use of them.
But do you know of any country where getting legislation like this passed would be straightforward and apolitical? It's not that the can't do it, it's that it would be difficult to do and would require expenditure of political capital.
If a majority government came to power and had this as a major part of their platform I suspect they'd try to get legislation passed, but any other government is not going to expend as much effort on it as would be needed to get it through.
That's understandable, and perhaps buybacks should be attempted (around here there are conservatories that buy up "pristine" land and then take it off the market, either by themselves or via covenants with the gov't).
Ask people in the EU what is currently happening to their forests with the energy crisis looming. Everyone now wants wood, or potentially freeze to death.
The "freeze to death" risk is largely overblown. Just wear more layers of clothing, and get a few more blankets for your bed. You might be uncomfortable but you'll be fine. Heating your home to 25 C in the dead of winter so you can wear t-shirts instead of sweaters is a modern luxury, not a necessity.
Most of the deaths attributed to the cold will be noticeable only in a slight uptick of elderly people living alone dying at a higher rate than usual, followed by a dip in their death rate in the subsequent months. The years of potential lost life (YPLL) will be minimal.
I can't speak for politicians and corporations. They have their own reasons for doing things (money).
However, as an average Canadian, there is an expectation that when you have a license, you use the forest in a way that does not permanently scar the land. That the forest management practices used are up to date and considerate of the environment. It is a naïve way of thinking but a common one based on the conversations I hear around me.
In reality, it's often clear-cutting. Turn the land into something similar to a desert that will not be able to regrow possible for maximum profit, destroying the flora and fauna completely.
People don't pay attention to who own the forest and are suddenly surprised when it disappear in a day. Then they move on and forget there was one in the first place.
"The country is so big, surely we still have more forest!"
It's also common to see lands that have been cleared of trees still have a border of uncut forest at the borders. Not for the environment but to hide the damage. You can only see the missing forest from the sky.
"The provincial government of British Columbia says old-growth forests are particularly important and that companies should put off logging them."
That's not really enough. BC should regulate these forests heavily.
Old growth forest is like nothing else on the Earth. There is organic material sometimes several feet thick. Trees with trunks like school buses stacked end-to-end.
Mankind will not survive a world where it is expected that corporations (especially megacorps) simply "do the right thing."
The UK company should not be on the hook here - they probably had no idea what the source of the wood was before this article, and, if the article is to be believed the timber was going to be cut anyway for the more valuable lumber species.
As a northern British Columbia some of what you were saying makes sense. The provincial government has also just recently put in deferrals that very possibly could lead to about half of the mill shutting down.
If old growth was as you to defined it, I think nobody would be chopping it down, but as it sits for forest to be considered old gross it only needs to have one tree per hectare over a certain size. in much of the area up here second growth from the early 20th century is even being considered old growth. The restrictions were primarily put in place for coastal old growth which is closer to your definition.
From what I have seen, primary logging always goes to the Mills first since they are willing to pay more money.
The shame here is on my country, Canada, for not putting a stop to this as much as the UK.
Why are we granting logging licenses to foreign companies that will simply burn the wood? Because the logging industry is huge money for British Columbia. Because "jobs" and "the economy" and a dozen other reasons that boil down to "we really like the money we get paid for it".
Hey, we didn't harm the climate because we didn't burn the pellets! And the UK didn't harm the climate because they didn't cut down any trees! Everyone wins, and also we get handed a bunch of money.
Trees make themselves out of the CO2. A growing tree absorbs CO2, an already grown tree is effectively neutral, and a dead tree releases the carbon when fungus decompose it.
If you cut down a tree and turn it into a house that lasts for 200 years, then you've sequestered that carbon for longer than the tree likely would have.
Note that this really depends. A quick growing tree wouldn't have lasted 200 years, but there are tree species in which individuals have been around for longer than recorded human history. I don't think any of them occur in the right part of the world, but if they did it'd be easily possible there's a tree which was once pissed on by a mammoth (~4000 years ago), and yet is still alive now.
