Moving something via cargo ship emits 10-40g of co2 per km * ton. I'll assume 10, since fire wood would be extremely low priority.
Assume you buy a 20lb bundle of foreign wood from a store 10 miles away, and transport it in the back of a Prius. (This seems optimistic for a rural area where wood heating makes sense.)
The prius gets about 50 mpg. Round trip, it drives 20 miles, so it uses 0.4 gallons of gas, or 8 lbs of CO2, which is 3.6 kg.
The earth's circumference is 40,000KM. Assume the wood traveled 20,000KM by sea.
20 lbs is 0.01 ton. 10g is 0.01 kg. 0.01kg * 0.01 ton * 20,000km is 2kg of CO2 emissions.
Even ignoring the emissions from harvesting and shipping the wood from the forest to the packaging plant, seasoning (drying) it, and the last mile delivery for the store, the overseas shipping is only 33% of the emissions.
> Even ignoring the emissions from harvesting and shipping the wood from the forest to the packaging plant
This should still be the biggest source of emissions. It's apparently his neighbor that gives him the wood, so I tried to find out some details regarding fuel use to quantify the emissions of his so called CO2 neutral wood but no dice.
Strong doubt on this one. "Modern" ocean shipping is really bad when it comes to emissions.