From Fibre Basket to Fibre Boiler: Climate Change, Bioenergy, and Making Waste in the Political Forest

Abstract In British Columbia (BC), Canada, industry advocates are increasingly mobilising bioenergy as a renewable and carbon neutral fuel source in energy transition and climate change mitigation strategies. At the same time, changing climate conditions have exacerbated the extent and severity of beetle and fire activity in the region, and trees impacted by extreme climate events are allocated as salvage wood in a growing bioenergy sector. This paper draws from timber supply and sector growth data in the Cariboo–Omineca fibre “basket” and follows the global wood pellet supply chain that links trees from BC to heat and power generation in the UK, the fibre “boiler”. The basket and boiler metaphors expose the powerful combination of state policy and capital accumulation in both BC and European contexts, and the discourses of waste and salvage that enabled sectoral growth in wood pellet manufacturing.