Many pine trees in managed forests, such as the European spruce, take roughly 80 years to reach maturity, being net absorbers of carbon during those years of growth – but once they reach maturity, they shed roughly as much carbon through the decomposition of needles and fallen branches as they absorb. As was the case in Austria in the 1990s, plummeting demand for paper and wood saw huge swathes of managed forests globally fall into disuse. Rather than return to pristine wilderness, these monocrops cover forest floors in acidic pine needles and dead branches. Canada's great forests for example have actually emitted more carbon than they absorb since 2001, thanks to mature trees no longer being actively felled.
Arguably, the best form of carbon sequestration is to chop down trees: to restore our sustainable, managed forests, and use the resulting wood as a building material. Managed forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) typically plant two to three trees for every tree felled – meaning the more demand there is for wood, the greater the growth in both forest cover and CO2-hungry young trees.
Even if there's no demand for wood, the trees should still be harvested because they can be pyrolized to produce fuel gas/oil and biochar. About 50% of the carbon can be converted to biochar, which is both a valuable soil amendment and a way to long-term sequester carbon such that it can't be easily extracted. And the carbon released by burning the remainder would have been released to the atmosphere away as the trees decayed, so it's better it does something useful.
If you allow decomposition then obvioisly net must be zero. If you createa object and destroy it, it pretty much has to release its source material in some form.
If tree stops growing it obviously has to have zero net. Anything absorbing anything has either to store it - grow, or release it in some form. Carbon is element, what are the options? Store it permanently, transform chemically and release, or transform it atomically and change the element but tree is not a nuclear plant.
"On average", no forest produces or consumes any CO2 or O2 unless the biomass is somehow sequestered, for example buried under volcanic ash or on the bottom of anoxic lake which would typically prevent it from decomposing.
The forest binds some amount of carbon and oxygen for a time being but then it is released back when it burns or decomposes, etc. It is really insignificant when compared with steady flow of carbon from fossil fuels.
That isn't completely true. A well managed forest will sequester some carbon when it burns. Note well managed in there, that means a small fire every year, a large fire gets hot enough to burn all the carbon, but a small fire will burn only part of the carbon and leave the rest as charcoal. Moral: shoot smokey the bear and let foresters start the fires they want to if only they were allowed to.
Of course the above is a generalization, and as all of them false in some way. Ask your local forester what applies to the forest in your area, but don't try to apply it to a forest in the next neighborhood as that might be different.
To sequester carbon it would have to be prevented from decomposing. It is not enough for the trees to turn to charcoal during fire. If what you said was true "well managed" forest would be standing atop of layers of charcoal which obviously is not true.
Instead what I suspect happens is that the charcoal from fires weathers, crumbles and becomes part of the soil. Soil is feed for other organisms.
Anecdotal evidence suggests to me that European spruce stores more CO2 than it sheds way over 80 years old as a spruce grows in mass significantly decades after reaching that age.
Anecdotal evidence tells me that spruce trees are really good at suppressing undergrowth due to their acidic needless so claiming a mature first is a net emitter makes sense to me. The trees may be growing, but nothing else is.
That’s not true. Methane is a significantly more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, so if the tree is absorbing CO2 but the decomposing needles and leaves are emitting methane, it could easily be a net GHG emitter.
If a tree keeps growing, but also gets more successful at suppressing growth of it's neighbors, then it can be a net emitter overall even though it's a net absorber considered individually.
No, if anything individual trees do start to become emitter as they age due to low growth and decay, how ever in forests old dying trees are quickly replaced by new ones.
Governments should pay to have the mature trees harvested, then tossed into some body of water, and eventually covered with dirt. At that point, the carbon sequestration will last for a 1000+ years.
Should demand ever increase, then the felled trees could be reharvested, cured, then used as normal.
.. it is not "plummeting demand" .. it is a bump in the massive consumption growth curve of the modern age.. aside from that, all paths need to be considered.
