Scientists are wary of the demands of a "green Europe"

6.4 billion trees currently growing and still to be planted in Latvia will not be enough even for the only 1.8 million inhabitants of Latvia to replace the consumption of all oil products with the consumption of wood in accordance with the instructions of the European Commission.

The discrepancy between the requirements of the European Union's "green deal" and the possibilities to meet them at the expense of the maximum timber in Latvia became the main conclusion after yesterday and previous day's conference "Zināšanās balstīta meža nozare" (Knowledge-based forest industry), on which Neatkarīgā has already provided insight.

Theoretically, wood is enough to replace both all the energy and all the things that people currently get from oil, together with coal. All that remains is to have the courage to act completely differently than it has been used to in Europe and thus also in Latvia for the last 100 to 200 years.

The most obvious example of courage would be the move from reinforced concrete buildings to wooden buildings in the form and - most importantly - construction volume that architect Juris Kronbergs presented at the conference: the record of the height of wooden buildings currently belongs to Norway with 85 meters, the record of the area with 45 thousand square meters in a 10-storey building - Canada, etc. A building designed under the leadership of J. Kronbergs should soon appear in Riga in accordance with Latvian construction standards, which allow wooden buildings to be built up to 5 stories or 18 meters high.

With the current building regulations, Latvian officials and politicians are allowed to ignore the calculations of reducing CO2 emissions if limestone was not burned for cement and ore was not smelted for metal. The explanation for their position is that, over the last hundred years or more, people have become convinced that reinforced concrete buildings are strong and secure buildings, which high-rise buildings, factories and transport hubs definitely must be, not to mention military buildings.

Therefore, buyers are willing to pay for such buildings and sellers offer them at a reasonable price, because architects and builders have learned to build in this way, traders have adjusted their supply of materials and tools, and officials live in confidence that they can control processes. Thus, the volume of construction of wooden buildings turns out to be too small to be cheap and too expensive to become large. The highest authorities of the European Union are forcing the national governments to change this situation with political methods, but for two reasons there is no wish to blame the Latvian government for boycotting compliance with the requirements, at least in this section.

Firstly, the Grenfell Tower, which burned down in London on 14 June 2017 with 72 fatalities, is a consequence of EU requirements for building insulation and energy efficiency. So the building was covered with a very flammable "insulating" material. The fire showed that people can die, relying on the strength of reinforced concrete structures and that Western Europe is an example to the whole world of how to act qualified, responsibly, and so on. The participants of the conference “Knowledge-based forest industry” continued to rely on it and called the modeling and auditing of construction and building safety risks in Western Europe more than a decade ago as arguments for building large wooden buildings in Latvia as well, but after a real accident with a reinforced concrete building, there is no confidence that, when speaking of wooden buildings, Western European countries are an example for Latvia simply because they are Western European countries.

Secondly, the creation of a wooden building industry threatens with a shortage of wood, given all the other requirements for using wood where oil is now used. It is possible to obtain fuel for internal combustion engines from wood and to obtain heat for both heating and conversion into electricity. This is followed by packaging and almost any other plastic items that are now oil-based. Clothing and much more that can be woven or braided from wood fibers should be placed in a separate section.

There is a particularly extreme story that, instead of current agriculture, there will be only forestry that supplies wood to be fed to bacteria that will be eaten by worms etc. until a protein powder from which food will be produced for humans.

The world already has or will soon have technologies capable of simulating processes, such as the processes in the stomach of elk, on an industrial scale. That is where the wood goes, which with low efficiency becomes a delicacy for people. In the literal sense of the word, a tree (trunk) is eaten by worms, which are eaten by birds (chickens), which are eaten by humans. If animal stomachs were replaced by (bio)chemical reactors, the necessary amount of nutrients needed by humans would be obtained with much less resource consumption, at least mathematically.

Non-traditional uses of wood will not eliminate the traditional use of wood, starting with the manufacture of furniture. This raises questions about how much wood is needed to meet all these needs.

In the conference, it was said that to replace plastic items with wood products to the extent declared by the European Commission as a 2030 target, Europe would need to build another 100 new pulp mills that would not be tied to paper production. The European Central Bank is clearly willing to issue money for such construction. Unfortunately, issuing money for capital investment is not a solution to the problem of wood availability, that is, unavailability, at European level. Even for Latvia, fulfilling all the tasks of the European Commission would mean transforming from a timber exporting country to an importing country with open questions about from where Latvia will get the money to buy wood and who will sell the wood to Latvia.

Although the conference “Knowledge-based forest industry” was aimed at discussing the internal problems of this sector and did not initiate any political or ideological discussions, it nevertheless raised issues that the entire Latvian society will face in the foreseeable future.