Stop expanding the wood…

Stop expanding the wood pellet industry.

One of the main products of Ontario’s forest biomass industry is wood pellets. Wood pellets are marketed as a clean energy alternative, but wood pellets are dirtier than coal at the smokestack.

While industry claims that only waste wood is used to manufacture wood pellets, more whole trees from primary, boreal forests are being logged to meet the demands of this growing industry. We need to increase industry oversight, not “streamline permitting and reduce regulatory burden for all sectors which use forest biomass.”

Expanding the wood pellet industry may provide jobs, but these will not be "low carbon" jobs, they will be jobs in an industry that dumps more carbon into the atmosphere than what it's replacing. We can’t afford to cut down forests to make a fuel that emits immense amounts of carbon dioxide.

Increasing deforestation as a climate solution is not viable. Wood pellets are a false climate solution.