This week, we return to our conversation with Richard Robertson and Tegan Hansen from STAND.Earth on forestry issues in British Columbia. Wood pellets, or biomass fuels, from B.C.’s forests are being touted as a large-scale, carbon neutral energy source. Does the carbon accounting behind those claims add up? What are some alternative solutions for the future of the forestry industry?
Richard and Tegan also share their experiences at last year’s climate COP in Dubai with us. Find out what it was like to be an observer at the biggest stage for international climate negotiations and how Canada’s forests can be affected.
Learn more about STAND.Earth on their website.
Make sure to check out the show notes on the podcast webpage for more links and helpful resources.
You can help this community grow by sharing the podcast with your friends.
This week, we return to our conversation with Richard Robertson and Tegan Hansen from STAND.Earth on forestry issues in British Columbia. Wood pellets, or biomass fuels, from B.C.’s forests are being touted as a large-scale, carbon neutral energy source. Does the carbon accounting behind those claims add up? What are some alternative solutions for the future of the forestry industry?
Richard and Tegan also share their experiences at last year’s climate COP in Dubai with us. Find out what it was like to be an observer at the biggest stage for international climate negotiations and how Canada’s forests can be affected.
Learn more about STAND.Earth on their website.
Make sure to check out the show notes on the podcast webpage for more links and helpful resources.
You can help this community grow by sharing the podcast with your friends.
Welcome to the ClearCut. Hi, I'm Janet Sumner, Executive Director at Wildlands League.
Kaya Adleman:And I'm Kaya Adelman, Carbon Manager at Wildlands League.
Janet Sumner:Wildlands League is a Canadian conservation organization working on protecting the natural world.
Kaya Adleman:The ClearCut is bringing to you the much needed conversation on Canadian forest management and how we can better protect one of Canada's most important ecosystems, as our forests are reaching a tipping point.
Janet Sumner:Okay, it's part two, with Teagan and Richard from. Stand and hold on to your seats, because you're going to hear a lot more about biomass. You're going to hear a lot more about attending the Conference of the Parties, the Climate Change Cup in Dubai and some of the unintended consequences from the climate agreements, and that has been to drive up the marketplace for biomass. Because you don't have to count the emissions coming out of the smokestack. That is one of the things that I just think is so incredible. The emissions that are coming out of a smokestack from burning pellets that came from a forest in British Columbia or elsewhere in Canada don't count in your emissions, because it's assumed that that is part of an and Teagan gets into this as part of a natural climate cycle, and it's just not true. The emissions that are coming out of that smokestack are actually I think she says they're worse than coal. So this is yeah, it's going to be a fabulous conversation, so so hang on. This is something to to savor and get into.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, but, janet, you know those trees, they grow back in, you know 100 to 200 years. So if Canada wants to meet its climate targets by 2050, I think those timelines definitely add up, you know.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, yeah, we've got a target of 2250.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah or maybe 2350.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, it reminds me of this trend on social media that's been. It's kind of stale. It has kind of cycled through its course, but it was going around a few months ago. May know it as girl math, if you've seen it. So girl math was this idea that, for example, anything that you buy with cash is free because you can't see the actual number decreasing in your checking account. If you return an item that you purchased for $50, you've just made a profit of $50. Or if you buy concert tickets for a show, six months from now they're free by the time you're actually going to the concert.
Kaya Adleman:And so girl math quickly devolved into boy math, because some people were saying oh, like you know, maybe this is a little bit problematic because girls are great at math. We've had many great women in STEM on our show before. So some examples of boy math ended up being you know, boy math is making fun of astrology but majoring in finance. Or paying $44 billion for a $25 billion company and, you know, through all of your entrepreneurial skills and business smarts, turning it into an $8.8 billion company. Thanks, elon Musk.
Janet Sumner:Oh, my goodness, really he did that. It was $44 billion became 25.
Kaya Adleman:Yes, and then now it's worth it, and it's worth $44 billion. It was a $25 billion company. He purchased it for $44 billion and now it's worth $8.8 billion.
Janet Sumner:Now I knew he was basically driving the value of the company down. I didn't know that it had gone all the way. Yeah, he paid $44 billion and it's now worth eight Like that's just. That is really bad math.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, that's boy math. You know there are further iterations of this trend. There was server math at one point I saw, but it kind of seemed like it was a all a tongue in cheek way to make fun of spending decisions. And writer for the cut, daniel Cohen, actually says it's justifying buying silly things while the world burns, which I think is a great segue into our conversation on biomass, because kind of seems like there's a place for forestry math in the conversation, especially when we get into what we're going to discuss on this episode as we learn about the role that biomass is playing in international climate negotiations.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, I think we can all be accused of having, shall we say, favorable math in it when we are making buying decisions where we're like, oh, I could buy those, those really great sneakers or kicks because they're on sale, so I'm saving 20%, but in reality you're still spending $150 or whatever the price is yeah. So I think that that is. We're all guilty of that. We all probably have some math blind spots. But you're right, we need to get to the truth of this, because we can't do that while the planet is on fire and we've got climate change. So this is going to be a good conversation and a good reminder that we do need to get the math right. We can't just be pretending that it's all going to be okay.
Kaya Adleman:Can't be making any decisions in our favor for sure?
