US Forest chief: Use trees to make ethanol

[repete86]

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/sci...ts.ethanol.ap/

Yikes!

This proposal comes from the same Abigail Kimbell who pushed Bush's Healthy Forest Program that includes giving away old growth forests to logging companies, and who was responsible for the largest government whistleblower reprisal of all time. What a *****.

[Gary Palmer]

This sounds to me like Dumb and Dumber are getting together and their telling the press what the President wants them to hear. What a whole lot of lip flappin, jabbering.

I wonder how much energy is going to be expended collecting all of that brush? I also can't fathom how they are going to accomplish to diametrically opposing objectives.

Maybe they can just purchase energy credits, whatever that entails, so they can reach their goals. Huh?

[omgwtfbyobbq]

That's actually a decent plan, if implemented properly. Forest fires can be less destructive if the population of suitable trees is healthy and the underbrush thinned. Naturally we can't just dump the brush we cleared someplace else in the forest, so it has to be (I'm guessing) compacted and trucked away. Since we're already removing it from the area, we might as well get some use out of it while netting maybe a few hundred gallons worth of feedstock per acre per operation. That being said, like everything else, it'll likely be a rip-off disguised by a decent idea. Like Bush' give-away to the timber industry.

[repete86]

Personally, I think that forest fires should be left burning. The problem is that we always put our forest fires out immediately and then chop down the old and plant new trees. This is actually extremely destructive, and instead a fire needs to naturally burn what needs to be burned and naturally for a forest to become healthy again. Clear-cutting burned old-growth does nothing but destroy the biodiversity of the area, and putting the fires out chokes the forest and makes future fires larger.