Energy, science, and technology to manage and control greenhouse gas


	There are aspects of Canada’s forest sink policy which are very difficult to understand.
	Canada’s greenhouse gas inventory assumes that when forests are harvested, their carbon content is released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Actually much of the carbon remains in wood products. Our growing inventory of houses represents a carbon sink not accounted for.

	Canada has inexplicably chosen not to take into account the carbon sink associated with wood products. A review of Canada’s GHG inventory suggests emissions might be reduced by up to 150 million tonnes with a change of accounting methodology. That’s a big chunk of our total emissions of some 750 million tonnes.

	In fact carbon representing about 40 million tonnes of carbon dioxide is freely shipped in lumber to the United States every year. Understandably, no one seems interested in factoring that into our lumber dispute. That issue is already incomprehensible.

	To summarize, the afforestation and reforestation initiatives of Kyoto seem limited by land and forest growth constraints. They discourage harvesting to allow regrowth and continuing carbon dioxide removal if there is no sink credit for forest products. They are thus not sustainable by the standards of this review.