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UK power station owner cuts down primary forests in Canada

223 points by tommoor 4y ago

grej 4y ago
Obligatory related reading: https://twitter.com/DoombergT/status/1571063488860286977 https://twitter.com/DoombergT/status/1571063488860286977
Victerius 4y ago
Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
- chaostheory 4y ago
  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
  - kennywinker 4y ago
    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
  - mellavora 4y ago
    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.
    - chaostheory 4y ago
      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
    - makomk 4y ago
      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.
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      Nuclear is sustainable. Start by not decommissioning them until you have established independent energy security.
- 1234letshaveatw 4y ago
  Sigh- If only capitalism could match the unrivaled perfection of a planned economy, which historically has treasured the environment above all else
skrbjc 4y ago
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?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Because selling the logging licenses and then shaming the companies into not using them would allow them to have their cake and eat it, too.
  - cronix 4y ago
    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. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/europe-is-turning-to-firewood-for-heat-gas-energy-russia-2022-9 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/europe-... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/07/world/europe/eu-logging-wood-pellets.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/07/world/europe/...
    - gadders 4y ago
      In my village in Kent in the UK, the chap that sells logs had a record day when the latest energy price cap was announced in July.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      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.
PM_me_your_math 4y ago
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  That's not a forest. That's some trees.
  - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
    Aren't trees found in a forest?
    - monktastic1 4y ago
      Well I guess since people live in cities then every group of people is a city!
      - CommieBobDole 4y 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!"
- debacle 4y ago
  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.
- charles_f 4y ago
  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. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cathedral+forest+bc&t=fpas&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cathedral+forest+bc&t=fpas&iax=ima...
- 4y ago
ls612 4y ago
Ladies and Gentlemen, behold the lengths some people will go to avoid other people saying that they use more fossil fuel.
debacle 4y ago
"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.
- joshuamoes 4y ago
  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.
  - debacle 4y ago
    Being across the continent from this, the only thing I'll say in response is that none of the photos in the OP look like old growth forest to me.
charles_f 4y ago
> The provincial government of British Columbia says old-growth forests are particularly important and that companies should put off logging them. 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-tenures/timber-harvesting-rights/forest-licences https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/industry/forestry/forest-...
- chaostheory 4y ago
  Is it a federal license or a provincial one? It would be ironic if they were granted one from the province
  - charles_f 4y ago
    Would be even more ironic if it were the federal[1] [1] https://globalnews.ca/news/8346968/cop26-pledge-deforestation-canada/ https://globalnews.ca/news/8346968/cop26-pledge-deforestatio...
  - Tiktaalik 4y ago
    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.
- blooalien 4y ago
  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…)
  - voisin 4y ago
    Reminds me of this: https://www.derekchristensen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/shareholdervalue.jpg https://www.derekchristensen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/...
xyzzyz 4y ago
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.
- fy20 4y ago
  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.
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    That’s not what the linked article says.
    - jcheng 4y ago
      > 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.
quacked 4y ago
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").
- kennywinker 4y ago
  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
  - quacked 4y ago
    > 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?"
atemerev 4y ago
The lengths people go to avoid using nuclear energy…
mabbo 4y ago
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.
- wsc981 4y ago
  If you buy the CO2 narrative, then cutting trees should be deemed bad, since these trees will not be able anymore to absorb CO2.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    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.
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      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.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33064582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33064582 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.
clarionbell 4y ago
That's how many biomass power plants get their fuel. https://e360.yale.edu/digest/u-s-forests-are-being-devastated-to-supply-biomass-energy-industry-report-finds https://e360.yale.edu/digest/u-s-forests-are-being-devastate...
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
- 29083011397778 4y ago
  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.
- cenkozan 4y ago
  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.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    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.
mistrial9 4y ago
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.
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
UK Govt: “Here’s $6bn if you promise to cut down forests.” 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.
eloff 4y ago
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.
null_object 4y ago
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.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  I guess many care, but they don't exert their care through money, which talks, sadly?
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    You can't vote with your wallet to prevent others from buying cheaper wood. 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.
    - jjtheblunt 4y ago
      that's a good point!
PeterStuer 4y ago
Same is happening all over Europe, with incinerators in the Netherlands the primary buyers.
soupbowl 4y ago
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.
- alex_young 4y ago
  This linked photo sure looks like clear cutting to me: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/07FB/production/_126934020_87e704f8-6b2d-4457-a580-0c5991d601e2.jpg.webp https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/07FB/production/...
  - soupbowl 4y ago
    Right, but you don't know what a clear cut is. I see wild life tree patches. Besides that this area will be replanted quickly.
    - uup 4y ago
      After replanting, how long does it take for the old growth trees to return? /s
      - soupbowl 4y ago
        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.
DyslexicAtheist 4y ago
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. [1 in German] https://www.meinbezirk.at/lavanttal/c-lokales/erste-kaerntner-windraeder-werden-sich-heuer-drehen_a5170108 https://www.meinbezirk.at/lavanttal/c-lokales/erste-kaerntne...
eyeball 4y ago
They’re going to get an increase in biter attacks if they don’t knock it off.
miguelazo 4y ago
Wonder if these are the same forests going into the Kirkland toilet paper at Costco.

