Interesting article from last month on BC including how shutting down nuclear in Japan led to more biomass imports..
"However, Ralston told reporters Wednesday (April 24) that “forests are not being turned into pellets,” adding that the source material for making pellets is sawmills, shavings, chips and forest residues.
He said all of those materials, which are taken to the Drax mills and made into pellets, would otherwise be burned in slash piles that “releases a lot of carbon and it wastes a lot of valuable forest products.”"
I don't know if I'm the only forest person here.. but here the story as EnvironMental suggests for US landowners in the SE is that they can get good prices for biomass left over from harvesting sawtimber.
I'm not a fan of the policies in Europe but we are not "clearcutting native forests" for chips. You can't always believe what ENGO's claim (I think you all know this.)
I've written about the SE and Enviva here (and a hit piece by CNN) It is very important to understand that Enviva’s pellets are made from low-value wood that is a byproduct of a traditional timber harvest. Enviva creates an additional market for private forest landowners to sell their low-value wood, such as “thinnings,” limbs, tops, or low-grade trees (deceased, crooked) that would otherwise go unused, and an incentive to keep their land as forests. We’re talking about material that is a relatively small source of revenue for a landowner, so it’s not driving their decision to harvest in the first place.
Here's an interview with Brad Worsley who talks about restricting RE PTC for biomass facilities engaged in forest restoration activities. I don't know what happened with this. Some D politicians seem to wave away any forest biomass based on some ENGOs not liking it (in terms of exports from the SE US).
The last article I saw from an ENGO was very careful to say "uses material from old growth forests" in Canada.. but biomass is a use for leftover material from the site. It kind of implies that the forests were cut to produce biomass, but that's not the case.
Finally, people already use a great deal of wood for heat.. depending on where you live this may be obvious or not, and when electricity is intermittent and it's cold, people are more interested in heating with wood. So if more renewables lead to more intermittency, we may have more primary wood use. If the electricity goes out, you can heat your house, cook and heat water for washing on a woodstove.
I spoke to BECCS for an article earlier this year. I was told that Enviva only account for ~15% of the groups fibre supplies. Not exactly the end of the world for Drax since other suppliers will look to fill the gap.
I was suspicious with a Krugman quote but could not stop grinning as I read this. I had wondered reading Doomberg's Drax article how much of our Canadian wood was being used. Thanks for clearing that up. The idea that wood from BC travels to the UK and is declared carbon free to be used by a biomass company that would be bankrupt without direct government subsidies is ridiculous. Compounded by the CCS plans to make Drax carbon negative and likely eligible for more largess. I am constantly amazed by these examples of the fact that we live in the stupidest time in history. Hopefully just for now as Doomberg has reminded me in comments there.
Cutting down North American trees, turning them into pellets, shipping them overseas, burning them for electricity, and then claiming that all the cutting, forming, shipping, and burning are somehow in the service of reducing CO2 emissions has always struck me as madness. Krugman got at least one thing right.
In the classic film “Back to the Future” we were sold on hoverboards and flying cars. Yet in 2024 we are still burning trees for energy. Not the quantum leap for which civilization had hoped.
You can use all kinds of low carbon or zero carbon energy sources for electricity & heat. Nuclear, hydro or NG. The one thing you can't do with those plentiful energy sources is you can't directly produce low emissions liquid fuels. Key fact: typical liquid fuels are >10x the cost per unit energy of electricity fuels coal, nuclear & gas. So the economics of focusing biomass on liquid fuel production is overwhelming. Biomass to replace coal or gas is just plain stupid. A total waste of biomass. The simple fact is fuels for mobile applications and for remote energy supplies are by far and away most practical as liquid fuels. But every practical liquid fuel contains carbon.