If you are seriously considering using building materials for carbon storage the best would be bamboo. It grows incredibly fast so that it soaks up carbon fast. However we would need more R&D to make the manufacture of bamboo building materials more environmentally friendly. Currently this Involves just soaking he bamboo in a lot of glue.
It's still wood though. That's basically butter compared to most materials that get featured in the same sentence as the word "machine" being used as a verb.
There are two groups of people who will care about the difference in hardness and silicate content. The first is people doing fine precision woodworking. Those people stick to traditional hardwoods so it's a non issue. The second group is the people who are putting saw blades on angle grinders and stacking dado blades on circular saws or other activities that make work more expedient but tend to result in lots of pearl clutching when discussed in polite company. These people depend in part on the softness of the pine they usually work with in order for their preferred techniques to work and will grumble about having to change their techniques for bamboo or any other harder material.
Everyone else who is not working at the limit of their materials and their tools will just shrug their shoulders and say the only difference they notice is that you gotta push the saw a little harder.
You can cut steel with a run of the mill carbide tipped plywood blade on a circular saw. The HSS family of tool steels used in woodworking applications have no problem cutting aluminum. Woodworking tools are completely capable of cutting anything in the wood and composite spectrum
Seriously, bamboo is not going to be any more of an issue than modern wood composites. You might suffer a slight reduction in work speed and blade life but that's par for the course when working in harder material and is basically a non-issue.
The dust it generates and the propensity of the plastics to melt instead of cut is the main concern with compose building materials. Working with them is basically no different than wood.
You're probably thinking about industrial processes, but AFAIK the traditional method of peeling the bamboo and using its "skin" as a rope to tie the parts together does not require ANY glue. See on your favorite platform videos about DIY bamboo furniture.
For the purposes of storing carbon, I don't think we'll get away from the fact that a large amount the carbon from fossil fuels that we have burned will likely have to be stored under ground again eventually. I find it strange to think about wooden buildings made out of pine; pine is an invasive species in Southern Africa. The effect of for example eucalyptus on the topsoil layer is as bad as full scale agricultural tilling.
There is an argument that agriculture is a better future for this part of the world and there would certainly need to be better options here than wooden buildings. Maybe some sort of carbon polymer concrete mixture?
According to [1] the terrestrial biosphere contains 2000 gigatons of carbon combined oil and gas reserves contain only 370
gigatons. 28% of earth surface is taken by deserts, and if we simply restored ecosystem there it would take 560 gigatons of carbon. So we do not need to store any amount under ground, we only need enough people to make irrigating deserts profitable.
Irrigating deserts doesn't really work that well. The main problem is, that undistilled water always contains some ions, i.e. salts (it's got electrolytes!). If the main process for loss of water is evaporation these salts are left behind leading to salinization. You don't really want that.
If you want to fight desertification, then you must combat evaporation first, which you'd do for example with engineering the soil. Only after you've figured out how to make the soil keep the water, then you may start to thing about irrigation.
> If you want to fight desertification, then you must combat evaporation first,
This is something plants can be remarkably good at!
I don't think you can get around irrigation to bootstrap the process. We could probably begin the process by putting down some irrigated top soil, and laying a bio-degradable, transparent moisture barrier to keep the water from evaporating while the ground cover grows.
Alternatively, I'm sure we could construct a man-made river running through a desert to revitalize it. I'm not a geologist, but I suspect that the existence of an active river is a strong influence on whether a region becomes a rain forest or a desert.
So we do not need to store any amount under ground, we only need enough people to make irrigating deserts profitable.
In an ideal free market, perhaps, yes. In the real world, people will just move/flee from dry areas. As the global temperature rises and more regions of Africa and America become uninhabitable, people will just slowly migrate north (or perhaps partially south America). If you thought that we had a refugee crisis, just wait a couple of decades.