Janet Sumner:No, absolutely not. Yeah, so let's switch to the the cop. Yeah, teagan, do you want to jump in or where do you want to take this?
Tegan Hansen:Sure, do you want to ask about the cop? Shall I just get in there, yeah.
Janet Sumner:So we recently had the conference of the parties that was held. It was on climate change and my understanding is both you and Richard attended and it was in Dubai. Sorry, just Teagan. Okay, so Teagan attended it and it was in Dubai and you went there and what was the interaction on the cop and very specifically, I guess, with relation to forest?
Tegan Hansen:Yeah, the cop is such a fascinating place. So this is, you know you can imagine, a massive conference, say with over you know, almost 100,000 people were registered to attend in this massive venue in Dubai and with countries are presented from all over the world and a record breaking number of fossil fuel lobbyists and lobbyists for other sectors like forestry and biomass. And so you imagine you're in this space where there's also, you know, a civil society presence and countries like countries in the Pacific, which are really fighting for their survival, and civil society from all over the world fighting to be heard, fighting to raise the profile of their very real struggles that they're facing with climate impacts, with sourcing for not just fossil fuels but also for the supposed renewable energy transition. And so you're in this really fraught space. It's a fascinating place because you know there's obviously some real restrictions in Dubai. Nor you know around what people are allowed to say without facing repercussions, really dangerous state repercussions, and this space is administered by the United Nations. So for a lot of people coming from different countries, it's an opportunity for them to speak out and to make connections with people from around the world and to build, you know, build a solidarity internationally around the struggles that they're facing. And in this space, what we saw was, you know, some, some positive steps that I feel obligated to start off with, which was this will sound shocking, but it has been a new thing. This was caught 28. Conference of the parties on climate and it was only the second year that fossil fuel, fossil fuel, was named in the final agreements and the fossil fuel got named three times and that was considered a very big step. And you know, that's where these international agreements are at.
Tegan Hansen:I don't think we should look to spaces like cop to save us, to save the planet, but there's certainly opportunities for both people from around the world to build solidarity and there are also opportunities for companies and corporations and states from around the world to build their power and build support for their you know, their solutions, which in some cases can be dangerous distractions like biomass, and so I visited a Drax co funded biomass kind of pavilion in one of the areas and there was a talk happening including people from Australia, and Australia is a country that very recently, just over a year ago, kind of quietly passed some new regulation around, sort of you know, not sourcing from native countries because their term for biomass, which is a positive step, and these you know this person from Australia, alongside a Drax, you know, senior executive. We're lamenting that and this space that's supposed to be about climate solutions and we saw the final outcome of this COP into by. You know, the agreements referenced a commitment that was kind of made early on by a number of countries, which is to triple their renewable energy. That you know countries are building out and expanding renewable energy over the next number of years, but they didn't distinguish biomass out or highly polluting you know industries out, and it was so affirming, but also so in raging to go into spaces with people from places like the mean and to go and Chile and Indonesia and countries that are seeing this massive growth in biomass and for some of them they're really framing it as land grabs and biomass companies from the global north, from you know countries in Europe, of the UK, have these renewable energy dreams that are predicated on burning and so they're looking to increasingly other countries to source, you know, to build biomass plantations, to log, and they're looking at the important forests that are, as we know, like here and around the world. They're places of enormous cultural importance, they're important for food, they're important for wildlife, they're important just for our communities. And so to go in and kind of have this framing of logging and then building plantations to fuel the green energy transition is really being dubbed by the groups that we work with in the biomass action network, as you know, a new form of climate colonialism. And in countries like Indonesia the biomass industry is not necessarily built around export but instead built around co firing.
Tegan Hansen:So what this refers to and you'll see this if you you know we're following the COP agreements that all you might have seen a terminology around phasing out on a baited coal. So what does abating coal mean? I can be in a number of different things, but one of the ways you can abate coal is by replacing a certain percentage of the coal with a material like wood pellets or forest biomass. So you can get 2%, 5% or 10% abatement or replacing your, your coal with biomass. Then you can consider you've kind of ticked your climate objective. You're still burning coal.
Tegan Hansen:Your emissions on on, you know, in practice do not go down, but on paper they do because, like we've talked about, you don't count biomass emissions because in theory they're supposed to be counted on the land, which again, we know is not true, and then you end up having an impact in a country like Indonesia that's looking at co firing, where you know thousands, I think they said I don't know where to do. I know it was 1.2 million hectares of forest for one of the lowest percentage of abatement options would have to be logged and burns to meet the goals that they have agreed to, and so that's a terrifying reality. That's an on you know, for a number of energy campaigners around the world who've been working to phase out coal as a huge, a huge source of the climate catastrophes we're seeing. And that's just an unintended consequence of the kind of international agreements that are being levied. But of course we can see in spaces like cop a real effort from certain countries and corporations at levy this, and certainly we're looking to Canada as an actor. Canada is known internationally in many cop spaces for having an impact on agreements and how they reference for us in a way that's ultimately quite harmful to for us. And then Canada also co chairs the powering past coal alliance with the UK and that body which again powering past coal. So great effort on paper to reduce global reliance on coal very needed, but in practice they're also now ramping up their support for biomass as the alternative to coal and what that's ultimately doing is is increasing the longevity of coal with co firing, with biomass, and then it's putting this enormous pressure on communities and for us.
