> Might be worth noting, that at the same time historical forests are being cut down for wind power
It is practically never the case that a forest is cut down for wind power. You cut down a couple of trees for the turbine grounding and for some ways to reach them. But really if you look at the numbers it's not that much.
The forest is still there afterwards. That's very different from "cutting down a forest" like it's done for opencast mining where nothing is left afterwards.
> Cutting an ancient forest, they are destroying an ecosystem.
Which is why this would have been a non-issue if they'd planted some Willow 10 years ago and harvested that instead. Energy forests are just another farmed monoculture.
Forests that we don't cut down is called reservations.
In Sweden there is a law that states that any forest cut down must be replanted unless used for farming or new buildings. I also recall Norawy having the similar law. If we counted that as carbon removal, we would have a massive carbon net negative from this pretty old law.
The law is not a carbon removal strategy. It simply maintain current biomass over time.
3. No, I‘m saying that forest is being removed for windmills. You are assuming that I‘m having some dumb argument. This is what I see where I live. Windmills in a national park with more trees removed for service roads. But please, continue educating.
> As to burning forests, fast growth wood can be harvested in decades not centuries.
Yes, but the main problem being pointed to here is the logging of old forests (they are nature preserves), this isn't about the fast industrial tree plantations of marginal ecological value.
It kinda is, given that controlled burns are taken off the table. Yes, controlled burns would be preferable, but if they are ruled out (which, in practice, they are), then we need to significantly reduce the forest size.
>it unfortunately leaves out a lot that a true forest requires and the resulting land will be less ecologically productive and every time the same region is re-logged a good amount of topsoil is lost
What is a "true" forest? When a forest burns down and regrows, is it still "true"? Do you think that's better than logging and replanting?
> Trees, on average, have a life span of a couple of decades.
This is not burning a tree it's burning forests, forests have lifespans of millennia. And that's not even considering these specific forests sit atop peat, you're not going to re-grow peat soils in 10 years.
> If we could capture all that carbon back by just re-growing trees for 10-20 years, we'd be fine.
Which is not what's happening, and fast-growers impoverish the soil and don't set up self-sustaining forests, we're mostly just setting the whole area up for erosion.
> Um, you do know that forests have stages? Right?
Right. From the article, the stages are:
> The trees mature in about 30 years ... and are then felled, making way for a fresh plantation.
> When machines chop down swathes of forest, a controversial process known as clear-felling, the landscape is devastated, said Stewart. “It looks like Hiroshima.”
> The single biggest reason to fell trees, according to official figures, is to create new pastures for cattle...
I doubt there's going to be much regrowth. It's still a huge and increasing number, regardless of whether it's a small fraction.
It's how we go "Oh that's not so bad, we can allow more of it." And more and more of it. Let's say 10x that number is where you draw the line and don't allow any faster. In a lifetime (80 years) 60% of it is gone, but it never happened quickly. Pretending large numbers don't matter because they're small fractions only counts when they're really small fractions and there are other forces at play to fix it.
> I've heard that the best ecological and economic outcome is to manage an old growth forest and log it selectively using patterns that mimic tree loss from non-human activity
I don't see how this is supposed to be accomplished. For that concept to make any sense, you'd need to prevent the tree loss from non-human activity, which is all but impossible to do.
If you can't do that, then the existing pattern of loss already looks like "loss from non-human activity", and any logging you do will look like "a lot more loss than typical of non-human activity".
Well, for any kind of industrial operation you'll want to plant the trees.. then there is the 10-20 year growth period that's kind of a problem for planning flexibility.. and then you need to chop them down and move them to the power plant which is a non-trivial and costly logistical constraint.
All the while the solar cell sits there and produces energy without any intervention. That's a big difference.. Also, wood does not scale well, there is just so much space for forests.
>The logging industry will happily wipe out nice, mature, profitable trees that are robust against fire and leave behind the unprofitable brush that serves as tinder. No thanks.
That wood waste used to power electric plants across the state before cheap renewables and solar were an option.
>Electricity infrastructure probably needs to be moved back to a core government function like roadways--especially considering that the infrastructure part is going to dominate more and more over the metered part as more renewables come online.
The forests will burn as long as Federal Lands are not managed and cut like they used to be. The Federal Forests will threaten private forests and the adjacent land will be impacted.
It’s simple, dead trees need to be cut down. Invest in as much renewable and clean energy as you want but if we don’t take care of these trees the air quality will be trashed. It’s happening right now.
> We're also up against a century of planting trees at 2x natural density after logging. Logging can be a useful management tool, but if we plant 2 trees for everyone we cut we're not building healthy forests, and we're just increasing fuel loads.
I'm thinking that mother nature generally plants trees at far higher than 2X density.
> The advantage of planting trees is that we know it works, it's cheap, and we can do it right now
Here in Sweden it is the law that if you cut down a forest you replant it. We have been doing it for a century. All forests here is basically in a constant plant-grow-cut cycle unless the land is claimed for new buildings (farm land has been steady declining every year).
It is debatable if the practice is carbon negative or carbon neutral. Most of wood product do get burned sooner or later, or turned into bio gas which then get burned. Almost nothing remain as stable carbon sink. A planted forest is an future investment to be cut, processed and burned. The only exception is forest reservations and those are much more expensive to make than planting trees.
The advocacy behind replanting might be better invested into a political action of bringing similar replanting laws to other countries. Sweden mostly did it because it looked ugly to have wast areas cut down without regrowth, and because it hurt biodiversity. It also make sense economically in the long run.
> The idea is to preserve as many slow growing trees as we can...
We need to manage forests wisely. I'm in the Northern Rockies, so I only know about pines, but preserving as many as we can isn't healthy. When they are packed too tight they aren't healthy. Their growth and structure is weak from competition and they are more susceptible to disease and insects. I've seen whole forests wiped out by bark beetles.
On my own land, we selectively logged, removing some of the larger trees or infested trees, thinning many smaller trees and sometimes just pulling out many saplings. Since then I've noticed the remaining trees putting on more growth and looking healthier overall. What happened to the logs? All the larger ones went to a mill. Someone at a big box improvement store can buy some wood and build shelves. They can sequester some carbon right in their own home.
I see such a negative, almost knee jerk reaction (not you specifically, but in general) to cutting down a tree that I wish people could come live where trees are weeds. I love the forest, I live in it and want it to be healthy, but it takes management and that means some trees need to be put to use doing something besides storing carbon.
Carbon credits or not, increasing the number of acres of healthy forest is always a good thing.
It is practically never the case that a forest is cut down for wind power. You cut down a couple of trees for the turbine grounding and for some ways to reach them. But really if you look at the numbers it's not that much. The forest is still there afterwards. That's very different from "cutting down a forest" like it's done for opencast mining where nothing is left afterwards.
reply