UK power station owner cuts down primary forests in Canada

&gt; The provincial government of British Columbia says old-growth forests are particularly important and that companies should put off logging them.<p>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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www2.gov.bc.ca&#x2F;gov&#x2F;content&#x2F;industry&#x2F;forestry&#x2F;forest-tenures&#x2F;timber-harvesting-rights&#x2F;forest-licences" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www2.gov.bc.ca&#x2F;gov&#x2F;content&#x2F;industry&#x2F;forestry&#x2F;forest-...</a>

This is extremely strange article from American perspective, but it probably hits British sensibilities.<p>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?<p>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.

I am a Canadian logger from western Canada. This article is nonsense and I have seen similar ones peddled locally.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If people don&#x27;t want forests to be logged they can quit using wood. As well you&#x27;d need to stop putting out forest fires and let nature reset itself as it always did before humans showed up.

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?

&quot;The provincial government of British Columbia says old-growth forests are particularly important and that companies should put off logging them.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s not really enough. BC should regulate these forests heavily.<p>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.<p>Mankind will not survive a world where it is expected that corporations (especially megacorps) simply &quot;do the right thing.&quot;<p>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.

The shame here is on my country, Canada, for not putting a stop to this as much as the UK.<p>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 &quot;jobs&quot; and &quot;the economy&quot; and a dozen other reasons that boil down to &quot;we really like the money we get paid for it&quot;.<p>Hey, <i>we</i> didn&#x27;t harm the climate because <i>we</i> didn&#x27;t burn the pellets! And the UK didn&#x27;t harm the climate because <i>they</i> didn&#x27;t cut down any trees! Everyone wins, and also we get handed a bunch of money.

Also discussed here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33064582" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33064582</a><p>Copying my comment from there.<p>Waste wood for power is fine.<p>Similarly other biomass from agricultural waste is good.<p>Key word here is waste, because it&#x27;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&#x27;t scale as much so they&#x27;re only part of the solution.<p>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.<p>The article tries to imply that the whole forest was clear cut and burned for power but they don&#x27;t actually state that, presumably because it&#x27;s not true. It would be a much bigger scoop if it was.<p>Once we get rid of the need to burn stuff for power by rolling out more renewables, it&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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.

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

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

One of the things that makes ecological protection so hellishly difficult is that the &quot;environmentally minded&quot; side of the argument pitches all of its propaganda assuming that the recipients of the propaganda are already in line with many other values.<p>As an example, the two major save-the-environment angles in the US are the &#x27;hippie&#x27; (&quot;We need to save the forests and the Earth because all of the species need to live in harmony&quot;) and the &#x27;scientist&#x27; (&quot;We need to save the environment because we are all going to die from ecosystem collapse and catastrophic flooding&quot;). Both of these personas are astonishingly easy to caricature and it&#x27;s effortless for right-wing political leaders to find the silliest and most ridiculous examples to paint as representative of the movement.<p>If you want to get &#x27;conservatives&#x27; to agree to do something about conservation, you need to appeal to the &#x27;religious&#x27; (&quot;Did God give us these gifts so we could destroy them in our own name?&quot;) and the &#x27;nationalist&#x27; (&quot;For centuries these proud forests have stood as a symbol and vital backbone of our nation&#x27;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&quot;).

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&#x27;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.<p>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.

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

That&#x27;s how many biomass power plants get their fuel.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;e360.yale.edu&#x2F;digest&#x2F;u-s-forests-are-being-devastated-to-supply-biomass-energy-industry-report-finds" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;e360.yale.edu&#x2F;digest&#x2F;u-s-forests-are-being-devastate...</a>

Obligatory related reading: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;DoombergT&#x2F;status&#x2F;1571063488860286977" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;DoombergT&#x2F;status&#x2F;1571063488860286977</a>

The lengths people go to avoid using nuclear energy…

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

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

gonna piggy-back on this to raise awareness about some of Austria&#x27;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 &quot;green&quot; power generated is sold to neighboring countries. I&#x27;ve talked to the farmers who owned the land formerly ~2 years ago. They were acknowledging the damage but laughed it off as <i>&quot;not a big deal because we&#x27;ve already sold our soul when we said yes to ski resorts&quot;</i><p>oddly the only party that opposed the plan was the right-wing populist party.<p>[1 in German] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meinbezirk.at&#x2F;lavanttal&#x2F;c-lokales&#x2F;erste-kaerntner-windraeder-werden-sich-heuer-drehen_a5170108" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meinbezirk.at&#x2F;lavanttal&#x2F;c-lokales&#x2F;erste-kaerntne...</a>

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