Fair enough, it won't happen automatically, but maybe instead of wasting money on subsidising biofuels, building non-effective renewable installations, funding additional border patrol or helping refugees, the rich countries can focus on helping the poor countries to build irrigation infrastructure and to become rich.
Sadly that's not what happens in practice, currently biofuels encourage cutting down forests and repurposing the land that could be used for normal food production.
Not everybody flees from dry areas though. There are always a few people who love the area enough and stay behind trying to make a living. If they have the opportunity (mostly a combination of legal rights, knowledge, but there are a bunch of other factors not all of which I will claim to know) to make their part of the desert better, the total of all those small changes is a big thing.
My personal use of coal/oil (including indirect use in the products I buy) is insignificant to global warming. However across the population of the world...
Adding trees where there where once desert is not automatically good for the climate. Sand reflects sunlight fairly well, trees are dark. That is actually one of the feedback mechanisms that make climate change worse: Rising temperatures in the arctic allow forests to grow in places that were once covered in ice.
It seems to me that if you are changing significant enough areas of land that the reflectivity of the surface matters then you've changed several variables at the same time. Particularly the amount of water transpired into the atmosphere would presumably result in greater cloud cover.
When the Khoisan and their distant cousins of other names were killed by colonisers from West Africa and later Europe, the Kalahari desert turned out to be a very useful (and the last) place for them.
If by "this mess" you mean civilisation in general, then yes, civilisation and science have originated in places where people had to make large scale changes to environment to survive (mesopotamia, egypt, etc.). But then "this mess" is much better than the alternative of small tribes living as hunter gatherers, until planet would run out of CO2 in 600mln years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
And this is why some many people dismiss climate change as just noise- 'Climate change will kill us all'- 'then we should plant trees here'- 'we can't do that- think of the cacti and gerbils'
If climate change is really something that needs OMG now levels of response you can't then dismiss every response on philosophical reasons.
Have you ever been to a desert? Some deserts are incredibly filled with life and diversity. It's no forest or prairie, but life finds a way. Desert by definition is someplace that gets little rainfall and lacks as much vegetation as other areas.
I have lived near deserts/semi-deserts, they are desolate and miserable places where some life survives despite all odds. Keeping a small number of national parks as deserts is of course important, but that does not need to be more than 1% of the area that is taken by deserts today.
> The effect of for example eucalyptus on the topsoil layer is as bad as full scale agricultural tilling.
This is true for any monoculture. We need to take into account how plants interact with their environment and fellow plants to preserve the humus (the topsoil layer whose microorganisms are essential to plant life). This is what permaculture is about.
There's not a single plant that we're going to find that we can grow everywhere and it's going to save the environment.
Eucalypts are known to not be great for topsoil quality, degrading and depleting soil (especially as they're not nutrient fixers):
> In a forest environment, SOM originates mainly from litterfall and litter decomposition. It is well known that the litter quality of eucalypts is low (Woods 1974). Eucalypt leaf litter contains large amounts of phenolics (Bernhard-Reversat et al. 2001) which are antibiotic and anti-feeding agent for invertebrate and vertebrate fauna (Waterman and Mole 1994; Harborne 1997). Eucalypt litter quality leads to low biological activity and results in a low litter decomposition rate in eucalypt plantations.
The result of using eucalypts is definitely mixed at best (https://www.aimspress.com/fileOther/PDF/agriculture/agrfood-...) but at the end GP is probably excessive, eucalypts are inferior to almost any other tree species for soil quality but they're not as bad as agricultural land:
> Our results indicate that soils in eucalyptus stands surrounding Ethiopian Orthodox church forests are more acidic and Eucalyptus may have some additional drawbacks that are not considered in this study. Though increased levels of organic matter should function have lower levels of organic matter and nutrients than soils in adjacent indigenous forest. However, there is also evidence that eucalyptus plantations exhibit higher organic matter and nutrient levels in comparison to nearby agricultural land, and no significant decrease in soil pH.
