If you take a walk in the woods with a naturalist, she will probably explain the role of nurse logs, fungi, and forest duff in maintaining a healthy ecosystem.
If you read about the woods in a green report, you will discover that all that material is mere "waste" and we must grab it and burn it. In order to save the planet.
We work in the environmental space. We see Indiana and Northern Long-Eared bats block natural gas pipelines from Appalachia to interconnects along the eastern seaboard under the Endangered Species Act. But those same bats don't seem to be a problem for spinning green crucifix (wind) projects.
28 ducks land in an unlined oil lagoon. Oil company gets a fine under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. No one knows how many migratory birds are killed by wind turbines every year. But wind energy developers get passes under the MBTA that would result in other energy companies/projects getting fine on a routine basis.
Too many similar examples to list here.
Thank you, BF. Your work is superb. And as environmental industry experts, we have some serious ideas about how your legal expertise could really turn the tables here. Very grateful to have you leading here.
Yes. Lies with a purpose. The purpose is to make it possible to claim "renewables" are doing great in Europe. Dorfman and other shills can proclaim they are winning, and keep conning the public into paying for more windmills and solar. The don't disclose that biomass is what is doing it.
This excellent piece gets right to the point - and begs the question: why are the "greens" doing this? It's anything but virtuous. They're practicing damn near everything they pretend to be "against." 🤔 If only there was a word for that....
It's quite simple. In Europe the Greens were taken over by East German communist cadres working for Russian intelligence, and welcomed by the fossil fuel interests in Germany. If you go to Europe you will find that Germany and France are not really friendly. Few who live near the Rhine will cross the pedestrian bridges. It is easy to understand why Russia would do this given their history of invasion from Europe.
Antinuclear support and curation has been a keystone of USA fossil fuel interests since the late 1940's. Again, easy to understand why.
All lies. Lies with purpose. The purpose here in the USA is profit. The purpose in Germany, Denmark, etc, is profit yoked to national interest of Russia. The latter is because Russia, with very good reason, does not trust Germany, nor the USA.
The protesters do not know. The shills making a living at it, do not care. Whether people like David Brower who took over the Sierra Club with money from oil that allowed him to create Friends of the Earth (FoE) knows and is a sociopath is a question. Because he created a kind of personality cult I am suspicious that is the case. However, the bottom line is that those people protesting believe that they are doing the right thing.
Fossil fuel plays both sides of this street. They also curate they denialists. The goal is profit. Profits now.
I've rubbed shoulders with oil millionaires at billionaire parties. (The bigger fish like to lord it over the smaller fish.) I can tell you that what the big and small fish care about is one thing: keep the mazooma rolling in so they have some power, and they can buy the time of beautiful escorts on their arm and show off and feel bigger and more powerful than other people and get invited to various Valhalla parties and see the Disneyland life of the ultra rich.
Baboon motives in other words, form the foundation. Ignorance and stupidity are the construction material of the palace.
And don't even get us started on gas booze (corn ethanol). Aside from the impacts on soil carbon/productivity, aquifer depletion, nitrogen loading of waterways, putting corn in gas tanks instead of humans or animals to feed humans, reduced BTU value, etc. it's hammered the Conservation Reserve Program (CPR).
Something on the order of 5-10 MILLION acres of former fallow land left as shelterbelts, wildlife habitat, groundwater recharge, nutrient load reduction to waterways, etc. under conservation leases to farmers has been lost to gas booze. Deer, upland birds and waterfowl, fish, aquifer recharge/water quality, etc. If these impacts were caused by oil/gas operations there would be green outrage. That they result from something portrayed as "green"......well.... to Meredith's excellent point below......
One member of our team lives in a state where Enviva and others are making wood pellets for export to Drax. Sickening.
A nitpick: some forest types *naturally* burn off their carbon. Where I live, the pine straw does not rot. It would just pile up if the city didn't take it away. Back in the day, the Native Americans intentionally set the pine straw on fire in order to allow understory plants to grow and feed the game.
If the Native Americans didn't do it, nature would have burned the piled up carbon from time to time via lightning strikes.
Shipping off wood to Europe from such forests depletes the soil of the minerals that would have been in the ash. It could be a factor driving up the price of lumber and paper as well.
P.S. If you don't thin a young pine forest, the trees grow very slowly. Harvesting part of the young growth to make paper or pellets speeds up the growth of the remaining trees substantially.