Tegan Hansen:So that was part of the experience of cop. But I do want to say I mean, I I think it's a very healthy debate whether or not cops should exist. I think as long as it's a space where countries and corporations are going, civil society has, you know, sort of an obligation to go and mitigate harm. I also think the international solidarity around biomass that I saw there and that I've seen growing around forest issues and biomass generally in these spaces is really incredible and there's something really important about our responsibilities to growing that kind of solidarity with people from around the world that's not based on our states or our countries but that's based on our common reality and our ability to support each other through these struggles. And so that's, I think, something I really walked away from cop with this enormous respect for these people who are doing that work, and I think it's valuable. But I do think we have to be really careful at not taking it face value what we're seeing coming out of those spaces, because it's always more complicated than it seems.
Janet Sumner:If you like listening to the clear cut and want to keep the content coming, support the show. It would mean a lot to Kai and I. The link to do so will be in the episode description below.
Kaya Adleman:You can also become a supporter by going to our website at wwwwildlandsleagueorg. Slash the clear cut and also make sure to leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming platform. It would really help the podcast. I'm also wondering, and you guys might not have the answer to this, but if we're increasingly looking to forestry as a climate strategy, like is the math that we're basing our greenhouse gas emissions because we're actively like taking out a carbon sink, is when the IPCC originally did the math on, you know, meeting our targets towards 1.5 or two degrees? This the sliding scale. There's a built in assumption that that carbon sink is being eroded over time? Or, if it's, if there's, if it's the same, or if we're still operating on the assumption that from the time these targets were born, that we have the same Expansive carbon sink. I don't know if that makes sense.
Tegan Hansen:I'll take a stab at it and then, richard, please jump in. It's absolutely makes sense. So part of the predicament we're in around biomass stems from the reporting from the IPCC and the counting from the UNF. Triple C, Five hundred thousand further제로at layer of biomass were there that were added in carbon Earlier. It showed that you could naturally and during high nuclear Gadot volume 1991 degrees oglots there the carbon storm grew as a source to diagnose. But they're not counted because the rationale for this is that it's an existing carbon cycle.
Tegan Hansen:So forests naturally over their lifetimes. You know, especially if you look at places like forests in BC, most forests in BC burn naturally and that's part of their cycle of regeneration and indeed first nations have used fire as a management tool, as a cultural practice for thousands of years and it's part of why there's such an abundance in BC. Is fire and forests naturally burn or they decompose, they go through periods of infestation, they might be emitting carbon. So there is certainly a science to this idea of forest absorb carbon, they release carbon and that's an existing carbon cycle. And the premise is you cut them down, they grow back. As you said, the time scales that the industry is using to justify that don't line up. We're not. We don't have the time that it would take for forests to regenerate even a majority of that carbon which it's up in the air, if they can ever recover the carbon that they store now with climate change. But we certainly just don't have the time to make those kind of dangerous assumptions. So that idea of a carbon cycle is part of the premise and why we're in this predicament with biomass, and I think you'll see the sector well, I know you'll see it.
Tegan Hansen:Unfortunately, we're seeing this really dystopian premise being sold by, you know, a number of actors in the forestry sector that you can store carbon and wood products, but the best climate solution is to log a forest and put the wood in the building and that that is actually instead of letting them burn. That's how we're going to solve climate change. That's. It's such a dystopian and wholly false view. I mean, we know in British Columbia the a lot of forests. The carbon that they store it's actually mostly in the soil and that's disturbed with all the equipment at logging. And then you know you don't use most of the wood you cut. It's totally false. And then you look at a place like the. You know even the lifetime of a building is actually not as long as you would think. It's less than a human life.
Tegan Hansen:So the idea of storing carbon in that way is ridiculous, but it is what the sector is promoting and I would say, with colonial governments, at least, it seems like that is the approach that they would like to take and the policies that they're taking, and so I think we have to be really careful about letting them get away with that, because ultimately, what it's doing is giving away to practices and sectors that are ultimately, you know, destroying our climate in terms of highly emitting fuels like wood biomass or wood pellets. And with logging, you know the real consequence of making communities more vulnerable to these really severe mega fires that we're now seeing in places like British Columbia. I know, Richard, if you had more to add to that.
Richard Robertson:Yeah, I think the wildfires is really good segue into what I wanted to say on this one, and that's that Forests are currently, or have been, a carbon sink and so they're storing more and more carbon over time. So they have this huge store of carbon. Forestry has come in and industrial forestry has come in and shortened the lifetime, if you like, the life cycle, of these forests. So we're now into 60, 70 year cycles on a. When you go back and disturb the forest again, the industry would say, oh, there's natural disturbance, pest fire, the like. We are imitating that through our this is how they sell it. They were imitating that through the clear cuts. However, the clear cuts are on such a cycle now and across such the whole of the landscape that that's no longer that's way ahead of this of the cycle that you would get from natural disturbance such as fire. So like something on off could be a 250 or 500 year cycle, but for a fire comes through naturally again. We're now into cutting and this disturbance over the 60, 70 years, let's see.