Most small residential buildings in NA are already using relatively climate friendly dimensional lumber so the question is, are large wooden building a solution for climate change. The answer looks like yes, but there are a lot of toxic pollutants involved in engineered wood products, the kind of large wood members needed in large scale construction. I haven't found much research into the subject, a lot of existing literature is from the industry. Partly because it might genuinely be the defacto future building material, partly because the market is ready since sand scarcity is going to be a problem for concrete in the future.
The point of CLT is that it contains only 1% of a not so bad adhesive (polyurethane) and 99% wood, vs e.g. MDF that contains 10% of a pretty bad adhesive...
In context climate change, it's more apt to compare effects of substituting concrete for CLT. The PUR / polyurethane adhesive is "no bad" in the sense that there's no toxic formaldehyde for people, but production of the adhesives still has heavy health and emissions risks - according to some Finish Building Science thesis I read a few years ago. As for MDF, since its is upcycled industrial wood residuals, it's going to be more economical as a byproduct of CLT popularity. Would probably be more wasteful to not use it. I'm a big believer in engineered wood, intuitively it seems like the way to go, there's just not much literature on it in terms of emission life cycle assessment in building science literature. Then again I haven't read up in a few years and interest in them have exploded outside of niche architecture and building circles.
What about recycled plastic? I've seen parks use it well for durable bridges, benches, gazebos, etc. For some reason I haven't seen it used for homes and that confuses me. It seems like a generally durable and even weatherproof material.
Not for structural use, which engineered wood is good replacement for concrete. Mybe some exterior cladding applications where there's already a lot of plastic products, I know some exist with recycled plastic but they seem pretty niche. Performance requirements for habitable environments (insulation, moisture control, outgassing/toxcity in fires etc) is different from outdoor use. It's probably down to process cost and scale, and the regulation around construction is generally pretty conservative.
We are currently building a home made of cross-laminated timber as inner walls. The outer wall are covered by a wood construction that is filled with wood fiber to insulate.
The carpenter ordered the walls in Austria and they set everything up in three days. The outer walls and the roof were pre-fabricated too and delivered in parts. Really crazy.
The house smells pretty good with all the wood, let's see how the climate will be when we live in it.
I hope you like it because that smell will take a long time to fade and will be your new cologne :)
My parents used to live in a wooden house. Even 10+ years after they built it whenever I'd visit for a few days my suitcase and clothes all smelled of wood afterwards.
My little big dream is to build a small multitenant building with CLT. For around 4 families, one floor per apartment. Then sell 3 apartments to fund building more and move in one left.
Have you left wood exposed in interior? How does it work for cabling and hooks for pictures and furniture? Where is your house? Did costs were lower than with typical technology around your location?
For me a big plus is what you mentioned, that it is very quick, that certainly helps to keep costs and the risk lower.
To remove carbon from atmosphere it must be sequestered. Sequestration means it is no longer available to go back to the atmosphere. It means it can no longer be part of cycle of life, it must be removed and prevented from getting back in the cycle.
The reason we have more carbon in atmosphere is not that we have felled trees but that we have dug out a bunch of carbon (coal, oil, gas) that for a long time was not taking part in the cycle.
What is surprising is that supposedly intelligent people still don't get the basic facts right.
There are two flows of carbon to our atmosphere (and oceans).
One flow is cyclic which means carbon involved in the proces is just changing form constantly but the total amount of it stays relatively constant as it is the same carbon just changing form. The only way this process could alter atmospheric CO2 is if amount of biomass drastically changed. It can't cause infinite rise of atmospheric CO2 as the amount of biomass is finite and relatively small. Even if you burned all biomass and converted it to CO2 it would just dissolve in our oceans causing slight acidification as oceans have capability to dissolve more CO2 than our entire biomass in circulation. There is not enough biomass on Earth to cause long term rise in atmospheric CO2 unless another mechanism is present.
