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.
Says Jens Wieting of Sierra Club BC, “[with pipelines and LNG] We’re talking about millions of tons of, of emissions from methane leakage, from processing gas and its transportation. And then we also have to consider that the emissions will be even higher — if we consider the climate pollution from burning these fossil fuels after exporting them to other countries.”
Continuing to subsidise the fossil fuel sector, says Wieting, guarantees that neither Canada nor BC will meet any of its declared “carbon reduction” targets. Some fossil extraction projects are now operating at a loss, making this not only an environmental but also a financial failure. When the potential liability for environmental damage is included, the net loss becomes enormous — and the taxpayer is likely to be left with the bill, as no fossil extraction company has ever posted a bond or “cleaning deposit” that would actually cover the damage they do.
It appears that the Canadian government is throwing good money after bad, investing in a losing proposition in every sense.
Meanwhile, Canadians are feeling the impact of intensifying climate change, including BC residents. Aside from the personal distress and loss resulting from ever-more-frequent fires, floods, landslides, smoke palls and collapsing permafrost, climate-related damage now worries even the economists… they now estimate it may cost the Canadian economy some $25 billion a year by 2025.
It gets worse.
Not only is BC aggressively extracting and selling fossil fuels and thus increasing the world’s carbon burden; it has also spent the last few decades decimating some of the best carbon sponge on the planet: intact old-growth forest, particularly coastal temperate rainforest, a resource now far more precious for its carbon-absorbing and climate-stabilising capacity than for its fibre content.
Until the early 2000’s, BC’s forest lands were a net carbon sink — they still absorbed more carbon annually than the amounts being released by logging activity. But as both logging and climate change inflicted increasing damage on the forest, “forestry management” has become a net carbon emitter.
BC’s forests, which used to be a climate asset, are now a liability.
In a year with major wildfires, BC’s forests might contribute over 200 million tons of CO2 to the province’s total emissions; for comparison, total emissions from all non-forestry sources such as transport, industry, housing etc. hover around “only” 60-70 million tons/year. But even in years without major wildfires, today’s methods of logging and forest management amount to a net carbon emission of over 40 million tons of CO2 — almost all of it related to logging activity. For its own reasons, the BC government does not include these numbers in its annual “greenhouse gas inventory”.
“There’s no action in place to reduce these emissions,” says Wieting. “Forest emissions are not counted, and that’s the reason why they are largely ignored.”
Though logging companies do replant most of their clearcuts, the “tree farm” plantations they create are no substitute for the original forest when it comes to climate stabilisation and carbon absorption.
“It takes way over ten years after a clear cut to allow the smaller trees — planted trees or regrowing young trees — before they even get to the point where they can absorb more carbon than the clearcut is emitting. In a clearcut, with the exposed soils and massive amounts of wood waste left behind — the carbon emissions continue year after year. It takes a very long time before such a damaged, degraded landscape begins to absorb a little bit more carbon than the ongoing loss. In the Pacific Northwest at least 13 years and in some cases 20 years, 30 years.”
So logging-related CO2 emissions include not only the fossil fuels burned to access, cut and transport trees, but also the carbon emitted for years to come by logging debris left to rot, by slash piles, by exposed and disturbed soil. The heaviest cost, however, is the destruction of carbon-absorbing mature forests, raising the average concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
“Our government looks at forests as if we have a two-dimensional ecosystem — as if it’s a cornfield that you can harvest and replant.
“But the reality is that forests are a three dimensional ecosystem, and it takes centuries for a fully functioning ecosystem with habitat for countless species and record high carbon storage to evolve. And we have now flattened the forests across large parts of the province. We have clear cut the most productive old growth forest, converted these landscapes into young short- rotation plantation stands, so now we have more and more younger forests that cannot withstand climate change.”
Canada’s twin policies of subsidising fossil extraction and permitting indiscriminate logging form a positive feedback loop: more carbon emitted means more climate change; climate change endangers remaining forests, including by wildfires that emit even more carbon; and large scale logging removes one of the few brakes on climate change: the carbon sponge of mature forests.
Policy-makers are not unaware that there’s a problem. Two years ago, the province of BC released the report of its Old Growth Strategic Review Panel. This report made fourteen clear and specific recommendations which, if acted upon within a three-year period, could begin to mitigate the damage being done to BC’s last remaining old-growth forest land and start restoring the forest’s capacity to absorb carbon.
Two-thirds of the way through the timeline laid out in the OGSR report, the province has achieved none of the 14 goals.
Last November, after the release of yet another expert review committee’s report (the Technical Advisory Panel), the Province released maps of about 5 million hectares of endangered old-growth forest and announced that it would “defer” logging on about half of that area. The public was led to expect that 2.5 million hectares would be protected. But so far only one million hectares’-worth of deferrals have been announced for the “most at risk” forests. The province has been rather vague about the status of already-permitted logging in these deferral areas.
Satellite imagery and on-site monitoring show that logging continues in areas proposed for deferral, so it appears that the province will not actually disallow or defer logging in those areas if permits were already issued. This would make the “deferral” designation meaningless in those areas.
As of 2021, at least half the area that the Horgan government promised it would “protect” was still open for logging.
The province has failed to curb the liquidation of old-growth forests, and has failed to provide effective alternatives for First Nations communities who depend on revenue from logging. “We have to protect and restore old growth forests, working with indigenous peoples, making sure that no indigenous nation is forced to choose between impoverishment of the forest or impoverishment of the people,” says Wieting. “The BC government has to join the federal government and commit to a goal of protecting 30 percent of the lands and waters across Canada and in BC.”
This goal — protecting 30 percent of land and water area from industrial exploitation by 2030 — is one to which over 100 countries are now committed. Canada’s federal government has made this commitment — 25 percent by 2025, 30 percent by 2030 — but it’s not clear whether the BC government has any serious intention to honour that commitment. And without that provincial commitment, the Canadian government’s endorsement of the Thirty Percent project is an empty gesture.
“This province could contribute so much more to solutions and offer some hope of addressing the climate and biodiversity crisis. It’s shocking that we mostly continue with business as usual,” says Wieting, “when we have such overwhelming evidence that we are running out of time to safeguard the web of life that we’re part of and depend on.”
In Part 2 of this story we’ll consider a particularly egregious case of greenwashing, regulatory capture, and net-negative exploitation of BC’s forests: selling off our trees to the international market for wood pellets.
Top photo credit: Wilderness Committee 2021, “No action on escalating old-growth crisis”