To be sure, there are over-generalizations. But burning does not mean ash. The inhabitants of the Amazons figured out thousands of years ago how to burn green wood and such to create what we call today terra preta - lots of carbon / charcoal. Your comment also suggests that Old Growth forests should not exist in nature. Can you explain their existence?
I wrote "some" forest types -- generally conifer dominated forests. Frequent cutting of certain other forest types -- or raking up the debris --is very disruptive.
In the southeast coastal plains where I live pines naturally dominate as they can survive both hurricanes and ice storms. Pine straw burning does not kill the larger trees unless the straw buildup gets too high. Back when I was in elementary school the skies were filled with smoke for days because the surrounding forests were on fire. The trees were still there at the end. Just the built up pine straw and branches burned.
And this was in a wet climate. I read that the importance of burning the natural trash frequently is more important in the arid west.
Go further north and nature will produce some older growth forest. But I would note that I have family in eastern VA which has been trying to sustainably raise large hardwoods and do selective cuttings on the ancestral farm. Small tornadoes have destroyed much of this effort. Smaller trees closer together better handle high winds. (But let them be too close together and they grow *very* slowly.)
The southern Appalachians better gravitate to old growth forest if you leave the forest alone. Less wind to knock down old trees, and plenty of rain. There is forest near the Tennessee border that evokes something out of Tolkien. And since there is very little soil other than rotten leaves on mountainsides, your concerns about soil carbon are extremely applicable there.
Once again, apologies for being the nit-picker, but I got to thinking about such things after watching "Planet of the Humans". There are a few instances where harvesting biomass makes sense:
1. Reducing fuel in fire ecosystems to prevent catastrophic forest fires. Labor intensive, but we do have a lot of people in jail, on welfare, or doing makework these days.
2. Letting landfills ferment and burning the methane. Reduces garbage volume substantially.
3. Using algae or cattails feed off the remaining nutrients in treated wastewater. Algae gives diesel fuels. Cattails give starch for ethanol. The ashes of both yield phosphorus. We could put phosphates back in our detergents and recycle them.
Also, I seem to recall reading that cattails also absorb the artificial estrogens from birth control pills. If so, this is double plus important. Conventional wastewater treatment does not remove this chemical and neither does conventional drinking water treatment.
4. Waste vegetable oil can fuel diesel engines. The big benefit here is that it gives restaurants and processed food makers more incentive to change their cooking oil more frequently. This reduces cancer rates.
----
With all this written, I doubt the above would suffice to replace fossil fuels. That's why I read your Substack and point people to it.
----
P.S. Forest soil is generally not great soil. Recall your video of earth movers smoothing out the ground to make that electric car factory. In the Piedmont, you don't have to dig far to reach that clay. Wild grasslands and properly managed pasture are what add serious carbon to the soil.
Wonderful article and something that isn't discussed very often (I'm in the UK so are 'fortunate' to have Drax which uses a lot your American ancient woodland🤦♂️) Unfortunately our Virtue Seeking Masters aren't interested in logic. I'm resigned to another 10yrs of this torture and am hoping at that point someone will bring some sense to energy policy. Right now here in the UK we are starting to experience electricity 'demand management' whilst paying more than ever before for energy. This, when we have been promised cheap reliable renewable energy for yrs. Nuclear, shale, traditional gas and even coal are the future. Expecting battery development to come along whilst carrying out a live experiment on our grid is like driving on the motorway at 70mph hoping someone will invent brakes before you need to stop.
Not disagreeing that extensive use of trees for fuel is a bad idea, but my understanding is it's misleading to suggest that trees left alone contribute substantially to soil carbon when they die. In many (most) instances biologic decay converts most of the carbon into CO2. A much smaller fraction is retained in soil. It depends of course on the microenvironment. Bogs will do much better. Also, the one upside of biomass is that it helps keep more coal in the ground - potentially permanently sequestered. Photosynthesis can recycle biomass CO2 back into biomass. It seems there is a limited role for biomass. As usual the devil is in the details. This is not to argue against the central point that burning wood for energy is no where near as green as many believe and, with some exceptions, is a poor choice.
If you take a walk in the woods with a naturalist, she will probably explain the role of nurse logs, fungi, and forest duff in maintaining a healthy ecosystem.
If you read about the woods in a green report, you will discover that all that material is mere "waste" and we must grab it and burn it. In order to save the planet.