The second flow is steady addition of carbon from outside the cycle, from fossilized stores. This carbon has been unavailable for hundreds of millions of years since times when our atmosphere was very different from todays. Every molecule dug out from sequestered stores ends up in the atmosphere as addition, causing steady rise in CO2. Oceans have only limited ability to buffer long term flows of CO2.
Also there is ventilation/cooling aspect for wooden houses which works favourably in tropical climates, especially when used in roofing. Not sure about its effect on colder climates.
It works really well in colder climates as well. In fact I guess the overwhelming majority of homes outside the city centers in Norway are wooden houses.
According to our local carpenter the wooden houses in Scandinavia are rapidly deteriorating because of the increase in temperature. His take is that wooden houses need a long cold spell in winter in order to slow down the attack by tree-eating organisms during summer. Could be depending on the widespread usage of fir trees for house-building, other types of trees may be more resilient to warm climates.
My experience of older mainland European houses is southern France. All the floor beams are made of ancient gnarly woodworm eaten hard wood, but it only really affects the outer cm of wood.
So I wonder if the problem is partially newer building techniques, thinner cut wood, less dense wood?
If Scandinavia is anything like Canada, the Pine Beetle.
We need a week or two at -40C (fun fact, -40C is roughly equal to -40F) to really thin them out. We haven't been getting that cold weather, so large numbers of them make it through the winter, and then ravage the trees.
It's related to the dramatic increase of forest fires in Western Canada, because dead trees dry out, provide little coverage to the area they're in (which lets the area dry further), and then burn very easily. All it takes is a lightening strike or some idiot deciding to violate a burn-ban, and then everything goes up.
I've heard the warm weather has led to a "tick-pocalypse" and resurgence of ticks and mosquitoes, particularly on Ontario and Quebec. I don't know about termites, but wouldn't be surprised if the warm weather is doing a poor job suppressing them.
Currently staying in a tiny log cabin with outside temperatures in about 25-30c and somewhat humid as well. Inside it stays comfortably 25-26c and 30% humidity. Does not feel hot at all.
I believe wooden building of the sort described in the article can be a solution to climate change, in the normally understood usage of the word solution, if combined with a time machine.
Agreed, time machine is probably the only hope. Now that we have melted large parts of polar permafrost and the arctic is on fire, "fixing" climate change is not really possible. More about coming to terms with what we've done and how to cope with the new world we have created. My bet, it won't be pretty.
The use of wood in building has some clear advantages, for sure, particularly as engineered timber improves.
At the same time, there are also issues of robustness to consider. If you're only building a house that might last for a few decades, you need to consider what happens to the building materials at the end of its useful life. More than that, depending on your environment, you need to consider risks that might cause either a premature end to that useful life or a degradation of performance over time.
For example, here in the UK, we don't get a lot of really bad storms of the kind that central America sees, but we do get storms strong enough to cause major structural damage from time to time, and the rate is expected to increase for a while due to the changing environmental conditions. The kinds of insulated panels used for a lot of timber frame construction today have many good points, but being about as robust as tissue paper in the face of fast-moving debris flying around outside your house in a bad storm is not one of them. There's not much point planning the environmental credentials of a new building over, say, a 50-60 year assumed lifetime if in reality the expected time before being seriously damaged in a bad storm is only half that.
You also have to consider the possibilities for timber elements changing shape over time, which in turn can reduce the overall thermal efficiency of a building, allow damaging pests to get in, increase sound transmission, or even in severe cases reduce fire containment or compromise structural integrity entirely. We have very changeable seasons here: as it happens, we're reaching all-time high temperatures of nearly 40C as I'm writing this, but we also have lows in the same areas that can push towards -10C or even -20C. That's a lot of expansion and contraction, and while again engineered timber has significant advantages over solid planks and the like, you do have to consider these kinds of issues as well.
