UK power station owner cuts down primary forests in Canada
bbc.com
bbc.com
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-...
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/8346968/cop26-pledge-deforestatio...
The "crown" land in BC is controlled by the Province.
(I'm just spit-ballin' a guess here, as I don't really know the answer either…)
fast grown oak is better:
https://blog.lostartpress.com/2020/11/17/slow-growth-oak-why...
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestry_in_the_United_Kingdom
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.
[0] https://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfd/pubs/docs/mr/mr113/forests.htm
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2013/jul/27/history-of-en...
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.
[0]: https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/CAN/2/?...
Not, because this is not a lineal system. At some threshold point the forest will collapse.
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.
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.
You mean _decrease_, right?
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.
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.
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.
Maybe a "whole log" is waste, sounds odd to me though - surely someone wants to use whole logs for more than burning?
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
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.
Then "Drax later admitted that it did use logs from the forest to make wood pellets"
Which time were they lying?
Then there was the bit where Drax said it transferred the logging licences to other companies, despite the evidence showing they didn't
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's left, at least on my first attempts is one lonely page of Drax's site:
https://www.drax.com/northamerica/pellet-sales/
> 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
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/04/13/220929...
This is incorrect. Only about 2.7% is old-growth. Source: https://thenarwhal.ca/b-c-old-growth-data-misleading-public-...
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.
>------------------------------------------- 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.
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.
Do you see evidence of selective logging there? I don't. If you're going to say I don't know what I'm talking about it sure would be good to hear why.
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.
No matter how you look at it processing and shipping wood from old-growth forests in Canada to burn in the UK is just not that.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/europe-...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/07/world/europe/...
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.
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.
Could the US government cancel outstanding bonds? Sure. Would it harm sales of future bonds? Yep.
It's much better and easier to just buy them back if the will is there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Copying my comment from there.
Waste wood for power is fine.
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.
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 theory I guess you could buy the forest but it is probably hard to pay interest on the market value set by logging if you plan to just look at it.
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
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.
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.
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").
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
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?"
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.
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.
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/u-s-forests-are-being-devastate...
oddly the only party that opposed the plan was the right-wing populist party.
[1 in German] https://www.meinbezirk.at/lavanttal/c-lokales/erste-kaerntne...
This is the norm btw. All these “green” incentives that you or I think are for wind and solar? 90% of them are just burning trees.