Your article or report invokes much rhetoric.

We think the grammatical inference is wrong and you compound it with the full colon. Thus we get the fundamentals wrong by saying

”At issue:”

which forces the predication of the second part of the discussion, but denies it as being a question (which it surely must be.)

”is burning biomass carbon-neutral, and are there other emissions associated with it that make biomass an unappealing alternative to the burning of fossil fuels.”

None the less as we do understand the issue fairly well we could and perhaps should remind ourselves of the words from our fore fathers. Whilst Anton Chekhov in his story ”Uncle Vanya” gives an equal statement to the background issues about trees we think the better two statements from the American Indians are better. Here we then recall the time-honoured statement in the comments from ~ Cree Prophecy ~

”When all the trees have been cut down,
when all the animals have been hunted,
when all the waters are polluted,
when all the air is unsafe to breathe,
only then will you discover you cannot eat money.”

and remember the parallel statement from the same sources

“In our every deliberation
we must consider the impact of our decisions
on the next seven generations.”

We have sympathy with the thoughts behind the statements of Carbon Counting for there are untold examples of how We as Mankind have denied the existence of a natural balance here. Easter Island is perhaps just one example, but there are others. At one stage the whole of China was a forest, and even our own country has been despoiled by cutting down trees to make the Wooden Ships used by the British and Colonialists to foster war.

Now though there is a different driver in that we have the impetus to seek alternative sources of energy from ‘’so-called renewable” areas in order to meet legislation on balancing up to 20% of our energy from renewable sources. So her again we repeat the folly of trying to start up an industry from (almost) scratch (just as we did in mandating for biofuels where the first and quick fix solution was to use food crops) and we are going for the parallel quick fix solution of using trees and forests. That would be alright had we just concentrated on the debris and forest clearing spoils. However here again there are concerns over whether these may affect the ecological balance of the forests for like everything else fallen trees and natural debris within forests have their part to play. Alas this does not appear to be the case for making electricity from wood based biomass is big business and is lucrative in terms of subsidies. In this therefore you should be aware that in the EU (European Union) huge amounts of money is being made from the Premium Rates for Electricity Generation in this area. In the UK there are facilities being built that will reap over £300 million a year in subsidies to produce renewable sourced electricity and that within 2 years these subsidies will pay for the building of the power plants. (Is it any wonder that these power plants are springing up all over the country, and then being sold onwards even before they are built?) Now is the crunch time for the demand for the wood biomass is projected to be so large (over 8 million tonnes per year by 2018) that the prices of the wood has already gone up by 50% in two years and it is likely to increase even further – possibly by as much as 200% by 2018 – so that the subsidies given to generate electricity will always be needed. Is it any wonder therefore that serious questions have been raised by the EU Commission and the Public at Large over the issue since the costs for this will as always be borne by the Public through higher energy costs. Now the USA has fallen in to the trap and the principal beneficiaries will be big businesses.

We see nothing wrong with attempting to assess the impact of the burning of Biomass and accounting for its carbon statement. The fundamentals (of the issue) seem relatively straightforward. There is a balance needed between the cutting down of the forests for burning to make energy (electricity and heat) that has to be equated to the time required to replenish the quantity of material used in the process. If a reasonably mature tree takes 20 years to reach the point at which is mature enough to be cut down for a biomass to energy facility, and we then cut down 50,000 trees and burn them all in six months then in theory the balancing mechanism to replace the carbon absorbing option of planting more trees is 20 years. However since the tree growth pattern is somewhat at variance to the notion that it absorbs carbon equally over its 20 year growth cycle then the need – up front – is to have a ready source of mature trees that were planted at least 20 years before the current programme was envisaged to cut down the trees. This out-of-balance theory is in part being addressed in other countries by legislation that forces the biomass to energy companies to plant anywhere between 7 and 30 times as many sapling trees as it cuts down mature trees within the same time frame of tree-cutting activity. Unfortunately we do not see this being included within the current legislation in the USA…unless you can point it out and avail us of where we may read it. To us it would make sense to have that additional clause added.