Again, none of this is to say that using more timber in our construction doesn't have some big advantages. We just need to be a little cautious, because there might also be risks, and so far we have relatively little experience with some of these newer timber-based construction techniques to fully evaluate them.
There is not single isolated solution to climate change. A wooden house can be a solution if you have abundant wood nearby, which is not the case everywhere. The problem is the industrialization of everything and the urban consumerist way of life.
Ikea furniture is made of wood yet they're terrible for the environment because the wood comes from far away, is usually assembled in China, filled of fire-repellent chemicals (among others) and is not very strong because it's low-quality wood (made from throw-away pieces hacked together with glue). So your piece of furniture brings a lot of pollution and is not gonna last, compared to hand-crafted furniture (out of real wood).
The same goes for housing. People have been building houses out of straw and mud for thousands of years. Where you have wood, you'll build a solid base structure out of it and make big houses. When you don't, you'll just make a smaller one (< 15m²). Made a few myself, and these houses are way better than concrete houses: < 1000€ to build, fresh in summer, warm in winter..
But the ultimate solution is to stop the madness of trying to pile up people in huge metal/concrete towers. I too love the comfort of the city and meeting many people but it is not a sustainable way of life and will never be. We should stop listening to these "Green capitalism" and other profiting vampires, and build our actual autonomy before this industrial civilization collapses.
> But the ultimate solution is to stop the madness of trying to pile up people in huge metal/concrete towers. I too love the comfort of the city and meeting many people but it is not a sustainable way of life and will never be.
Wait, how so? Dense urban living is the sustainable alternative, if anything.
I always thought that but although half the worlds population lives in cities they are responsible for 70% of the worlds emissions. I guess people in cities are richer so consume more.
People in rural areas consume more when all else is equal though. Subsistence farmers do much better, but are you willing to give up your computers, tv, lights, central heat/air, plumbing, fast travel? If the answer to any of that is no you will use less resources living your lifestyle in a dense city than in a rural area.
We still need farmers in rural areas who will of course use more than their share of resources, but the number of farmers we need is small and so insignificant. It is the semi-rural suburbs that have enough people to make a difference.
We also have to take into account how our society destroyed local communities and economies. People on the countryside now depend a lot more on the global economy/industry than they did a few decades back, because local production was dis-incentivized by surrounding economical structures.
Take for example food. When you're on the countryside, it's not complicated to produce more than 90% of what you eat locally (up to 100% for people willing to give up on some spices, oil and other products not grown locally). What makes it complicated is that local farms were coalesced into big industries based on monoculture (which itself destroys the environment) so the food produced on the countryside doesn't feed people locally but serves as a source for big corporations to make derived products (usually less nutritive and bad for health) which rural and urban people alike will go buy in the supermarket (because there is usually no more alternative).
So i agree the current numbers don't reflect that so much, because of the self-perpetuating circle of heteronomy imposed by capitalism. But living on the countryside relying on local production is way more eco-friendly than any industrial civilization could ever be.
> the population is too high for subsistance farming now.
Is it, though? More than half of cultures are used for animal exploitation (which most of the world could do without). It appears we currently have around 2 football fields of cultivable land per person living on earth (though this may change soon with the climate).
We also have to take into account that industrial farming and monocultures kill the humus and dry off the land in the long run (over decades) making it more and more sterile (requiring an ever greater dose of fertilizers to grow anything and making the crops more sensitive to heatwaves).
Many serious agronomists (those not employed by the industry) insist not only that another agriculture is possible, but that it's the only way to prevent food shortages in the coming years (which will happen if we insist on chemical-powered monocultures).
Also, a one-garden-per-person model is not the only way to grow locally. We can of course share the land and the work. It just makes things a lot easier when the population isn't so dense that you can't grow your own food locally anymore (which is only the case with big cities).
> Dense urban living is the sustainable alternative, if anything.
How so? Concentrated populations means you have to produce (energy, food etc.) far away from where it's consumed. So you need to extract and produce on a big scale so that model becomes sustainable (if it ever is, which i doubt).