We work in the environmental space. We see Indiana and Northern Long-Eared bats block natural gas pipelines from Appalachia to interconnects along the eastern seaboard under the Endangered Species Act. But those same bats don't seem to be a problem for spinning green crucifix (wind) projects.
28 ducks land in an unlined oil lagoon. Oil company gets a fine under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. No one knows how many migratory birds are killed by wind turbines every year. But wind energy developers get passes under the MBTA that would result in other energy companies/projects getting fine on a routine basis.
Too many similar examples to list here.
Thank you, BF. Your work is superb. And as environmental industry experts, we have some serious ideas about how your legal expertise could really turn the tables here. Very grateful to have you leading here.
Great post. Attaboy, BF.
Yes. Lies with a purpose. The purpose is to make it possible to claim "renewables" are doing great in Europe. Dorfman and other shills can proclaim they are winning, and keep conning the public into paying for more windmills and solar. The don't disclose that biomass is what is doing it.
This excellent piece gets right to the point - and begs the question: why are the "greens" doing this? It's anything but virtuous. They're practicing damn near everything they pretend to be "against." 🤔 If only there was a word for that....
It's quite simple. In Europe the Greens were taken over by East German communist cadres working for Russian intelligence, and welcomed by the fossil fuel interests in Germany. If you go to Europe you will find that Germany and France are not really friendly. Few who live near the Rhine will cross the pedestrian bridges. It is easy to understand why Russia would do this given their history of invasion from Europe.
Antinuclear support and curation has been a keystone of USA fossil fuel interests since the late 1940's. Again, easy to understand why.
All lies. Lies with purpose. The purpose here in the USA is profit. The purpose in Germany, Denmark, etc, is profit yoked to national interest of Russia. The latter is because Russia, with very good reason, does not trust Germany, nor the USA.
The protesters do not know. The shills making a living at it, do not care. Whether people like David Brower who took over the Sierra Club with money from oil that allowed him to create Friends of the Earth (FoE) knows and is a sociopath is a question. Because he created a kind of personality cult I am suspicious that is the case. However, the bottom line is that those people protesting believe that they are doing the right thing.
Fossil fuel plays both sides of this street. They also curate they denialists. The goal is profit. Profits now.
I've rubbed shoulders with oil millionaires at billionaire parties. (The bigger fish like to lord it over the smaller fish.) I can tell you that what the big and small fish care about is one thing: keep the mazooma rolling in so they have some power, and they can buy the time of beautiful escorts on their arm and show off and feel bigger and more powerful than other people and get invited to various Valhalla parties and see the Disneyland life of the ultra rich.
Baboon motives in other words, form the foundation. Ignorance and stupidity are the construction material of the palace.
Typos:
"From the point of vie..." => "From the point of view..."
"The sooner we figure that out, the more pain and suffering we will cause..."
=> "The sooner we figure that out, the more pain and suffering we will AVOID..."
Super piece, BF.
And don't even get us started on gas booze (corn ethanol). Aside from the impacts on soil carbon/productivity, aquifer depletion, nitrogen loading of waterways, putting corn in gas tanks instead of humans or animals to feed humans, reduced BTU value, etc. it's hammered the Conservation Reserve Program (CPR).
Something on the order of 5-10 MILLION acres of former fallow land left as shelterbelts, wildlife habitat, groundwater recharge, nutrient load reduction to waterways, etc. under conservation leases to farmers has been lost to gas booze. Deer, upland birds and waterfowl, fish, aquifer recharge/water quality, etc. If these impacts were caused by oil/gas operations there would be green outrage. That they result from something portrayed as "green"......well.... to Meredith's excellent point below......
One member of our team lives in a state where Enviva and others are making wood pellets for export to Drax. Sickening.
A nitpick: some forest types *naturally* burn off their carbon. Where I live, the pine straw does not rot. It would just pile up if the city didn't take it away. Back in the day, the Native Americans intentionally set the pine straw on fire in order to allow understory plants to grow and feed the game.
If the Native Americans didn't do it, nature would have burned the piled up carbon from time to time via lightning strikes.
Shipping off wood to Europe from such forests depletes the soil of the minerals that would have been in the ash. It could be a factor driving up the price of lumber and paper as well.
P.S. If you don't thin a young pine forest, the trees grow very slowly. Harvesting part of the young growth to make paper or pellets speeds up the growth of the remaining trees substantially.