Richard Robertson:So the fear is that we are going from a carbon sink to a carbon bomb when we're actually a forest. Could forests could come to emitting more carbon into the atmosphere than they've been absorbing and that they've been able to store over time. This is the fear here in temperate rainforest and this is the fear also in the Amazon, the Amazon rainforest. A lot of people might have heard that that forest is at a tipping point or potentially getting to a tipping point where we'll go from a carbon sink to a carbon bomb, and those two things are the opposite ends of what we really want here and need here in terms of our futures and our future climate. And if we cannot bring or keep these forests as the carbon sinks that we desperately need, it's going to alter the climate, not only for those forests which we're seeing and we're seeing so much more in terms of fires, and we're dreading the fire season coming here this year but also I'm looking out the window here and everyone around the country is saying where's the snow been this year? Where's the cold? Where's the? Could it be an unusual year?
Richard Robertson:It seems more that we've had a cycle of a number of years like this now, and yeah, so that's the kind of cycle we could be going into and that is not what we want to be doing with our forests, and the forests have been there the rainforest, the temperate rainforest. We have have been helping to control our climate here and on as part of a global system, so to cut further into those now and to further degrade them, it seems really a very egregious thing to do. That's all sounds very negative. I wonder if there are some positives that we can switch to and talk about, maybe how restoration of these forests and protection of forests could really Could see us through to something that's much more positive than where we're at right now.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, I mean we could talk about that. I mean I don't want to deter you from having a bold way of stating what is, because I think we all need to admit to what is, and then we can actually start to solve things. And so I think that that's. Many people don't have the advantage that you have, which is to get out there and see what's happening on the ground and understand it, and that's it's vital to it's. One of the reasons we're doing this podcast is basically, I had a deep frustration with so many of these conversations happening across the country. People in the middle of the country would see the fires in BC and feel frustrated. Or they see the protests around old growth. They'd feel frustrated, but they wouldn't really know the state of it. We'd only hear it in the media as a Sound bites.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, sound bites in the media and we'd get a sort of a taste of reality every once in a while. So the point of the podcast was to actually bring some of these conversations out into the open so you could actually go through the podcast. You could listen about the honorable harvest, you could listen to Harvey Locke talk about the carbon cycle, but also how we're counting carbon internationally. You could have a conversation or listen in on what's actually happening in BC in terms of old growth and listen to Justina Ray talk about caribou and what's happening there. So I very much want these conversations to be bold and be able to face the reality in front of us and then say, well, what are we going to do about it? And actually where I'd like to go next is because I know Stan has thought about this a little bit and one of the things that we know that we're in an energy transition, that we have to be thinking about an energy transition. But I'll just full disclosure I've been thinking for a while now that we need to start having a conversation about a fiber transition, or how we make things, what we make them out of, what's our product that we're going to be producing and what's the source material?
Janet Sumner:And I'm also thinking of that from the perspective of communities, communities where logging might have been occurring for a long time, and those old growth forests that are actually very rich in biodiversity are also very rich in terms of the dollar amount that they gather on the marketplace, and so what is going to replace that? And then, if you talk about biomass coming in as this savior, even though it is heavily subsidized for our local community, it might be the savior in terms of what can be logged or not logged in, and I know that you've done some thinking about that, because, as a nonprofit organization, you really do think about local impacts, and so I'm just wondering if you could maybe talk about that a little bit.
Tegan Hansen:Sure, and this is the real meat of the discussion. Right Is well, what, if not this, then what? And I think it's also been an intensely frustrating time because there's been sort of a barrier to having that conversation in a meaningful way, certainly in British Columbia. So we've had a commitment on old growth from the province of British Columbia to implement a number of recommendations, and they made this commitment in the last election, so in 2020. And what we've seen really dominate the rhetoric from the province, instead of following through on that commitment, has been a real thinking into misinformation about what's actually happening in forests and about what they're doing, and I think that's been a real struggle and one of the things that's made. Having the discussion about, okay, what you know, what can community, what can communities look to instead, because we can't even be honest about what's happening now and about the impacts and the causes. And so that's one thing I'll also I'll preface this with is the conversation itself is so deeply rooted in misinformation from and it's intentional from the province, and also there's also just a very understandable amount of caution and fear. I think it's again I mentioned this earlier about. You know, our approach as a province in British Columbia to resources is still very much rooted in a gold rush economy and frame of mind, and the fear, the very real fear, of your town becoming a ghost town is also true. I think it's really important, though, to take a step back further. I've been really encouraged.