So if you REALLY want low carbon, then you must consider biomass is a treasure as a supply of liquid fuel carbon. Why not use biomass to produce a liquid fuel fully utilizing all the biocarbon captured from the atmosphere? The whole idea is to use the ability of plants to convert CO2 to usable carbon. They are good at that. That's DAC (Direct Air Capture) at its finest. Plants have been doing DAC for the past billion years. But plants are terrible at solar energy conversion, 0.1-1% efficient vs solar panels at 20% efficient. So the rational objective is 100% conversion of biocarbon to liquid fuel carbon not wasting it stupidly as an energy source for electricity generation or alcohol fermentation. That's just crazy. Biomass carbon can be directly converted to methanol with 100% carbon efficiency with added nuclear hydrogen.
So the common sense thing to do with biomass waste is to convert it directly to liquid fuels for transportation, remote power generation, off-grid homes, building heat where NG isn't available. Also can be used as chemical industry feedstock. That's the efficient use of biomass carbon.
Best way to make liquid fuel from biomass is convert it to methanol, a distillation process. Ethanol is a fermentation process with a very low carbon efficiency. Methanol has been made from biomass for hundreds of years, that's why they used to call it Wood Alcohol. Methanol is easy to transport, spills are benign, burns more efficiently than diesel in high compression engines, more efficiently than NG in gas turbines. Excellent for cooking fuel, heating fuel and chemical industry feedstock. Can be converted directly into DME which is the best fuel for diesel engines.
We have all these destructive wildfires burning. Western US forests, for instance, are 30% overstocked, which also causes insect infestations. 1992-2001 wildfires in Oregon alone, released 65M tonnes of CO2 = 740M barrels of crude oil. If converted to methanol, the annual biomass consumed by wildfires worldwide, would be sufficient to supply all the World's annual transportation fuel. Instead of having to breath particulates from wildfires, you can harvest forest overgrowth, cut firebreaks and directly convert that biomass into methanol with tractor-trailer sized methanol plants. One dry ton of biomass produces 166 gals of methanol.
Color us skeptical on converting biomass to methanol. We "get" the abundance and the conversion rates/technology.
It's just not obvious to us that its scalable (we consume ~20mm bpd just in the U.S.) at a level that would make a difference. Or, what the energy requirements to make it, and market cost, are by comparison to current fuels.
You are missing the key point. Many countries are burning biomass in powerplants displacing coal. Whereas instead, if they converted it to methanol, they would be displacing gasoline, diesel, HFO & MGO which have ~10X the energy cost of coal. Which makes more sense to you?
Who said anything about "scalable" to 20mbpd? It could certainly displace well over the 10% corn ethanol used stupidly in gasoline. It could produce 8X the methanol for the same amount of biomass input.
For the long term, methanol/DME are really the only viable replacement fuels for oil products. That's the conclusion of the Nobel prize winning chemist, George Olah, who wrote a book on the subject: Beyond Oil & Gas: The Methanol Economy. You can make methanol/DME in unlimited quantities using any carbonaceous feedstock: stranded gas, flare gas, coal, biomass, waste, flue gas (i.e. cement plant), volcanic CO2 or seawater CO2 plus nuclear hydrogen. Nuclear, of course will have to be the next energy source, but to supply portable liquid fuels for remote applications and mobile equipment, methanol/DME are the obvious replacements for Oil products. Except Jet fuel, which can be made synthetically from methanol.
In the case of wildfire prevention, that has its own benefits beyond that of the methanol production. Methanol is just probably the most cost effective use for the biomass harvested, which can be produced locally with mobile production plants @ an estimated cost of $1.90/gal, displacing gasoline/diesel amount equivalent in value to ~$4/gal. Beats the hell out of displacing Coal @ $100/ton, equivalent to ~$0.40/gal.
And we haven't even touched on a massive problem with burning biomass as fuel for electricity generation - what to do with all the ash left behind. Biomass can have up to 50% of its mass as incombustible minerals (ash), which MUST be disposed of. So not only is the transportation wasteful from a CO2 perspective, they are also transporting material that has next to no net benefit or use, which is a completely wasted cost from time and money. At least with burning coal, most of the ash has been removed ages ago due to geological processes.