To be sure, there are over-generalizations. But burning does not mean ash. The inhabitants of the Amazons figured out thousands of years ago how to burn green wood and such to create what we call today terra preta - lots of carbon / charcoal. Your comment also suggests that Old Growth forests should not exist in nature. Can you explain their existence?
I wrote "some" forest types -- generally conifer dominated forests. Frequent cutting of certain other forest types -- or raking up the debris --is very disruptive.
In the southeast coastal plains where I live pines naturally dominate as they can survive both hurricanes and ice storms. Pine straw burning does not kill the larger trees unless the straw buildup gets too high. Back when I was in elementary school the skies were filled with smoke for days because the surrounding forests were on fire. The trees were still there at the end. Just the built up pine straw and branches burned.
And this was in a wet climate. I read that the importance of burning the natural trash frequently is more important in the arid west.
Go further north and nature will produce some older growth forest. But I would note that I have family in eastern VA which has been trying to sustainably raise large hardwoods and do selective cuttings on the ancestral farm. Small tornadoes have destroyed much of this effort. Smaller trees closer together better handle high winds. (But let them be too close together and they grow *very* slowly.)
The southern Appalachians better gravitate to old growth forest if you leave the forest alone. Less wind to knock down old trees, and plenty of rain. There is forest near the Tennessee border that evokes something out of Tolkien. And since there is very little soil other than rotten leaves on mountainsides, your concerns about soil carbon are extremely applicable there.
Thanks for educating me about this.
Once again, apologies for being the nit-picker, but I got to thinking about such things after watching "Planet of the Humans". There are a few instances where harvesting biomass makes sense:
1. Reducing fuel in fire ecosystems to prevent catastrophic forest fires. Labor intensive, but we do have a lot of people in jail, on welfare, or doing makework these days.
2. Letting landfills ferment and burning the methane. Reduces garbage volume substantially.
3. Using algae or cattails feed off the remaining nutrients in treated wastewater. Algae gives diesel fuels. Cattails give starch for ethanol. The ashes of both yield phosphorus. We could put phosphates back in our detergents and recycle them.
Also, I seem to recall reading that cattails also absorb the artificial estrogens from birth control pills. If so, this is double plus important. Conventional wastewater treatment does not remove this chemical and neither does conventional drinking water treatment.
4. Waste vegetable oil can fuel diesel engines. The big benefit here is that it gives restaurants and processed food makers more incentive to change their cooking oil more frequently. This reduces cancer rates.
----
With all this written, I doubt the above would suffice to replace fossil fuels. That's why I read your Substack and point people to it.
----
P.S. Forest soil is generally not great soil. Recall your video of earth movers smoothing out the ground to make that electric car factory. In the Piedmont, you don't have to dig far to reach that clay. Wild grasslands and properly managed pasture are what add serious carbon to the soil.
these are mostly footnotes in terms of scale--there are others. Problem is there is no way to limit the "waste" niche. Look at Drax.
Wonderful article and something that isn't discussed very often (I'm in the UK so are 'fortunate' to have Drax which uses a lot your American ancient woodland🤦♂️) Unfortunately our Virtue Seeking Masters aren't interested in logic. I'm resigned to another 10yrs of this torture and am hoping at that point someone will bring some sense to energy policy. Right now here in the UK we are starting to experience electricity 'demand management' whilst paying more than ever before for energy. This, when we have been promised cheap reliable renewable energy for yrs. Nuclear, shale, traditional gas and even coal are the future. Expecting battery development to come along whilst carrying out a live experiment on our grid is like driving on the motorway at 70mph hoping someone will invent brakes before you need to stop.
Not disagreeing that extensive use of trees for fuel is a bad idea, but my understanding is it's misleading to suggest that trees left alone contribute substantially to soil carbon when they die. In many (most) instances biologic decay converts most of the carbon into CO2. A much smaller fraction is retained in soil. It depends of course on the microenvironment. Bogs will do much better. Also, the one upside of biomass is that it helps keep more coal in the ground - potentially permanently sequestered. Photosynthesis can recycle biomass CO2 back into biomass. It seems there is a limited role for biomass. As usual the devil is in the details. This is not to argue against the central point that burning wood for energy is no where near as green as many believe and, with some exceptions, is a poor choice.
Cults gonna cult