HIGH-GRADE NI-CU-PT-PD-ZN-CR-AU-V-TI DISCOVERIES IN THE "RING OF FIRE"

NI 43-101 Update (September 2012): 11.1 Mt @ 1.68% Ni, 0.87% Cu, 0.89 gpt Pt and 3.09 gpt Pd and 0.18 gpt Au (Proven & Probable Reserves) / 8.9 Mt @ 1.10% Ni, 1.14% Cu, 1.16 gpt Pt and 3.49 gpt Pd and 0.30 gpt Au (Inferred Resource)

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Message: Conservatives Say Northern Ontario “Abandoned by Throne Speech”

The young trees, which loggers plant three for each one harvested, consume more carbon dioxide then mature trees do.”

I take exception to two errors in the above statement, being an expert in these matters.

1.  The three-planted-for-one-harvested number is correct in British Columbia.  Not correct in Ontario, where a fairly large percentage of harvested land is allowed to regenerate naturally, or is seeded instead of planted.  Incidentally, Ontario is the only province with a significant seeding program.  The province seeded 11,000 hectares in 2016, if memory serves me correctly.  I'll check that number later this weekend and issue a correction if I've erred.

2.  Juvenile trees that are growing do in fact sequester more carbon than a fully mature tree.  That is based upon the "additional annual sequestration" metric.  However, if you compared "stored" carbon, then obviously the mature tree has sequestered much more.  A good comparison is a bank account.  If I'm putting $2,000 per week into my bank account, which is currently at $200,000, and you're not adding any more to yours but you already have $1.2m in your account, then yes, I'm "storing" more (ongoing process of augmenting) but I'm not storing more (my net storage is less).  We really need some new words to describe the nuanced differences here.  Anyway, the implication here is that it's great to cut down mature trees and then plant new ones to pull additional carbon from the atmosphere, but that's a disingenuous argument if the harvested mature trees release all the carbon that they have sequestered over their lifetimes.  One can argue that the harvested trees may be used for lumber, in which case the carbon continues to be stored.  That's partially correct, although lumber usually tends to return to landfill within a century, or is burned.  In the former case, the carbon will usually end up back in the global ecosystem within a hundred years or so, and in the latter, the carbon is released whenever it burns.  The only semi-permanent ways to effectively sequested carbon in harvested timber would be to bury the timber/lumber deep in a mine shaft where decay won't be released for perhaps hundreds of thousands of year, or to shoot the lumber out into space.  Not even Bored Elon would consider such a pedagogical experiment.  Also, a lot of harvested timber ends up as pulp, in which case it tends to revert to the environmental forms in mere decades.

If you really want to come up with an argument about why rampant logging is desirable, just tell me that you enjoy cutting trees.  I'd respect that.

(And to clarify, I'm certainly not anti-logging - I just detest political misdirection).

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