Thank you everyone who has participated in this post chain.
My takeaway from this is “it’s complicated”.
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Timber does reduce the overall embodied carbon, but is only truly carbon negative if you ignore the end of life. Still, way better than steel and concrete.
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More timber is only better if it replaces worse materials, even if it does improve LCA results through sequestration. The idea of using more material in order to get better results is ludicrous.
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Certified timber is important as it ensures replacement of the tree (“good wood”). Different standards have different priorities, and the differences between SFI and FSC, and the arguments for each, could fill a book. It’s not clear to me if one is better than the other purely in terms of CO2e, or if it would affect LCA results in the GWP category.
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External offsets exist. They are available to counteract CO2 harm done elsewhere. Better not to cause harm in the first place. I don’t full trust offsets. Paying someone money so that I can continue a bad practice sounds a bit like indulgences to me. But better than business as normal. Also it’s a kind of carbon tax which should modify people’s actions. And I need to be clearer about the terms offset and sequester
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Jens, I’ll watch the video this weekend.