Tegan Hansen:It's been hard fought and extremely imperfect and has a long way to go, but I have been encouraged to see, with recent agreements coming out, that the province, the provincial government and the federal government have done things in partnership with, like First Nations Leadership Council, for instance, which is a body that represents many First Nations governments in British Columbia, and to really recognize, you know, what we have to approach forest management in BC with is one every forest is on First Nations sovereign territory, and we that means we actually have to change how we do things. It's not just, you know, a land acknowledgement and some nice words. It's a full change in practices to reflect that the sovereignty of that nation, to reflect our commitments under the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act in BC, which was adopted a few years ago and said that laws would be amended to like to reflect the title and rights of First Nations. So that's one thing, and then also the reality that you know there are certain fundamental values that take precedence in our lives water, air, you know, having a home, having access, you know, being safe. And we are reckoning with this in the province where undergoing we just actually finished close up a period where the province was getting feedback on a draft, a biodiversity and ecosystem health framework. What does ecosystem health means is a very much an open question and something that could be dangerously misapplied. The forestry sector has used the argument of ecosystem health to do enormous clear cuts with the way they responded to the Pine Beetle crisis in BC, which was not ultimately helpful for ecosystems or communities. But you know these are very fundamental things and so the idea being that there should be legislation in the province that that requires a fundamental, fundamentally ecosystem health is a priority, and that any corporation, whether it's forestry or mining oil and gas, you know, or utilities takes ecosystem health as the fundamental basis of life, and that that, you know, has to be at the forefront of your discussion. So I think you know, respecting that those are the priorities, then you get into.
Tegan Hansen:Well, people need jobs and they need livelihoods, and a lot of communities around BC were built. The settler communities were built on the industry of cutting down trees and milling them. And now you know, you look at companies, the biggest logging companies in the province, like Canfore and West Treasure, are increasingly closing mills and opening new ones in the southern US where the trees, you know, are in a different kind of cycle of regrowth. And that's such a concern because those companies really control the land in a profound way. They have these massive 10 years, they have the ability to, you know, build these roads and have like kind of wreak havoc with these massive clear cuts, and I do mean wreak havoc because that has been the impact. And so fundamentally, when we talk about jobs, we're going from a place where the priority of these biggest, most powerful companies has ultimately not been to give the best or most jobs. It's been to make to really have good profit margins.
Tegan Hansen:And I gave a presentation at a forestry on a forestry panel in the fall. It was very interesting, I was a very out of place panel but at one point I pulled up a graph where I showed you could see basically two lines and it was the amount of wood cut by volume in the province and then the amount of kind of jobs per volume and in the 90s those two lines diverged sharply. So you had kind of volume going more steady and then the amount of jobs for per tree basically cut, just going in steep decline. And so the reality is that you know, with mechanization, you know more automated jobs, that you haven't needed to employ as many people to make money.
Tegan Hansen:And we've been exporting, you know, products that aren't what we would say, I would challenge, our true value added products. I don't think exporting pulp, even a two by four, you could say it's not the same as building a house or making furniture and selling a really high value product. And so that's the challenge, I think, ultimately the reality of what, what is the alternative? You know job sector, what's the alternative? Fiber source it's going to be different in different communities and I think there is a very founded reality that for some communities looking at, well, what can we do with the fiber that's left in this area, it's not going to be the same answer in. You know where I'm from, in the West Cuny's, where there's been such severe degradation of forests. It's not going to be the same there as it might be in you know parts of the North where the industry really centralized now if you think about ultra-thulking and where it's most severe it isn't on the South Coast, it's in the North, and I think where we have to accept is that some communities will not have the same number of mills that they might have had in the 80s.
Tegan Hansen:It should be the priority of this government to, when they look at, you know, opportunities to subsidize projects, to subsidize true value-added projects where employment that comes with the basis of First Nations Title and Rights and ecological integrity as the priorities that that is the goal of the project is the community longevity. My concern is that our province currently considers wood pellets to be a value-added product. I don't think turning a tree into a pellet is value and it's certainly not a good jobs proposition. It's one of the worst jobs proposition sectors that Forestry has to offer. But that is, in a lot of cases, the only solution that's being offered to communities by this province, because it's one that's still rooted in the same way of looking at a forest as a timber basket.
Tegan Hansen:A forest is not a timber basket. You know forests are our best defense and offense to climate change. For First Nations it's their land and, you know, sources of food and culture and for all of our communities it's safe drinking water, it's protection from fire, it's protection from flood, and so I just I think, fundamentally, we need to have those open and honest conversations about what matters most, and we need government to be honest about their priorities. And the reality is, the province of BC has been sending trade missions to Japan to market BC as the timber source for wood pellets, and that's not, that's not a solution that I think works for anyone, and I don't, at least in the fall. The fallers and the people in the sector I've talked to are pretty, you know, just as horrified by that option is. I think we are, and so I think we have a lot more in common than than others would like us to believe. But ultimately, we need to be willing to have very difficult conversations that are going to be different in every community of BC.
Kaya Adleman:Hey, are you liking the clear cut as much as we like making it? Your donation helps us bring more of these important stories to life. You can actually support our work by going to our website, wwwwildlandsleagueorg. Slash the clear cut, or you can click the link in the episode description below. Your support means the world to us.
Janet Sumner:Richard, do you want to jump in on that? It's a pretty passionate plea by Tia.
Richard Robertson:Yeah, amazing to you. Yeah, I agree with everything you said. It's an amazing call out of the industry and its impact on communities in so many ways. And yeah, I've worked in the forest and I it's a lot of the work out there is not very, very highly paid as, and trying to get an industry that's more skilled and that's able to provide those kind of more skilled and jobs with longevity, along with with future and the potential for promotion for people's lives to be more enhanced, I think is is a great call out.