England has some trees that are definitely hundreds and probably a couple of thousands years old. And England isn't exactly the ideal place to be a tree, it's small, heavily populated and the people who live on it cut a lot of trees down either for firewood or to build things. I'd be surprised if Canada lacks 2000 year old trees.
Similarly other biomass from agricultural waste is good.
Key word here is waste, because it'll naturally be cheaper and more efficient to use animal droppings or the inedible bits of food crops or post-consumer food waste or sawdust or offcut branches that are only going to be dumped in a way that releases methane. This can make them GHG negative, and so better than even renewables, though they can't scale as much so they're only part of the solution.
If that primary forest was sold and cleared to make planks, then that might be a problem for Canada to look into, but people using the waste from the process is not.
The article tries to imply that the whole forest was clear cut and burned for power but they don't actually state that, presumably because it's not true. It would be a much bigger scoop if it was.
Once we get rid of the need to burn stuff for power by rolling out more renewables, it'll probably still make sense to process waste biomass via pyrolysis to achieve carbon removal.
This is happening on an unfathomably large and devastating scale in Sweden, right now.
Old forest is being savagely clear-cut and replaced by monoculture plantations to the detriment of animals, insects, birds and the entire rich ecology of the ancient woodlands. The new plantations have introduced new diseases and encouraged pests that further damage the old-growth trees - leading to even more clear-cutting to prevent the spread of the new blights.
Near to where my family have a cottage, a forest that surrounded the visible remains of a bronze-age settlement was brutally clear-cut using the usual enormous machinery that completely churns the land and scars it irrevocably. The forest itself was probably five or six-hundred years old, and it was felled by these monstrous machines in a morning, leaving just horrifically bare soil and the cratered disfigurement of industrial forestry. No-one cares.
In case anyone is not aware of current events, right now at this moment the EU is facing an energy crisis due to their reliance on Russian energy. It’s not just about the money, but being able to allow the majority of the populace to heat their homes
EU resident here who hates the cold but will be wearing a down vest all winter.
Yes, EU is facing an energy crisis due to reliance on Russian energy.
How does switching to a reliance on another non-sustainable energy source help? That just creates another energy crisis.
We need to face up to having a few cold winters while we make the change, there really isn't any other good way forward.
And on the bright side, while a few cold winters isn't comfortable, it is a heck of a lot less destructive than what our grandparents and great grandparents lived through during the "cultural readjustments" of 1914-1920 and 1939-1945. These things come 1-2 times/century. If you manage it well you come out better.
There is no way to "make the change". The kinds of renewable energy that are broadly available in Europe, like wind and solar, are not a full replacement for existing fossil energy sources - they're simply too intermittent and the storage technology to deal with that does not exist. (The BBC has been falsely claiming otherwise, insisting that other energy sources are pointless and a waste of money by treating wind and solar as though they were direct GWh-for-GWh replacecments for natural gas and nuclear.)
That's why biofuel burning is so common - not because it "creates a lot of profit for shareholders" but because politicians have to square the circle of keeping the lights on asnd homes warm whilst dealing with voter expectation that they switch to renewables that are fundamentally unable to do that. The UK opposition party released a "100% renewable energy by 2030" promise recently and if you look at how they plan on filling the gaps when there's not enough energy from the wind and sun, sure enough it's biofuels just the same as the current lot.
Also, I don't think you quite grasp how catastrophic the energy crisis is in Europe - the entire continent is deindustralising because the energy supplies to keep modern industrial civilisation going are no longer there. There's a real risk that in a few years time Europe might no longer be part of the developed world if politicians do not change their path.
For the people where a “vest” isn’t good enough, it buys them and their respective governments time to figure things out before the weak and vulnerable fall prey to short sighted energy policies
Right now. But this problem existed a year ago, two years ago - it’s actually existed for decades.
Not doing anything real about it for those decades, and then blaming russia for your inaction for the past 30-40 years? Classy move.
Edit: re-reading this it comes off as a personal attack, which was not my intent - the “you” i’m speaking of is european nations - not the commenter i replied to
One of the things that makes ecological protection so hellishly difficult is that the "environmentally minded" side
of the argument pitches all of its propaganda assuming that the recipients of the propaganda are already in line with many other values.
