Well, Well: What's Driving Canada's Softwood Lumber Price Spike? Shortages From Pine Beetle Dieoff

[hatrack]

Janice Cooke remembers the first time she heard bugs murder a tree over the phone. It was at the height of the petulance plague, when the warming Canadian Rockies gave rise to swarms of beetles so Biblical they were able to kill 100,000 big lodgepole pines in a day, said Cooke. "I remember calling my brother who lived outside of Prince George, British Columbia, at the time, and I asked what he was doing," she said. "He held the phone up against a tree and you could actually hear the beetles underneath the bark, and he said, 'I'm listening to my trees being killed.'"

Twenty years and 50 million devastated acres of forest later, the mountain pine beetle can share the blame for one of the worst lumber shortages in history, with prices jumping 200-300% higher than pre-pandemic levels. During the housing boom of the mid-2000s, lumber prices stayed well below $500 per 1,000 board feet (a 2,000 square foot home uses around 16,000 board feet). Last summer, prices set a record of over $1,500 before briefly dipping and bouncing back around $1,200.

Outrageous housing demand, a Covid-cursed supply chain and a 40-year timber trade war with Canada are also big reasons the cost of a 2x4 has tripled since 2019. But Cooke -- a biologist and forestry specialist with the University of Alberta -- points out that today's crunch is also an example of climate inflation, which begins with a perfect storm of unnatural weather events made more likely by an overheating planet. Thanks to their cold winters, Canadian softwoods grow slower and stronger than those in the southern US, a big reason almost one in every three vertical studs nailed into an American home starts as a pine, spruce or fir north of the border, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

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Before they could be salvaged, beetle-kill forests helped accelerate the record-shattering wildfires of recent years. And then freakish coastal storms washed out roads, rails and ports, breaking the supply chain between forest, sawmill and lumberyard. "Climate change ... it impeded us a lot," said Jerry Howard, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, as he strolled the setup for the organization's annual conference in Orlando. "It definitely is a contributing factor to the high prices."

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https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/12/us/lumber-prices-climate-change-beetles-weir/index.html

[NickB79]

1. A lot of pine forests in the West and Canada will become more open

A more park-like savanna is inevitable. It's the only way trees will cope with reduced rainfall, insects and fire.