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An enormous new forest-destroying project masquerading as a "green energy" enterprise is rapidly taking shape in California.
Golden State Natural Resources' (GSNR) so-called "Forest Resiliency Demonstration Project" would build two new wood-pellet manufacturing plants in the state—one in Lassen County and the other in Tuolumne County about 30 miles from Yosemite National Park.
These plants would vacuum up "feedstock"—woody biomass including not just branches but also trees of any size or species—within a 100-mile radius of each plant. That's about 63,000 square miles total, to produce some one million tons of pellets per year.
Contact your California officials today and voice your opposition to this project!
It is now clear that burning woody biomass for electricity generation is neither clean nor sustainable. In fact, it generates more CO2 than coal, per unit of electricity produced!
And wood-pellet manufacturing for such electricity is at every stage dirty and climate-damaging as well. The environmental impacts of resource extraction in the woods—bringing with it loss of habitat, pollution of streams, and damage to sensitive soils, not to mention destruction of carbon-storing trees—are just the beginning.
After that would come large-scale processing emitting heavy metals such as lead and mercury and carcinogens including dioxin, storage of highly flammable pellets, and clouds of lung-damaging and explosive fine dust particles.
(In our Resources section below you'll find a detailed comment letter on the project, co-signed by Forests Forever and over 100 other concerned groups.)
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Paul Hughes
Executive Director
Forests Forever
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RESOURCES →
- In June 2023 Forests Forever was one of 109 groups that co-signed this detailed comment letter opposing GSNR's so-called "Forest Resiliency Demonstration Project."
- Here is a recent study that explodes the myth that burning trees instead of coal is better for the climate.
- Check out Forests Forever's latest eAlert on the dangers of burning forest biomass to generate electricity.
- One of our closest allies in the fight to stop forest-destroying bioenergy in California is an outfit called Biofuelwatch. Visit: https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2021/bioenergy-in-california/