As an example, the two major save-the-environment angles in the US are the 'hippie' ("We need to save the forests and the Earth because all of the species need to live in harmony") and the 'scientist' ("We need to save the environment because we are all going to die from ecosystem collapse and catastrophic flooding"). Both of these personas are astonishingly easy to caricature and it's effortless for right-wing political leaders to find the silliest and most ridiculous examples to paint as representative of the movement.
If you want to get 'conservatives' to agree to do something about conservation, you need to appeal to the 'religious' ("Did God give us these gifts so we could destroy them in our own name?") and the 'nationalist' ("For centuries these proud forests have stood as a symbol and vital backbone of our nation's economy and spirit, and only powerful and clever stewardship will allow us to both profit from our natural resources as well as hand them down in full strength to our grandchildren so they can continue to steer the nation to prosperity").
Criticizing someones methods of activism is always kinda a joke to me. If you care, and think you have a better way to win people over - MAKE YOUR CASE - don’t tell others they’re doing it wrong and if they just said the right words you’d get on board and help.
The scientist making a religious argument, when they didn’t believe it, is just as easily dismissed as the scientist making the science argument. Turns out you need pastors and religious leaders and conservatives to make those arguments to conservatives. Why aren’t they? You tell me - i’d guess that a few do and the audience would rather hear other things - plus all the nice oil money goes to media that pitches climate denial messages
Criticism is of interest to us when we are serious about achieving success. When really trying to achieve something, ideas of fatal flaws are fascinating. On the other hand during a performance, criticism must be effectively ignored.
> Criticizing someones methods of activism is always kinda a joke to me. If you care, and think you have a better way to win people over - MAKE YOUR CASE - don’t tell others they’re doing it wrong and if they just said the right words you’d get on board and help.
Point to where I said I wasn't on board.
Criticism of ineffective activism is necessary for anyone who continually beats the same message and then has no idea why they keep losing elections and failing to achieve their goals. "Why do they keep voting right-wing?"
If you’re on board, and have a better argument than you see being made for why others should be on board as well - it’s time to make your case. The climate isn’t going to wait.
I literally did made my case. Real climate action done with majority consensus must win the support of people who don't currently believe in environmental causes. This will require a change in messaging in order to capture opponents. The alternative is violent suppression of consumption and industry, which I am also open to.
> If you want to get 'conservatives' to agree to do something about conservation, you need to appeal to the 'religious' ("Did God give us these gifts so we could destroy them in our own name?")
You can't win that game against their own priests, particularly if you don't even believe the religious arguments you're trying to make. Atheists smugly and self-servingly explaining Christianity to Christians with arguments the atheist doesn't even believe himself is something they're already very familiar and derisive of.
Use arguments you actually believe yourself. People can tell when you aren't.
If you do, then knock yourself out and go preach to your fellow Christians. Something about the tone of your comment lead me to believe that you, like myself, do not.
You are perfectly demonstrating the total inability of left-wing people to govern effectively. The Christians make up a huge percentage of people who oppose climate reform. If you want non-violent, non-authoritarian action on environmental protection, they need to be on board. Why is this principle difficult for you and your co-believers to understand?
While this is technically renewable energy, it involves huge amounts of non-renewable energy to turn carbon sequestering forest into energy. It must be logged, shipped, processed into wood pellets, and then energy to ship that to a port and across the ocean to the UK and then to the power plant. That's largely all diesel fuel of some variety. The power company is able to completely ignore the carbon cost there and even get 6 million pounds of carbon credits for being a good little world citizen. It makes no sense. I hope this kind of insane green washing gets shutdown before it causes widespread harm in other countries.
something like this is happening on a daily basis in California, along the routes of major power lines. Tree contractors under the supervision of dot-mil cut well past their allotted areas. Once it is done, no arguing can fix it. The documentation of this is considered classified in some cases since the power lines are certainly critical infrastructure.
