DougT, Your augumrnt is patricularly relevant in Christchurch at this time of year. Those who insist on heating their unisnsulated houses by burning firewood have taken to using the carbon nuetral argument. What they choose to ignore is that in a single winetr they will release all the carbon that a tree absorbed over twenty or thirty years. And they assume that the tree they are burning has been replaced with another tree when it is just as likely to have been replaced with a methane emitting dairy cow.

Worse still one recent letter writer in the Press claimed that burning firewood is more carbon friendly than hydro electicity because of the huge carbon emmissions during the dam construction. By contrast burning firewood has never emmitted even one gram of carbon more than was absorbed by the firewood in the first place. That conveniently ignores the fact that fireplaces are made either of bricks or cast iron. Making and transporting them releases huge amounts of carbon, possibly more per unit of heat than hydro dam construction.

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I just found some actual research about forest harveting here
http://icm.landcareresearch.co.nz/research/research.asp?research_id=58&theme_id=1

The potential for erosion and sediment generation within forests is one of the major environmental effects facing the forest industry in New Zealand.

Maybe NZ Wood could put this in their key research page.

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Would you or one of the other Greens be willing to approach NZ Wood and ask them what the story is Frog?

Do you know the answers are to the questions I asked them?

I did try to find the answers myself, but most of the information I got for harvesting was in cu mtr RWE rather than land area.
I was interested to find that most of the forest area is near or at maturity (because of mass planting back somewhere in the 70′s or 80′s), so if that was to be felled at maturity there would be a huge gap where not much wood could be harvested, and not much wood would be standing.

I still think the best bet is to put all the research money into time travel. It’s far more likely to work than putting research money into unsustainable renewables like wood.

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DougT – I cannot speak for the Green Party itself unless I quote policy, but I can speak for myself. I think that the “Key Research” looks like a load of bollocks. Not that it’s inherently wrong to ask those questions or that the answers are wrong. I, like you I suspect, think it is totally the wrong thing to be researching.

I do agree with the result that most Kiwis don’t think the sector will grow. We all know that forestry is being chopped at an alarming rate to allow for dairy conversions, preferably before the ETS kicks in. Now that that period has begun, the forestry lobby is fighting for special exemptions under the ETS that will see hundreds of millions in taxpayer money going to a few wealthy individuals and corporations over many years. If they succeed it will be the biggest transfer of public wealth to the private sector since they gave away our assets in the ’80s and ’90s.

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What does the Green Party think about NZ wood’s research Frog?

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The fact that they can’t answer a simple question like the one I asked proves that they either don’t know or realise what I am getting at and don’t want to acknowledge it.

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good point

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I pointed this one out a while back.
Renewable just means it’s able to be replaced after you use it. e.g. trees being replanted after they are cut down.

Sustainable means that the rate that the resource is renewed is the same or greater that the rate it is consumed.

The two are related, but renewable shouldn’t be confused to also mean sustainable. NZ wood are either confused or delibeartely misleading the public, because to sustain a forest you can only cut down 1/25th of the the total forest area (assuming a 25 year growth to maturity) and the same area needs to be replaned in the same year.

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oh and Doug I wonder how the NZ Forestry industry as it stands *isn’t* sustainable? I mean they plant, chop and then plant again, sustainable no?

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DougT, yeah, good on you – follow through again perhaps?? I don’t think it’s possible to lose any more native forest, as it’s most probably all ‘locked up’ by now, but if they were to look to find more timber from overseas, that’s another issue I think i.e. might be a matter for the FSC?

Yes BucolicOldSirHenry (BOSH?), I would imagine an ecologist would at least have a very keen grasp of the ‘interrelatedness’ within any particular natural phenomena, without necessarily having an appropriate background in the particular subject, so at a general level (for a Listener article for instance), they could have done much worse.

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Read “6 degrees”. It is about food and drought LONG before it is about flood.

BJ

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“Only” an ecologist? (Yes, I know what you were driving at…)

It’s the ecologists who really appreciate the risk we’re running.

The really scary stuff about climate change is not on the Working Group One part of the IPCC report, it’s in WG2 – the impacts. In the climate “debate”, it seems the Leylands and de Freitas’s of this world never get past the first few pages…

Ah well.

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Heres an interesting thing I found out about NZ wood StephenR.

They have a website which shows you the key research to prove that wood is sustainable.

http://www.nzwood.co.nz/home/articles/key_research/

You might note that the “Key Research” is an opinion poll (very scientific).
I sent in the following comment to NZ wood a few weeks ago

Hello,

I just have a couple of questions.

What is the area of NZ forestry harvested annually?
And what is the Area of forestry in NZ?

Thanks,
Doug

And this was the response 2 weeks later

Hi there

Sorry for the delay in response – your email slipped through the cracks – I have forwarded your enquiry onto someone who can help

It’s been a week since that response, and still no answer.

If NZwood can’t answer such a simple question, then they obviously have no proof that wood is a sustainable resource in NZ.

Sometimes coming up with flashy billbords and TV adds about a solution does not actually prove that the solution is feasible.

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It’s hard to argue with ‘balance’, and I might normally level an accusation of ‘false equivalence’ between a couple of cranks and a published (on the matter of climate change) climate scientist. However Dave Kelly on the ‘other side’ is ‘only’ an ecologist, but does a broadly good job of dealing with broad issues about the IPCC and provides a few helpful links to the New Scientist website I feel…

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Menawhile, StephenR, following the decision to drop Dave Hansford as a columnist, this week’s Listener has published an appalling article (not available online yet) full of half-truths and inaccuracies written by climate change deniers Bryan Leyland and Chris de Freitas – I presume supposedly in the interests of “balance”.

Wonder what the agenda is here?

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My turn to slightly thread-jack, have the Greens heard about this at all? http://hot-topic.co.nz/2008/04/16/climate-cranks-claim-a-scalp/#comment-1420, and by extension this http://publicaddress.net/default,4937.sm#post4937

The post did have the phrase ‘global warming’ though!

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Perhaps another tree is able to grow in its place?

Frog, those guys flogging timber as a partial solution to climate change (NZ Timber or someone? They have billboards and TV ads is all I know) will love your endorsement…I wouldn’t mind either, as long as we dont clear cut any more native forest to do more…

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And what happens when the tree dies?

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