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Canadian wildfires have this year burned a land area larger than 104 of the world’s 195 countries. The carbon dioxide released by them so far is estimated to be nearly 1.5 billion tons — more than twice as much as Canada releases through transportation, electricity generation, heavy industry, construction and agriculture combined. In fact, it is more than the total emissions of more than 100 of the world’s countries — also combined. But what is perhaps most striking about this year’s fires is that despite their scale, they are merely a continuation of a dangerous trend: Every year since 2001, Canada’s forests have emitted more carbon than they’ve absorbed. That is the central finding of a distressing analysis published last month by Barry Saxifrage in Canada’s National Observer, ominously headlined “Our forests have reached a tipping point.” In fact, Saxifrage suggests, the tipping point was passed two decades ago, when the country’s vast boreal forests, long a reliable “sink” for carbon, became instead a carbon “source.” In the 2000s, the effect was relatively small. But so far in the 2020s, Canada’s forests have raised the country’s total emissions by 50 percent. “There is this feel-good myth in Canada that our massive forest is offsetting some of our massive fossil fuel emissions,” Saxifrage writes. “That might have been true decades ago under our old, stable climate. But we’ve so weakened our forest — through decades of business-as-usual industrial logging and fossil-fuelled climate shifts — that it has switched to hemorrhaging CO₂ instead of absorbing it.” And, in theory at least, there is a lot more to hemorrhage: Saxifrage calculates that the 3.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide released by Canada’s forests since 2001 are only a small fraction of the 100 billion tons stored in its trees and soil. The trends there are not encouraging. “As extreme as this year’s wildfire emissions have been,” he says, “they are just the latest escalation in a multi-decade flood of CO₂ pouring out of Canada’s ‘managed’ forests and forestry.” This is not a simple story of wildfire and climate change but also of logging and forest management. Roughly speaking, when trees logged and trees replanted and regrown are in balance, a forest’s ability to absorb carbon is stable. But beginning in the early 2000s, twice as much carbon-absorbing ability was destroyed through logging as was regenerated by replanting. In the decades since, the forest has largely stopped regenerating at all. In the 1990s Canadian forests were sequestering 165 million tons of carbon each year, 20 million more than the carbon-storage loss by logging. In the 2010s those same forests released 35 million more tons of carbon each year than they stored, not including the additional carbon released by logging. In the 2020s, that number has grown to 180 million tons released annually.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/opinion/columnists/forest-fires-climate-change.html

The article goes on to say:

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Alberta actually hit pause on new renewable energy projects — a pause that may derail 118 projects worth $33 billion.

That has to be idiocy! MAYBE we can learn a lesson from all this?