Richard Robertson:I also want to reflect back on the subsidy situation and the idea that that that the government is further subsidizing this industry, the biomass industry, as opposed to putting a lot of the money. Let's be frank, 90% of what we have here is crown land and the ties between government earning revenue from that and industry going about what it's done for the last century and more are very, very solid, and so to try and break that paradigm and look at rest of forest restoration and pulling back the time scale on which you go in and re, harvest and recut these, recut these forests is essential. So instead, I my view would be that you, instead of using some of some of the income that you've, you have been benefited from from cutting forests in to further cut and further exploit. Take a step back and start to restore what you have and restore it in a way that we can have an ecological integrity and a community integrity more intact and more in place so we have a greater future for forests and forest communities.
Janet Sumner:Maybe trying to where Richard was taking us with a conversation. Are there? There are lines of hope here. Are there things that you see, that you go? We should be really, really hopeful for this. I know there's a lot that we have to face, but what would you draw out as what gives you hope?
Tegan Hansen:I think, ultimately, people will always give you the most hope. I think you're feeling hopeless. The best thing you can do is go and take action with people and really there has been so much incredible work done by community leaders over I mean forever, but in the last few years, you know, we've seen people do everything from blockades to actions to raise awareness and, you know, verging on I wouldn't say harassment, but like a real steadfast commitment to elected officials responsible. I mean that's really helpful. And I do think there has been a response from and certainly we talk a lot about the province of British Columbia when we're talking about these because the province has so much power. But there has been movement from the province and it's been because people have done such a good job of forcing them to take action and to forcing them to face political consequences if they don't, and that's amazing. We've had great commitments. You know I will always hold the province responsible for not meeting their commitments to implement their old growth strategic review that they agreed to in 2020. But the fact that they said they would and they're still ostensibly working on it and we have something to hold them to their is hopeful. There's really promising pieces in that review. That could do an enormous amount of good for forests and communities.
Tegan Hansen:There was recently a tripartite nature agreement signed between the First Nations Leadership Council here in BC and the governments of British Columbia and of Canada to dedicate, you know, about a little over a billion dollars I say a little, but over a billion dollars for nature. And again, like, was it all good? I mean to be just Herman's how it actually rolls out, but in theory what that's going to do is make it more feasible for First Nations to lead on conservation work in their territories that is actually meaningful and long term and rooted in, you know, connection between people and land. And so if that's rolled out properly, that could be a great thing. And I think those are hopeful measures and they require us to be constantly vigilant and constantly active and engaged in holding our representatives and our governments accountable. And so I think that that's really where the hope comes in.
Tegan Hansen:It's not, you know you, if you look at the state of forest, it's grim. There's very little old growth left. Forests in this province are intensely fragmented. There's more. You know BC as a jurisdiction within Canada leads on biodiversity and also on extinction. There's a lot to be, very rightly so worried about, and there's so much we could do. I think one thing that I always come back to is we're at such a profound moment where we can actually make change for the future. We can. We can keep species from growing extinct, we can work together with communities to make a truly green and empowered future for communities, and so this is all possible and we actually can do it, and it's a really our responsibility to, and so I think that's where I find hope is in the opportunity, and that's also where I find frustration the lack of follow through from colonial governments. But that's our job. That's why we have so much fun professionally yelling at them.
Janet Sumner:I'm wondering where's your hope? Have you got hope in the EU DR? Have you got hope in Like? Where's your hope come from?
Richard Robertson:Yeah, I think that's that's a good one to call out. I am, one of the most hopeful things that I've seen in the past year has been the work that we as a national, regional, environmental, non government organizations have done and actually come together. I was I was amazed how we we came together and came to a very strong agreement on what is forest degradation, and so it's. I think it's a very strict and necessarily very strict definition, but for for some fairly in the past divergent organizations to be able to come out strong together and speak for their constituents and to be able to represent those people, hopefully, who are listening to this podcast, who are concerned and who really want to see improvements in our forest, I think that's that's amazing and I hope we can do some more work like that together. I think that's that's how we're going to really get our voices heard, if we can speak as one and come out very strong.
Richard Robertson:So, yeah, that that gives me hope and I think this there really is opportunity for the change at the international level in terms of recognizing what, what are real climate solutions, and that our forests and their ability to absorb carbon, that this is the only thing that we found so far that can actually absorb carbon. There's this industry. The pilot industry is going down the route of trying to do that artificially Again, trying to beg for more, more subsidies. We have essentially a free resource out there that is storing millions of tons of carbon and doing it daily without us interacting at all. Sadly, we're denuding that a bit. If we could step back a little, I think that's that would give me some further hope.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, it's the original carbon capture technology.
Tegan Hansen:Yeah and it's the only proven carbon capture and storage technology at this point as well, yes, exactly.
Kaya Adleman:Is there anything that someone listening to the podcast can do to maybe get involved? Things that stand is doing that you want to plug, yeah.
