Louisiana forests being sacrificed to fuel Europe's biomass boom

[bloomington-lib]

http://america.aljazeera.com/content/ajam/articles/2014/1/16/green-energy-demandineuropemaybethreateningamericanforests/jcr:content/mainpar/adaptiveimage/src.adapt.960.high.1389887865058.jpg

BATON ROUGE, La. — The smell of freshly cut wood wafting from a dirt lot along an industrial stretch of road near the state capital might not conjure up an image of green energy, but some say this is the future of sustainability.

The smell comes from two white plastic domes rising high along the Mississippi River. Stored inside those domes are millions of wood pellets, which started as trees in the surrounding 50- to 75-mile area, and were converted to easily shippable and burnable material at mammoth factories where wood can stretch as far as the eye can see.
------
In 2007, the European Union set an ambitious goal to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to 20 percent below their 1990 levels by 2020. That, in effect, required power plants across the continent to quickly find new ways to make energy. Some turned to wind and solar. But for coal-fired power plants it was much cheaper to convert their facilities to burn wood. The conundrum for those companies is that much of western Europe doesn’t have sufficiently large forests left to meet the demand, and the remaining woodland is heavily regulated. So corporations turned to the Southeastern U.S., where wood is plentiful, and regulations about what can be done on private land are lax.
-------
“It’s just not as simple as 'the trees will grow back,’” said Norman Christensen, a professor of environmental science and policy at Duke University. “Yes, you are regaining carbon when trees grow back, but when you cut landscapes intensely, you release some degree of carbon to the atmosphere more or less permanently.”

[link:http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/16/green-energy-demandineuropemaybethreateningamericanforests.html|

[freshwest]

1. Third world resource status now attained. And dammit. n/t

[pscot]

2. Not yet

Not until Keystone XL is completed and a hundred coal trains a day are running throught the State of Washington.