Environmental groups have advocated for all energy emissions to count within the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) cap-and-trade program. The draft set of recommendations released July 2008 suggests emissions resulting from logging and burning natural forests to produce electricity would be ignored. The final recommendations for the regional cap-and-trade program - released September 23, 2008 -allows each province and state to decide whether to ignore these real emissions and treat them as carbon neutral. The argument for carbon neutrality of these emissions is that producing bioenergy from forests does not increase emissions because trees grow back and remove carbon back out of atmosphere as they grow.

"The problem is that it can take more than a hundred years for a natural forest to take the carbon back from the atmosphere, if it ever does. In the meantime, switching to woody bioenergy actually increases emissions in the short-term when reductions are most urgently needed," says Chris Henschel, expert on forests and climate change for CPAWS.

CPAWS contends WCI governments need to send a clear signal that they will not create a perverse incentive to log and burn natural forests with no actual climate benefit. Creating a market to burn natural forests for electricity could result in much greater pressures to log these forests and accelerate clear cutting of northern pristine boreal forests.