Tegan Hansen:Yes, there's always a way to be involved. I think you know there's a very simple thing of you can go to stand on earth and sign a petition, but what also that will do is you can sign up to get updates and alerts About actions you can take. You can further take to do to support worker on forest defense, and that can be everything from signing more petitions to you know, we have an upcoming election here in British Columbia, so if you reside in British Columbia, there's a real opportunity to engage with people in your constituency and work to hold political representatives accountable and make them aware of the fact that these issues matter to you, I think very rightly so. Issues of affordability and housing and health care are going to be really top of the agenda for this election and BC and I'm sure you know, as we had also towards a federal election, and so it's really on us and on you to make sure that your you know whoever is running for office in your writing also knows that issues around forests and climate matter deeply to you and are going to impact the way that you vote, and so those are important steps you can take. So I would suggest signing up via one of our petitions on stand out earth is a way you can get engaged in that community or or simply do that work yourself. I find out, you know, if you live in a community, in a forest community and I would challenge also that I mean at least in British Columbia every community is a forest community and you have opportunities locally to take action. And whether that's from trying to, you know, work with people locally to protect a forest or changing practices like trying to get glyphosate, which is a harmful talk to me haven't even talked about that but trying to get that to not be sprayed somewhere where people in your community might go berry picking or all kinds of different activities like that's an important measure you can take and those opportunities to engage. You'd be surprised how much a phone call or a visit to a local office, how much power that actually has, because so few people do it. And then I also think one thing that also advertises.
Tegan Hansen:We talked a little bit about misinformation and we developed a tool at stand called forest I, which is a monitoring tool for old growth logging Specifically.
Tegan Hansen:At the moment it just focuses on old growth in British Columbia, but what it does, because there's such a lack of publicly available information about old growth flagging.
Tegan Hansen:It's so hard to know when there's a road that's gone into a new place or when there's a new block that's recently been put in. How do you know that's actually happened if it's 200 kilometers away from you and up a really you know frightening login route? So we have a tool now that sends alerts or we post alerts online to an interactive map, into a repository of information, so you can actually see satellite imagery of new roads going in and new clear cut logging happening, and so you can also sign up to get alerts through that. And so it stands at slash forest I and that's a really designed also as a tool for you, for people, to take action, where you can then send that information to your, to your MLA, to your MP, federally, even if you'd like and really drive home the fact that old growth is still happening and that you want these practices to change. So those are a couple, couple little pieces of information at your disposal, but then also feel free to just reach out to us via our website as well.
Janet Sumner:I was also going to say I think every Canadian can do that, because the force of BC sometimes feel like they belong to every Canadian. You know that that when the fires are going, when the old growth is being threatened, you see general concern across the country, and so it's well MLAs and MPs in British Columbia might be counting the votes and how that might work. I think it's good for all Canadians be tracking what's going on and understanding what's happening to our force on behalf of us and thinking about ways that we can have that conversation and be prepared for it.
Kaya Adleman:So that we can make our decisions better. So being politically engaged is like super important, because just for everyone, because business as usual is dependent on the notion of like free riding for people to not be engaged.
Tegan Hansen:Absolutely, and these policies impact people all over the world, I mean very directly. We've seen, you know, with the fires last year, not just in BC but around Quebec and Ontario and elsewhere, and the smoke making news and just wreaking havoc on people's lives, and, you know, as far away as New York City. Well, those are the direct impacts of Canadian forest policies and making the landscape so susceptible to fire. So, absolutely, you're totally right, this is, you know, our collective responsibility to take action and do what we can to make these political decisions essential for political leaders, you know, make it so that they have no choice but to take this action that we desperately, for our lives and for livelihoods, need them to take.
Richard Robertson:Yeah, I think, don't you write? The forest in British Columbia should be regarded by everyone lives in Canada as such an amazing part of the culture and the environment here. And then I also reflect on the fact that 90% of them are termed brown land, so it ties into the colonial past, and me myself being from Britain and seeing wood pellets go from here to to the UK is furthering that whole kind of colonial impact. And so, yeah, people in people in Britain also have a responsibility now for these forests in the way that they are exploited and and always have done. And so, yeah, I really take that away. I'm always if I'm talking to people in Britain.
Richard Robertson:I had the privilege of going to the Drax, a GM in London last year and there I was telling people, look at the names of the places here, look at the fact that it's you know, alberta and Prince George and the Queen Charlotte Islands, as as colonial these places have been termed.
Richard Robertson:It's, it's writ large and this is a place that's been exporting internationally for a long time. So it's, yeah, it's essential that the world looks to these forests and says, no, this is not the way to be, to be going forwards, and that these forests deserve a lot more respect and the people who rightly who rightly own these forests and culturally manage these forests are the first nations and indigenous peoples here in this nation. Yeah, I don't think they're really aware of that and I don't think they're really aware of some of the shocking history around that either. So I take every opportunity to let people, certainly in the UK, know more about that and I hopefully through podcasts like this, and I'll certainly be sharing with my family friends there so that they'll get to know a little bit more about what's happening and their impacts.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, I think that when we designed and I mean we as in the collective, we designed the climate architecture to try and reduce emissions and get to net zero and I thought wasn't really to be burning more trees to get out of the climate emergency, I mean that seems, just on face value, seems counterintuitive. And so this is I think Tegan you mentioned it and I think it's absolutely right this is an unintended consequence of those climate agreements and trying to get to net zero. And if countries and I'm, you know, pointing my finger at places like the UK and I'm a dual citizenship there, so so feel I have an ability to do that as well but your climate policies are killing our forests. And so starting to think about if you really want to get to net zero, really embrace getting to net zero, and burning trees is not the the answer to the climate equation. Yeah, sorry it's maybe too much editorial, but that's where I'm at.
