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What a good idea. The smoke would make a bigger contribution to greenhouse warming than all other pollution combined. And while we make the air unbreathable, we get rid of that pesky forest, the lungs of the planet.
To dress up this scheme as ''green'' electricity generation is truly Machiavellian. Business Victoria says old-growth forests are a renewable resource. They are, if you log them only once every 300 years.
But if you replace them with plantations that are harvested in a sixth of that time, you have not renewed what you have destroyed. The biodiversity of the old forest takes much longer to recover.
And fancy calling a policy that requires clearfelling and the burning
of trees a green solution! Victoria's Energy Efficiency agency has refused
to endorse the policy (The Age, 24/7), but will that deter the slashers
and burners at Business Victoria? If they turned their energies and the
money they hope to raise to solar and wind energy, they might come up with
power instead of a scorched-earth policy.
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