Environmentalists insist that deforestation is a major factor in global warming because it is contributing as much as 20 percent of the “greenhouse effect” – the process whereby the atmosphere is less able to cool itself, thanks to excessive amounts of gases like carbon dioxide (CO2). But CO2’s villainy puts environmentalists in an unexpected corner. To contain global warming, government pressures private businesses to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. But that pressure also encourages private companies like the utilities that generate electricity to find substitutes for the coal they currently depend on. So, guess what many utilities here and in Europe are starting to burn?
Wood.
In the can’t-see-the-forest world of tree huggers, chaining yourself to a pine to prevent its harvest is out, and cutting the same tree down is suddenly in. Even though, according to Bloomberg News, forested areas are “being harvested or burned at a rate that reduces tree cover by a Greece-sized area each year.”Deforestation, which reportedly contributes up to a third of total man-made C02 emissions worldwide, is apparently no longer anathema. That’s because power companies are up against an inconvenient truth: Significantly reducing the use of coal, which is mined in 27 states and currently generates half of all the electricity produced in the United States, or any other carbon-based fuel is a daunting challenge. Biomass – which includes wood – currently accounts for just 4 percent of all energy consumption in the industrialized nations.
Power companies in Europe and the U.S. have figured out that if they burn wood, they won’t need expensive government C02 permits – even though the main products of wood combustion are C02 and water. Government regulators consider tree burning “carbon neutral” because trees extract C02 from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. The tree-huggers’ dilemma is that cutting down carbon-consuming trees en masse to fuel power plants means fewer trees and more atmospheric C02, which the Environmental Protection Agency now classifies as a pollutant. The deforestation that results from their ongoing crusade against coal will be a Pyrrhic victory for them, as well as a devastating economic blow to the rest of the nation.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the U.S. has about 475 billion tons of coal, enough to meet projected energy needs for the next 200 years. So, cutting down millions of trees to replace this abundant natural resource just doesn’t make much sense, even from an environmental point of view.