When the concentration is smaller, you can live in harmony with your local environment: produce your food, your energy, your clothes and houses with what's around you, which will always be better for the environment than shipping "eco-friendly" materials across three continents before reaching your supermarket aisle.
Production should be as close as possible to consumption. Concentrating populations means you can't locally produce electricity (because you need so much of it, it's dangerous to produce so you put it away from urban centers) or food (because you need so much of it, and the surrounding land is used for "urban development" and other sweet words for gentrification and privatization of space).
So i used to think some smarter industry regulations and government policy could fix the environment. Then i realized our entire civilization is based on fucking things up and exploiting other people, and those holding the reigns will not stop their bloody mess until they're made the planet uninhabitable. It speaks for itself that billionaires invest their fortunes in traveling to Mars.
We already produce enough food and have enough housing for everyone on this planet. On a global scale, a third of the food produced is thrown away. This reaches almost 50% in industrialized societies like Europe/US. Yet many people struggle to fill their fridge. Here in France (official stats by INSEE) 3 million houses are EMPTY (not secondary houses, UNUSED houses) yet 150 000 people sleep on the streets.
The same goes with the environmental crisis. It's not a crisis because we don't know what to do. It's a crisis because we know what to do to save the planet and it goes directly against our way of life as consumers, and against the interests of our ruling classes and industrial elites.
Transport of energy and food is a very small part of the global impact of getting them to customers, and dense living makes a huge impact on transportation impact. To convince people that they'd be better in straw houses, you'd need at least argumented numbers...
From all I've seen and read, the ecological impact of suburb and country living is a lot more than urban living.
That forgets another variable - efficency of production. The entire reason small anything cannot compete is economies of scale vs input of some sort fundamentally.
Thinking localism or pastoral will solve exploitation is not only naive but historically illiterate. Bronze age slavery was dubiously an improvement over genocide.
Humanity never really was in harmony with nature - the reason for nomadism was because they depleted the food resources locally. Hell nature is never in harmony with nature! Every effect you lament has happened before including mass extinctions due to life induced atmospheric changes (anaerobic extinction).
"because the wood comes from far away, is usually assembled in China"
I saw a documentary on Ikea and the furniture supplier was swedish(?) and made with Swedish wood. All the random tat came from china though.
Ultimately though I suspect you're comparing apples and oranges. I would expect a piece of Ikea furniture to be greener than a built to last, solid wood item. But then I wouldn't expect the Ikea furniture to last as long. At what point the made to last furniture become greener, and if that point is reasonable is the question.
There is no solution to climate change. Climate change will occur, whatever we do. Human activity is polluting, it's inevitable. To avoid climate change, we should have listened to the Club of Rome, in 1972, when they published "the limits to growth". We should have installed a Malthusian politic, to avoid high birth rates. Now it is much too late.
An article I read recently talked about how the famous Toyota production system (which inspired agile and such) actually refers to countermeasures, not solutions. Seems rather appropriate to our current conversations about climate change.
Many pine trees in managed forests, such as the European spruce, take roughly 80 years to reach maturity, being net absorbers of carbon during those years of growth – but once they reach maturity, they shed roughly as much carbon through the decomposition of needles and fallen branches as they absorb. As was the case in Austria in the 1990s, plummeting demand for paper and wood saw huge swathes of managed forests globally fall into disuse. Rather than return to pristine wilderness, these monocrops cover forest floors in acidic pine needles and dead branches. Canada's great forests for example have actually emitted more carbon than they absorb since 2001, thanks to mature trees no longer being actively felled. Arguably, the best form of carbon sequestration is to chop down trees: to restore our sustainable, managed forests, and use the resulting wood as a building material. Managed forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) typically plant two to three trees for every tree felled – meaning the more demand there is for wood, the greater the growth in both forest cover and CO2-hungry young trees.