Burning wood .. bad for the enviroment?

In a flash... the two wood burning plants proposed here in western mass could go up in smoke. A six month study by Massachusetts Manoment Center for Conservation Sciences in Plymouth indicates that burning wood to generate electricity can be worse for global warming than burning coal. The short of it: The study looks only at new forest being burned and not the waste wood that biomass plants use now.

This may be trouble for the two power plants for burning wood but MAY increase the awareness of other biomass materials that are grown yearly and don't add to the problem of co2 in our air. By the way, burning hemp has less detrimental effects on our environment than wood, oil and natural gas. It releases the same amount of co2 that it took to grow it when burned.

Immediately after the report was issued, BPA, Biomass Power Association has requested an apology for the Manoment Center and the State of Mass, citing these reasons.
“Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study” examines biomass energy in the state of Massachusetts, but bases its analysis on new forest biomass instead of the waste wood most biomass plants use or propose to use. It’s a subject of grave concern for the members of the BPA who do business in 20 states, according to Bob Cleaves, president and CEO of the BPA. “The report issued by Manomet on behalf of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has generated both a lot of interest, but also a tremendous amount of confusion and misinformation about a very, very important issue for our industry and that issue is carbon impacts from utilizing biomass in the production of electricity,” he said.

In response to the study, Cleaves emphasized four major principles of the BPA and its members that guide operations: only sustainable fuels that do not contribute to land-use changes and offer much lower greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels are used; members do not promote harvesting of forests for energy; members fully support use of wood waste and byproducts from sustainable forestry; and members support the use of nonforestry waste from the agricultural industry. The Manomet study completely ignores waste wood fuels for the first 109 pages, Cleaves said, addressing them almost as an afterthought on page 110: “All bioenergy technologies, even biomass electric power compared to natural gas electric, looks favorable when biomass waste wood is compared to fossil fuel alternatives.”