by Dave Neads
As Minister Penner stated when commenting on the new carbon credit system the BC government is putting in place, things can get "complicated." Just how complicated becomes readily apparent when you examine the newest scheme to make us look climate friendly and make money to boot.
Here in the Interior, we get, on average, 125 cubic metres of tree mass per hectare. It takes 125 years or more for trees to achieve this size. Most of the beetle kill and most of the old growth logged here is 125 to 200 years old. The ministry has set the lower limit of loggable forest down to 60 cubic metres per hectare. That is about the same amount of wood that is contained in one big old coastal cedar. Or one off-highway logging truck load for every 2.5 acres of land laid bare.
The question is: What happens to the carbon when these trees are clearcut?
With coarse woody debris, slash burning, diesel release in the cutting down of the trees, transport of logs to the mill, processing the logs into lumber and the subsequent transport of dimension lumber to the building site, coupled with the usual life span of 30 to 40 years before the dimension ends up burned in a landfill, all that carbon from the trees plus all that carbon from the manufacture and disposal of the forest will go into the atmosphere.
So, we plant seedlings. Diesel and natural gas to heat the greenhouses, diesel to transport the trees, propane and diesel to feed and house the tree planters. Once the little guys are in the ground, it will take them as long as it did the old forest that was cut before they pull the equivalent amount of carbon out of the air to replace what those old trees had locked in their wood. When you add in all the additional carbon for the cutting, transport, milling, delivery of dimension, disposal of materials, and growing and transport of the seedlings, even in the full 125 year cycle, it is impossible for the new forest to remove as much carbon from the system as was released in the whole process of manufacture and eventual discarding and replanting of the forest.
Impossible.
Young trees absorb carbon at a faster rate, but the amount they can lock up is nowhere near what the old trees had until they are the same age as the tree they are replacing. Period. Even as they are dying, old trees continue to add carbon as long as they live. Managed Stands? Faster growing? Sure. Just add fertilizer, go in and limb, space, do 20 year thinnings – all those carbon releases again.
Managed forests are a dream. It will never happen. Not on the millions of hectares in the Interior anyway. There is no money in it and the companies admit it: that is why they are asking for hundreds of millions of dollars for "rehab." In other words, if the taxpayers won't pay for it, it won't happen. But, even if this money were to come from the public purse and some rehabilitation was done, the costs and side effects are far more damaging to the system; the overall carbon release will still exceed any possible removal by the trees.
Beetle killed? As the trees die, fall over and rot, they will release carbon. Typically that process to release all the carbon will take 30 to 60 years in this climate. As well, some of the decay is fixing carbon in the soil. So letting a dead forest stand, then fall over and decay is by far easier on the carbon cycle than logging the trees. Remember you have to add in all the carbon released in the whole process. Not to mention that clearcut logging removes all young trees under two feet, effectively setting the forest recovery clock back to time zero. In stands left to If we were serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we would end clearcut logging immediately. We would leave as much structure on the land as possible, we would protect regen, we would get rid of this false notion that a scraped and burned piece of land covered with 18 inch high seedlings is somehow good for the planet.
In stands left to rot naturally, where there are already young trees in place, by the time the old trees are rotted, there will be 30 to 60 year old trees in the same place, locking up considerable carbon. So, when the full release of carbon from the dead forest is achieved, half of it will have been taken up by the forest standing right there.
Beetle-killed forests actually lower the long term fire risk in a forest. Once the needles fall, in two or three years, the forest is less fire prone than when it is green. It is the green needles with all of the oils and turpentines in their cells that cause the explosive high temperature fires that race across the andscape. In the red attack phase, the needles are drier, so there is a 10 to 15 percent elevation in risk of fire, but the speed of spread, the size and duration of the fire takes on a life of its own. Racing crown fires follow their own dictates according to wind and topography. I've seen them race across clearcuts, road corridors, beetle-kill and green forest alike, no difference.
To say that logging followed by planting seedlings to replace forest is a way to reduce greenhouse emissions is a full and utter scam. Then to sell these seedlings to the world as a way to raise money to defray the costs of clearcutting just adds to the farce.
If we were serious about reducing green house gas emissions, we would end clearcut logging immediately. We would leave as much structure on the land as possible, we would protect regen, we would get rid of this false notion that a scraped and burned piece of land covered with 18 inch high seedlings is somehow good for the planet. If we are serious, these are the things that need to change, along with the continued hallucination that what is good for the US housing market is good for our forests or the carbon cycle.
Minister Penner is right, it is very complicated indeed, let's see if he has the wherewithal to set the record straight.
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Dave Neads is a long time conservationist who has been involved in Mountain Pine Beetle issues since the late eighties. He is currently working with several local and provincial organizations to promote economic and biological diversity in these changing times.
[Watershed Sentinel, March/April, 2007]