Fuelling a biomess : Why burning trees for energy will harm people, the climate and forests

The use of forest biomass for heat and power is already widespread in Canada, the United States and the European Union. [...] The main goal of the forest biofibre directive, the amount of biomass made available has soared published in 2008, was to “encourage the use of forest to unprecedented levels. [...] Much of it is recycled in the soil, enabling from New England forests is not the next generation of trees to better capture ‘carbon neutral’ in a timeframe carbon from the air, while the rest is released that makes sense given our legal very slowly 118, 134-135; mandate to cut greenhouse gas 4. Large amounts of energy are needed to emissions, we need to re-evaluate extract, transform, dry and tran [...] Biomass extracted from this carbon storehouse is one of Salvage logging fast tracks the worst biomass feedstocks on the planet due to: carbon release in B. C. • The low productivity and slow regrowth of the British Columbia was the first Canadian province to Boreal Forest resulting from the cold climate dive into the biomess by allowing large-scale, full-tree and long snow cover143; harvesting in [...] These ecosystems, • The fact that the Boreal Forest is one of the largest impacted by one of the largest insect outbreaks in terrestrial carbon stocks in the world and most Canada’s recent history, itself due to a changing climate155, of this carbon is stored in its sensitive soils 102, 144; are being cleared through salvage logging, primarily • The Boreal Forest’s low decomposition rates118, 145;