Awake and aware people may howl and writhe more, except that the backdrop here is catastrophic wildfire, which also destroys irrevocably .. (catastrophic has a technical meaning in that context). Things really are grim in many forests at this time in history.
gonna piggy-back on this to raise awareness about some of Austria's primal forests getting destroyed so they can build massive roads needed to transport concrete for wind mills. Austria usually uses reservoirs on the mountains which is a lot more effective (considering there is little wind). The "green" power generated is sold to neighboring countries. I've talked to the farmers who owned the land formerly ~2 years ago. They were acknowledging the damage but laughed it off as "not a big deal because we've already sold our soul when we said yes to ski resorts"
oddly the only party that opposed the plan was the right-wing populist party.
As a (presumably) fellow Canadian: Things do look bleak some days, and "Others are worse" is cold comfort. The fact that the grass is always greener, and a nation always looks worse from the inside though, is at least slightly reassuring - it at least implies things are at least salvagable.
A Canadian company is cyanide gold mining in Turkey. They destroyed thousand year old forests while the poison spills everywhere. They just get a hand slap and get another license all the time.
Canadian mining companies are basically the worst of the worst. Completely psychopathic behavior, at least from what I know about their operations in the African continent. Not that canadians care, because it's far away and we just don't like talking about resource extraction in general. That our entire economy is extremely heavily dependant on oil and mining (here and abroad) might ruin the illusion for most of us here.
> It doesn't take thousands of years to develop a forest. Trees grow rapidly.
Except it does, and they don't, because that's literally what makes old-growth forest so important and so rare. A forest is not "a field of trees", when we call something a forest we're talking about the complete, fully established, stable ecosystem that makes up a forest. And an old-growth forest is one where the trees took hundreds of years to grow (old growth trees do not grow fast) with a floor composed of biomass accumulated over many generations of vegetation, requiring -surprise- thousands of years.
Fields of trees only take 10~15 years to stand up, so you can log them. Which is why we do that. Actual forests take a hell of a lot longer to create, usually a few generations of humans. Except for old-growth forest: we can't create those, we die way too quickly. By the time a single generation of old-growth trees have done a cycle, it's anywhere from 150 to several thousand years later.
If you've never seen old growth forest: imagine a huge, adult tree, so wide two people can't even put their arms around it. Good job: you just imagined a toy tree compared to old-growth forest, so let's do this again: Imagine a car. Then imagine a single-car garage built around that car. Then imagine a fantasy-world tree that is so big, the entire garage fits inside that tree.
That is what old-growth forest is. Those weren't fantasy trees, that's what our forests used to look like. It used to be everywhere. Now, there is almost none of it left, and no one should ever be allowed to log it.
Trees in BC's old growth forests are not your backyard's trees. They're millennial gigantic old giants. Since they're gigantic, they're a prime product for lumber, and they've been decimated in the past 100 years. Growing these forests back will take thousands of years.
That'd be basically a tree plantation, but a real forest is an extremely complex ecosystem, whose soil builds up and evolves over hundreds of even thousands of years where microorganisms, mycelia and trees' root systems interact, cooperate, share nutrients and water.
The same goes for the canopies, where a whole other ecosystem lives in it's own, with some species (animals and plants alike) never touching the ground of the forest for their whole existence.
Forest are an incredible carbon sink and removing old growth will dry up the soil and cause outgassing of the captured carbon within a quite short period of time, cause weather induced soil erosion and destroy the former water retention capabilities, leading to more floodings.
A mast-producing forest with a thick and high enough canopy to create its own microclimate takes 80-100 years to grow in some places, and yes thousands of years in others.
A forest can grow in 15 years, but they are a lot different. I live in Michigan and you can still see some of the effects from the clear cutting that ended over 100 years ago.
"Sure, we razed Manhattan and sold the rubble for scrap. But the people who live there put up a bunch of tents and makeshift shacks, which are technically buildings, so the city has been fully rebuilt!"
Why, then, selling those licenses in the first place? Sounds like something that could be made illegal if there was an actual will to do so.
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/industry/forestry/forest-...