I'll drink to that.

must be a real slow news day with nothing happening in the world.

Hey, are you going to buy some carbon offsets for the flatulents resulting from that drinking?

Don't get it. How is burning trees going to save the environment? How is burning trees a step forward technologically speaking? Check out www.energyjustice.net/biomass for critical information

Oops http://www.energyjustice.net/biomass

Burning Trees is not going to save the environment. It puts us back to stone age basics - burn wood for heat energy.

Creates CO2, creates particulates, creates VOCs.

In the stone age we had the family and the clan sit around one or more wood fires getting warm, cooking, and inhaling the smoke.

In the 21st century we have the family and community residing around the wood burner creating steam for electricity to cook with and hot water to heat with and inhaling the residue of the particulates and those from the wood transportation and chipping equipment.

And the progress is????? Tada!!!! .................. okay, time to come out now and show yourself father progress ........ yoohoo .... where are you ???? .... Come on out you fool!!!! quit hiding .....

Who's the fool... it was only a week ago that we had a giant smoke cloud from here all the way to Toronto... and some people obviously missed that.

Isn't the biomass industry about capturing some of that potential for good use, rather than just contributing to the fuel to power the kind of environmental event we experienced last week? Isn't it about creating jobs in the process that would otherwise be lost due to the ignorance of uppity monopolist organizations that want to tie us to the global warming carbon off sets program.

Foolish indeed... foolish are those that think wood won't burn on its own if we just ignore its existence.

I think the link provided above has no bearing on the BC biomass industry. Burning garbage in a biomass incinerator may be taking place in the American states where they have garbage problems and thereby storing their pollution in the atmosphere... but that has no relation to a biomass plant in BC that is burning genuine wood waste that would burn either way somewhere down the road anyways.

If someone is burning tires in their biomass plant, than that is no longer a biomass plant... no way to compare that with a biomass plant burning the hog fuel from the saw-milling process... or dead pine trees that will burn in a forest fire otherwise.

We must not forget a few things.

1. We cannot just log for logging sake unless we are willing to pay for the cost. We have to have a product to be manufactured and sold at the end of the process (as NMG reminded us of in another thread on here)

2. The biomass into energy industry has so far been totally dependent on the other lumber manufacturing industry to supply it with the waste at very low to no cost.

3. to the best of my knowledge there has so far been no fuel or energy manufacturing business that has taken on the full cost of harvesting and silviculture treatment of logged areas and has made a viable business of that in a similar fashion that the lumber and pulp businesses have been able to do.

4. People are concerned about the rising cost of electricity because of the apparent high guaranteed prices such bioenergy firms have been receiving for their generated electricity.

Everyone knows that wood will either burn on its own or fall down and decay, or both.

BUT, what no one has shown us yet is how to use the oversupply of that wood in such a way that the removal and replanting of it will be paid for by the sale of a marketable product made with it.

Huh, what about the pallet plants... they get like 30 loads a day directly from the bush of whole log grind that is ground directly from the forest floor into the back of the trailers for delivery straight to the pellet plant without stopping at any lumber mills on the way.

Pinestar, that's all they do is dead pine trees ground straight into the truck for delivery to the pellet plants. All-wood does a lot of that too.

So Gus, it appears your argument turns out to be merely conjecture and not fact.