Tegan Hansen:I think it's not editorial, it's just a fact, right.
Richard Robertson:Yeah, I think, the more simply we can put these things as well. That speaks so readily to people out there. I can't top that, I don't think.
Janet Sumner:Thank you both very much for your time.
Janet Sumner:It's been really appreciated and for me it's a chance to. I mean, I've been working with Richard a little bit more closely over these last few years, but it's a great chance to catch up with you, tegan, and to hear a lot more about what you're doing. And the conversation that we had, that you gave us an inside view into the COP was really good. Really appreciated that and just understanding how countries are out there selling the opportunity to come and get biomass here, it really was a bit eye-opening for me and also just how some of the communities that are out there that's the only options they're given.
Janet Sumner:So, it's really sobering, but I thank you for bringing that all to the conversation of Richard. I look forward to doing more with you in the future as we explore the degradation definition and trying to get Canada to agree to something that's recent Great. Thank you, so much this has been a great opportunity.
Tegan Hansen:Yeah, thank you so much, Really appreciate it.
Janet Sumner:So, as promised, we heard about the unintended consequences of climate agreements driving up the marketplace not the need, necessarily, but the marketplace for biomass, and also the time scales. That's a really big thing that Kaya and I were both just shocked by that. You could have a zero emission when you were burning wood pellets, even if you include all of the transportation costs, the drying of the fuel or the fuel drying of the wood to create wood pellets, and then you ship that 12,000 kilometers, move it from British Columbia to the UK to fuel up a very large station there called Drax, and this is a dangerous game of roulette or very bad math. It's actually one of the reasons that I moved from working. I specifically worked on climate change up until 2003, and I did that because it was, you know, a breaking issue is a really big concern for me, and when I started to look at the math on how much carbon Canada that stored in its forests and its peatlands, I got very, very concerned and moved to working on nature, because I thought one of the things that Canada was at risk of it was its greatest problem was how it was going to deal in terms of climate change, was going to be how it dealt with the natural world and I hate to say that, 20 years on, it still is a great concern for me that Canada may seem to want to deal with you know getting out of coal or reducing our emissions or you know being a part of all of that but we have grave concerns of how we're dealing with biomass, how we're treating the underlying structure of the climate agreement.
Janet Sumner:As Kaya points out in this episode, there was an assumption there. All the climate models assume that you had essentially a natural world that would keep absorbing carbon at the same rate, and yet we are taking away some of these natural places you know our forests, but also our peatlands and that's diminishing the ability of the planet to capture carbon. And yet we're out there saying, oh, we're going to invent carbon capture systems and the greatest carbon capture system is the natural world, and yet we're liquidating it. At the same time we're saying it's a zero emission coming out of a smokestack. So all of this is deeply concerning for me and the time scales are just way off.
Janet Sumner:If you cut down a two or 300 year old tree and I think Tegan talks about this in the episode mentions that cutting that tree down yes, it's all that stored carbon, but also it changes that entire forest and its ability to absorb carbon. So you've got both of those things going on and there's no way you're going to replace. Even if you could believe the sustainability model and believe that we're going to have 100% regeneration, that's not going to happen by 2050. It's just absolutely not that two or 300 year old tree that became wood pellets, or 50% of it became wood pellets, will not be restored in that timeline. This is sort of the shocking truth of these conversations and I really hope that people will start to take this into account. We definitely need sustainable economies for our forest dependent communities and we need to look more broadly than just this gold rush mentality that Tegan keeps talking about.
Kaya Adleman:Forestry math if you will. I think one of the standout points.
Janet Sumner:You started a new meme. Instead of girl math or forestry math, yes, Maybe that'll be the title for this episode.
Kaya Adleman:Moving on, one of the things that stands out for me and one of the things that I'm actually kind of concerned about is there's a lot of negative media attention of this past year's cop in Dubai, that there was an overrepresentation of people from the fossil fuel industry who were lobbying to make sure that fossil fuels aren't completely phased out of the conversation, and one of my hopes is that world leaders are not going to look to biomass as the solution to that. And, as Tegan was saying, given the biomass industries presence at COP as well, I think that's also something that's a red flag for me and I hope that this episode will kind of bring these issues to light more and that this is not something that we should be turning to as a solution for clean renewable fuels. Yeah, so there's that. And then one of the other parts of this conversation that I really enjoyed was when we started talking about the transition for the future. What does that look like?
Kaya Adleman:We've had similar conversations on the podcast before about finding alternative materials to produce single use wood products, from steering away from biomass as a broadband energy source. One of the things that Richard said actually is that a lot of the jobs that are in these industries are highly recognized, they're being phased out and that they're also not very highly paid. Especially as the industry is going to get more skilled, it's not a good outlook for job longevity and growth, so we need to start looking towards better solutions that'll provide better economic security for the people that are working in the forest industry as well. Those are my ads.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, definitely, forest dependent communities need jobs. All right, kaya, thanks so much. Another great conversation.
Richard Robertson:Yeah, thanks.
Janet Sumner:Take care. If you like listening to the Clearcut and want to keep the content coming, support the show. It would mean a lot to Kaya and I. The link to do so will be in the episode description below.
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Kaya Adleman:See you next time.