Tag Archives: forests emitting carbon

Talk Is Cheap, Part 1: BC Fails to Fulfill its Carbon, Climate, Forestry Promises

The government of Canada, and the BC government, state publicly that they are committed to carbon reduction and proactive responses to climate change; yet both Canada and BC remain consistently among the world’s top carbon emitters per capita. In 2019 Canada was the world’s highest carbon emitter per capita.

On the one hand, our government proposes initiatives that would improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions — in sectors like transportation and construction. But on the other hand, they continue to subsidise existing and new fossil-fuel projects such as LNG Canada and the Coastal Gaslink pipeline — to expand fracking.

Canada’s Liberal government spent $4.5B to purchase the Trans-Mountain Pipeline in 2018, only to announce in Spring 2022 that no further funding would be allocated to the project as cost overruns neared 70%. But wasting money may be the least of our problems. These fossil-fuel projects have huge carbon impacts.

Continue reading Talk Is Cheap, Part 1: BC Fails to Fulfill its Carbon, Climate, Forestry Promises

Enviro groups say Canada’s climate goals are based on flawed forest carbon accounting

By Natasha Bulowski, Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Last week, the federal government announced Canada’s 2020 greenhouse gas emissions dropped, in part thanks to trees removing carbon from the atmosphere. However, environmentalists are quick to point out this calculation excludes a huge chunk of emissions from the logging industry.

Nearly seven megatonnes of CO2 were removed by the land use and forest sector, an amount that reduced the country’s total emissions by one per cent, according to the federal government. Environmental groups, however, say the sector’s true GHG emissions are underreported by a staggering amount — approximately 80 million tonnes of CO2 each year.

Continue reading Enviro groups say Canada’s climate goals are based on flawed forest carbon accounting

The Quadra Project: Challenging the way people think about forestry

Prior to embarking upon a literary career in 1985, Ray Grigg taught English, literary history, fine arts and comparative world religions in British Columbia’s High School system. Since then, he has written a long list of books on Taoism, Zen and environmental issues. Grigg was also the author of a column called ‘Shades of Green,’ which ran in the Campbell River Courier-Islander for 15 years. A little over half a year ago, he started writing a series of articles called ‘the Quadra Project.’

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Climate questions about Mosaic harvest plans

By Barry Saxifrage

To: Colin Koszman, Land Use Forester at Mosaic
From: Barry Saxifrage, resident of Cortes Island
Re: Mosaic’s harvest plans on Cortes Island (Feb 8, 2022).

Thank you for your Zoom presentation and flyer emailed to the Cortes Island community. I have some questions about the climate emissions from your planned harvesting. Each question has a brief discussion below it. An extended discussion with additional supporting data is at the end.

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