Nova Scotia’s forests were dealt another blow today when the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables announced it would be burning more biomass (trees) over the next three years under a new renewable electricity standard.
The new standard, in the Renewable Electricity Regulations under the Electricity Act, requires the utility to purchase 135,000 megawatt hours of readily available renewable energy in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
The DNRR says “biomass is likely to be the only readily available option during that time. It is available due to the closure of the Northern Pulp mill and damage from hurricane Fiona.”
"Biomass is renewable, readily available and burns cleaner than coal," said Tory Rushton, Minister of Natural Resources and Renewables. "Adding more sustainably harvested biomass for a few years is a small thing we can do in the short term to bring more renewables onto the grid while longer term solutions are built."
As previously written, these spurious claims are rooted in fraudulent accounting.
You are so right. Lacking since beginning of the BioMess in NS, circa 2010 has been rigorous, preferably independent, life cycle assessments (LCAs). You can't even find what the feedstocks are to the PHP biomass facility. It was concerns about excessive harvesting associated the PHP facility in early 2016 that kicked off concerns that led to the Lahey Review, completed in Aug 2018, still to be fully implemented. Ironically, Lahey had next to nothing to say about biomass energy issue, not even to recommend LCAs; (he recommended small scale use of forest bioenergy for district heating). So we are back in the mire. Unfortunately, as Linda P knows and has written about, it not just a NS issue but pervades all of Big Forestry and governments in N. America and Europe and the NS government/NRR are able to hide behind the broader smokescreen. That's starting to clear, however, as methods of remotely monitoring forest landscapes become ever more sophisticated and more independent agencies are involved and as the public becomes more aware and concerned about the issue.
This is utterly insane, as anyone familiar with industrial forestry already knows. The superb stupidity behind burning our carbon capturing forests during the twin crises of Climate Change and the Biodiversity Crisis has been seized by industry andpromoted with the slickest greenwashing. Social media is now inundated with sponsored posts promoting industrial forestry and biomass burning as ecologically sound when the exact opposite is true. This greed-driven, antiscience, approach to forest management needs to be stopped in its tracks.
Not to mention the diesel fuel that has to be burned to truck all that "biomass." Ridiculous.
You are so right. Lacking since beginning of the BioMess in NS, circa 2010 has been rigorous, preferably independent, life cycle assessments (LCAs). You can't even find what the feedstocks are to the PHP biomass facility. It was concerns about excessive harvesting associated the PHP facility in early 2016 that kicked off concerns that led to the Lahey Review, completed in Aug 2018, still to be fully implemented. Ironically, Lahey had next to nothing to say about biomass energy issue, not even to recommend LCAs; (he recommended small scale use of forest bioenergy for district heating). So we are back in the mire. Unfortunately, as Linda P knows and has written about, it not just a NS issue but pervades all of Big Forestry and governments in N. America and Europe and the NS government/NRR are able to hide behind the broader smokescreen. That's starting to clear, however, as methods of remotely monitoring forest landscapes become ever more sophisticated and more independent agencies are involved and as the public becomes more aware and concerned about the issue.
This is utterly insane, as anyone familiar with industrial forestry already knows. The superb stupidity behind burning our carbon capturing forests during the twin crises of Climate Change and the Biodiversity Crisis has been seized by industry andpromoted with the slickest greenwashing. Social media is now inundated with sponsored posts promoting industrial forestry and biomass burning as ecologically sound when the exact opposite is true. This greed-driven, antiscience, approach to forest management needs to be stopped in its tracks.
Alas, it seems the cost of burning almost anything is low, stupidity is free and greed is a job-creator.