Because climate doomsday scientists and activists continue to frighten the hysterical-prone media and bureaucrats, there are now those who consider burning the world's forests to generate electricity to be a viable solution - another questionable proposal from CAGW devotees
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Read here. The hysterical fears associated with CAGW belief often leads to bizarre regulations and proposals to reduce and/or eliminate human CO2 emissions.
One such bizarre "green" proposal is to harvest the world's existing forests and burn the wood in power plants to generate electricity. This idea by extreme green fanatics borders on a "sacrificing the patient to cure a speculative disease" type of mentality.
A team of researchers (Schulze et al.) analyzed this bizarre proposal and concluded the following:
"..."such an increase in biomass harvest would result in younger forests, lower biomass pools, depleted soil nutrient stocks and a loss of other ecosystem functions," such that "the proposed strategy is likely to miss its main objective, i.e. to reduce GHG emissions, because it would result in a reduction of biomass pools that may take decades to centuries to be paid back by fossil fuel substitution, if paid back at all." In the long run, therefore, they feel that "depleted soil fertility will make the production unsustainable and require fertilization, which in turn increases GHG emissions due to N2O emissions," which ultimately makes the large-scale production of bioenergy from forest biomass, in their opinion, "neither sustainable nor GHG neutral."...they caution that society should fully quantify direct and indirect GHG emissions associated with energy alternatives and associated consequences prior to making policy commitments that have long-term effects on global forests; for they ominously warn "there is a substantial risk of sacrificing forest integrity and sustainability for maintaining or even increasing energy production with no guarantee to mitigate climate change.""