Environmental Registry…

Environmental Registry Submission
I do not agree with the premise that wood pellet production for the purpose of producing electricity is a plus for the environment. Why?

(1) Ontario's electricity needs are predominantly meet through nuclear and water power as well as solar and wind with some natural gas-powered plants primarily used for peak power. In the latter case there is now being developed carbon sequestration technologies that eliminate CO2 emissions.

Green energy slogans for political purposes only should be eliminated in this policy proposal for that reason. It is bad enough that greenies sometimes propose projects that can and have done enormous ecological damage in the past. This proposal, in its own way contributes to that. For example, the science is in with respect to the enormous ecological damage done by damming large river systems worldwide for green power; and many rivers are now being freed and/or being considered for reversal.
The whole premise of using wood to replace coal is ridiculous. Even in the US private sector
power generating companies have and are still converting coal burning power plants to natural gas.

(2) Effectively then this project is totally about converting the totality of the Boreal Forest into a tree farm for economic and northern development reasons. In principle I have no quarrel with this but it must be done in an ecologically sustainable manner. In this context this means that Ontario’s Boreal Forest cannot become one giant mono culture tree farm

The wood supply will come from Ontario's Boreal Forest area meaning that even more of this area will be subject to industrial style forest practices including herbicide spraying to eliminate any competing biomass; effectively creating a mono-culture (a tree farm rather than a forest). Real forests can be logged sustainably; Algonquin Park is a good example. This should be considered as a management strategy for the whole Boreal Forest but in a way that large tracts and related corridors are left untouched.

The bigger environmental threat is not from climate change but from degraded ecosystems in terms of ecological integrity and diversity. In this sense the biggest ecological threat worldwide is industrial scale farming, fishing and forestry which will ultimately lead to large scale extinctions and broad scale ecological collapse.

This proposal is solely about maintaining employment opportunities in the north; and I am for that but only in the context of environmentally sustainable ways.