Posted on 09/18/2022 7:16:18 PM PDT by packagingguy
According to the Rachel Carson Institute, Enviva alone — which currently owns and operates seven plants in the southeastern United States — is responsible for clearcutting 50 acres of southern forestland every day, much of it a mix of hardwoods critical for wildlife habitat and absorbing the carbon dioxide rapidly warming the planet.
(Excerpt) Read more at features.weather.com ...
We are cutting down American forests for green "energy" in Europe.
This is a dated article, so this has been going on for a long time.
There is cutting of forests from Texas to New Jersey with the wood being made into pellets for "green" energy in Europe.
So you take an energy source which is not particularly dense, wood, cut it up, pelletize it, transport it across the Atlantic and burn it to make energy in some "environmentally friendly" scheme.
Can anyone explain how this is "green"? Forests sequester carbon dioxide. Forests lower surface temperatures. Forests offer shelter for all sorts of animals, ones you hunt, ones that are endangered, etc.
So what are we to make of these "green dreams"? Deforestation in the United States. Child labor to mine cobalt in the Congo. Ecological devastation in Myanmar to mine for rare earth elements for the Green New Deal.
If looked at objectively this is not "green". It is environmental destruction.
No forests for the "little people" of America, Africa or Asia.
The euroPEONS (yoops) will be cutting their forests this winter if things go like they seem headed. 😨
The “rapidly warming planet” I stopped reading at this Bulls*** There is no evidence that the planet is warming. All the so-called evidence is computer generated scam models, and if anyone thinks you can’t program a computer to say whatever you want just look at the computer games available today.
Do the ships that deliver the wood use sails? No. Do they burn wood or coal? No. they burn heavy oil. The hypocrisy is thick enough to cut with a knife.
Pellet stoves aren’t all that “green”, and only idiots think it is. It’s trendy among millennials though.
If they replant to grow new trees, then the clear cut land will provide the humans with a new forest. Plant, Grow, Harvest, Plant.
Trees are renewable!
England has been doing this for centuries.
Their modern “Forest” look strange since the trees are planted in perfect rows, like corn.
Funny, bunker oil is heavy enough to cut with a knife also. Its one of the dirtiest fuels ever used. Green? Hardly.
One ship I was on the engineers were pretty sure hazardous wastes were being disposed of in our bunkers.
You bring up an excellent point about computer generated models. Back in the early ‘80s when I was living in Japan; I took a course in computer programming taught by a navy LCDR. He said the same thing. He said that basically a computer is dumb. It cannot do a thing by itself. He said you have to program it.
Rachel Carson was the brain trust who wrote Silent Spring isn’t she?
All the song birds were supposed to be dead sometime in the ‘60s.
One more in a long line of failed enviro-wacko doomsday predictions.
I’ve been making a living building computer models for the last 45 years this includes some state of the art statistical analyses and I can tell you that global warming is a scam designed to fool stupid people into giving up their money and their freedom - and it’s working.
“People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they are afraid it might be true.” Terry Goodkind.
Not stoves. Large power plants. They call them biomass power plants so it sounds “green”.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/09/wood-burning-power-plants-misguided-climate-change-solution/
The average time it takes a hardwood to reach a decent size is 30-40 years. Which means you have to plant 18,250 acres of trees each year for 30-40 years to make it “sustainable” before you can go back and harvest your 50 acres a day crop again.
The average time it takes a hardwood to reach a decent size is 30-40 years. Which means you have to plant 18,250 acres of trees each year for 30-40 years to make it “sustainable” before you can go back and harvest your 50 acres a day crop again.
My comment was tongue-in-cheek. The 2-stroke chain saws used to cut down the forests to make pellets for the biomass power plant probably create more carbon emissions than a natural gas power plant with equivalent output to the biomass power plant. Wood is a low density power source.
More simply, if you harvest 50 acres per day, you have to plant 50 acres per day. Generally, if the terrain is suited for rapid harvest, it is suited for rapid replanting, esp. with modern techniques.
The US Forest Service reports our minimum forestation as 721,000,000 acres around 1920. Then the forests of the US made slight gains through much of the rest of the 20th century, apparently decreased somewhat from 1990 to 2010, and recovered about 0.03% annually from 2010-2020. The US Forest Service reported total US forestation as 766,000,000 acres in 2012.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forests_of_the_United_States
People have a “thing” about clear cutting, but, in some cases it is the best bet to achieve rapid regrowth of desirable species. In other cases, selective harvesting is best. (Can vary from individual selection to “patches”.)
I would think hardwoods are NOT best for large scale wood-for-fuel. Although... I’ve been fairly impressed with how fast genetically selected walnut trees can grow in good conditions.
Disclaimer: My Dad was a Forestry Prof. who did a lot of research, “extension service” consulting, etc. Degrees in Forest Management, Forest Ecology, and Forest Genetics (did a lot with those walnut trees back in the day!) Never was very worried about US and Canadian lumber / paper / etc. companies, as they typically replanted as much or more than they harvested. And areas like the Shawnee National Forest and the Hoosier National Forest (two of his old stomping grounds) are almost entirely reforested farmland. He did considerable work with recovery of strip mine lands, too. His bigger concern was invasive species (diseases, insects, and plants).
The thing was a total crock and led to the pseudo-science of DDT making birds egg shells ''thin'' and that would led to the extermination of the American Bald Eagle! The horror!. What that stupid bitch wrote was total pack of lies and in her own way Carson condemned millions in Third World countries to die of filthy insect borne diseases that DDT could have eradicated.
18,250 acres equals less than 30 square miles, which isn’t much in the scheme of things. You could carve out that amount of land in most of the South and no one would notice. Something else to remember is that most trees on privately held land are planted to be cut down.
For the past 30 years, if you wanted a research grant, you toed the global warming / climate change party line. This isn’t science, this is politics, this is Lysenko science. It’s time we all made our voices loud on this, they intend to control us by controlling energy.
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