This document reveals that it is logs that are being considered for burning in furnaces to create electricity, not bits and pieces left on the forest floor from harvest. P. 6 explains that the ‘residues’ the report considered are ‘logs that met the specifications for pulpwood (typically 10 cm small end diameter overbark, and a minimum of 2.5 in length’ and that ‘the crown was typically left in the forest’.
Taxpayers have subsidised this report despite the rationale on which it is based, i.e. that burning native forest biomass is ‘carbon neutral’ is contrary to peer reviewed science, both nationally and internationally. Taxpayers are funding schemes to provide profit for the logging industry based on inaccurate science.
This report refers to the wood biomass available for ‘bio-energy’ as ‘residues’. Other rhetorical terms are used e.g. thinnings. What needs to be remembered when reading these industry documents is that a) emissions from combustion of wood biomass release CO2 and other climate damaging gases into the atmosphere at a greater rate than they can be re-absorbed by growing trees and b) ‘residue’ is not the focus of the wood biomass industry. It is trees. Trees that could otherwise be left standing to absorb carbon and provide desperately needed wildlife habitat.
Based on this flawed report the state agency issued a media release recommending 3 forest furnaces for NSW to a burn so-called 1 million tonnes of ‘spare’ wood, i.e. trees from north coast native forests, despite the global climate change emergency, despite Australia’s acknowledged extinction crisis.
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