The foundational materials of the past century are energy-intensive and polluting. The production of steel is responsible for 7 to 9 percent of global carbon emissions. The cement industry produces about 8 percent. Efforts are underway to make “green” steel and concrete, but a full transformation is still years away.
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“This is what we have: concrete, steel, masonry and wood. That’s it. And the only path forward to get us to carbon-neutral buildings is timber,” said Green, who designed the seven-story T3 building in Minneapolis, completed in 2016, using timber salvaged from trees killed by beetles.
Still makes much more sense to build buildings or furniture from wood than to just burn it for heating and claim it’s a renewable energy source… With buildings you will at least be sure to keep that carbon out of the atmosphere for a longer period.
I think the better alternative is to not cut down the forests in the first place for either housing or fuel and let them continue to grow. Now for damaged and standing dead trees it makes sense to use them vs burning, but relative to the demand for lumber products, generally, the beetle damaged trees is a small fraction of global supply. Ideally, we’ll stop seeing beetle damage trees, but that would require that we slow down or stop climate change as the beetle problem is one of expanding beetle territory (which the trees can’t move to avoid).