223 points by tommoor 4y ago

grej 4y ago

Obligatory related reading: https://twitter.com/DoombergT/status/1571063488860286977 https://twitter.com/DoombergT/status/1571063488860286977

Victerius 4y ago

Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

chaostheory 4y ago
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
- kennywinker 4y ago
  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
- mellavora 4y ago
  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.
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    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
  - makomk 4y ago
    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.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Nuclear is sustainable. Start by not decommissioning them until you have established independent energy security.
1234letshaveatw 4y ago
Sigh- If only capitalism could match the unrivaled perfection of a planned economy, which historically has treasured the environment above all else

skrbjc 4y ago

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?

bombcar 4y ago
Because selling the logging licenses and then shaming the companies into not using them would allow them to have their cake and eat it, too.
- cronix 4y ago
  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. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/europe-is-turning-to-firewood-for-heat-gas-energy-russia-2022-9 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/europe-... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/07/world/europe/eu-logging-wood-pellets.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/07/world/europe/...
  - gadders 4y ago
    In my village in Kent in the UK, the chap that sells logs had a record day when the latest energy price cap was announced in July.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    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.

PM_me_your_math 4y ago

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
That's not a forest. That's some trees.
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  Aren't trees found in a forest?
  - monktastic1 4y ago
    Well I guess since people live in cities then every group of people is a city!
    - CommieBobDole 4y 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!"
debacle 4y ago
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.
charles_f 4y ago
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. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cathedral+forest+bc&t=fpas&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cathedral+forest+bc&t=fpas&iax=ima...
4y ago

ls612 4y ago

Ladies and Gentlemen, behold the lengths some people will go to avoid other people saying that they use more fossil fuel.

debacle 4y ago

"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.

joshuamoes 4y ago
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.
- debacle 4y ago
  Being across the continent from this, the only thing I'll say in response is that none of the photos in the OP look like old growth forest to me.

charles_f 4y ago

> The provincial government of British Columbia says old-growth forests are particularly important and that companies should put off logging them. 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-tenures/timber-harvesting-rights/forest-licences https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/industry/forestry/forest-...

chaostheory 4y ago
Is it a federal license or a provincial one? It would be ironic if they were granted one from the province
- charles_f 4y ago
  Would be even more ironic if it were the federal[1] [1] https://globalnews.ca/news/8346968/cop26-pledge-deforestation-canada/ https://globalnews.ca/news/8346968/cop26-pledge-deforestatio...
- Tiktaalik 4y ago
  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.
blooalien 4y ago
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…)
- voisin 4y ago
  Reminds me of this: https://www.derekchristensen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/shareholdervalue.jpg https://www.derekchristensen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/...

xyzzyz 4y ago

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.

fy20 4y ago
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.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  That’s not what the linked article says.
  - jcheng 4y ago
    > 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.

quacked 4y ago

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").

kennywinker 4y ago
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
- quacked 4y ago
  > 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?"

atemerev 4y ago

The lengths people go to avoid using nuclear energy…

mabbo 4y ago

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.

wsc981 4y ago
If you buy the CO2 narrative, then cutting trees should be deemed bad, since these trees will not be able anymore to absorb CO2.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  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.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    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.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33064582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33064582 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.

clarionbell 4y ago

That's how many biomass power plants get their fuel. https://e360.yale.edu/digest/u-s-forests-are-being-devastated-to-supply-biomass-energy-industry-report-finds https://e360.yale.edu/digest/u-s-forests-are-being-devastate...

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

29083011397778 4y ago
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.
cenkozan 4y ago
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.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  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.

mistrial9 4y ago

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.

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

UK Govt: “Here’s $6bn if you promise to cut down forests.” 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.

eloff 4y ago

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.

null_object 4y ago

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.

jjtheblunt 4y ago
I guess many care, but they don't exert their care through money, which talks, sadly?
- rightbyte 4y ago
  You can't vote with your wallet to prevent others from buying cheaper wood. 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.
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    that's a good point!

PeterStuer 4y ago

Same is happening all over Europe, with incinerators in the Netherlands the primary buyers.

soupbowl 4y ago

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.

alex_young 4y ago
This linked photo sure looks like clear cutting to me: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/07FB/production/_126934020_87e704f8-6b2d-4457-a580-0c5991d601e2.jpg.webp https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/07FB/production/...
- soupbowl 4y ago
  Right, but you don't know what a clear cut is. I see wild life tree patches. Besides that this area will be replanted quickly.
  - uup 4y ago
    After replanting, how long does it take for the old growth trees to return? /s
    - soupbowl 4y ago
      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.

DyslexicAtheist 4y ago

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. [1 in German] https://www.meinbezirk.at/lavanttal/c-lokales/erste-kaerntner-windraeder-werden-sich-heuer-drehen_a5170108 https://www.meinbezirk.at/lavanttal/c-lokales/erste-kaerntne...

eyeball 4y ago

They’re going to get an increase in biter attacks if they don’t knock it off.

miguelazo 4y ago

Wonder if these are the same forests going into the Kirkland toilet paper at Costco.