Great piece, thanks. So burning wood produces more CO2 emissions than coal, and shipping wood from BC in Canada to the UK burns a million gallons of diesel, and it's unprofitable without subsidies, but not to worry - carbon credits for uncounted biomass emissions can be sold to other CO2 emitters.
Further, irrefutable, proof that the global warming/climate change agenda has never been about policies that are environmentally sound, but rather about control and profit. I get a lot of grief when I point out the difference between environMENTALism, (oddly, a term I coined over a decade ago) and conservation, or stewardship.
I grew up in northern California. To some, the Mecca of the environmental movement, but somewhere around halfway through high school I noticed policy rarely, if ever, matched reality. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of California's water supply, especially for southern California, a natural desert, relies in snowmelt, runoff from the Sierra Nevada mountains. Much of that was used in the San Joaquin Valley, the same real estate that made California a giant in the agricultural field which was directly responsible for the economic juggernaut California used to be, but now is threatened daily by those self proclaimed environmentalists that care more for a bait fish than the land and population they deludedly state benefit from their policies. The eradication of dams that could be used in hydroelectric power generation, provides a boon to fish, game, agriculture, and more In February of 2019 an estimate of 18 trillion gallons of rainwater alone, was allowed to simply runoff into the Pacific. At the same time, we heard ad nauseam about 𝑢𝑛𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑒𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑑 drought. California's weather, sorry for the truth, but climate 𝐈𝐒 weather, more specifically, the records of accumulated weather patterns over time, runs in cycles Even I noticed this in my meager 16 years on the planet. From the time I was around 5 - 12 years of age, we experienced a 𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑑 𝑏𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 drought. Car washing was verboten except for even and odd days, depending on the last digit on your license plate. The same held true for lawn watering, dependent on the last digit of your street address. Homeowners were advised to place bricks in their toilet tanks for displacement. Reservoir levels dropped, so much so that Dairies that could afford it, drilled wells to keep their cattle ponds replenished. As is the way in most agricultural communities, those less fortunate were were teamed up with those that could afford the wells and dairy herds grew in size just to keep them hydrated. El Niño events were welcomed, even if they brought costly flooding and road washouts. They meant plenty of water for everyone and abundant snowfall to the mountains that assured water would no longer be in short supply, at least for a time.
then the environMENTAL movement secured the MENTAL part of their moniker. Before, juvenile delinquents were often diverted to the CCC, or California Conservation (there's that mean word again) Corps. Kids from 12 - 16 were put to work in State and Federal forests to cut firebreaks, clear deadfalls and brush. All abundant fuel sources for fires that were as much of California life as earthquakes, mudslides and the Pacific Ocean. But some 𝑑𝑜𝑔𝑜𝑜𝑑𝑒𝑟 or five in the State Legislature decided that using budding young criminals learning useful skills and providing a highly useful service was akin to slavery or something. So instead of learning vehicle maintenance, small engine repair, EMT type medical training, and forest management, these kids were locked into criminal college and learned how to be better crooks, rather than useful members of society. Sure, there were drawbacks and a few isolated abuses in the CCC, but compared to the benefits and lack of recidivism CCC graduates achieved, keeping them locked up with career criminals was deemed somehow kinder and safer than teaching them personal responsibility and how to navigate both in reality ad metaphorically. Now a spark can burn down half the state and the number of experienced, woodland firefighters has dwindled domestically and California constantly has to rely on out of state smoke jumpers and firefighters, because they made teaching a new generation illegal.
Don't get me started on what State regulations have done to PG&E. Somehow it's supposedly better to carry and increasing load of electricity on above ground, outdated, and under capable transmission lines rather than allowing them to upgrade and or bury transmission lines reducing fire risk by orders of magnitude because somehow the current(sorry, unintentional) situation is somehow more environmentally friendly.
Seriously, I could go one for another 10,000+ words, but I'll bail here. If there's a right way to do things, look to what California is doing and do the opposite. If you want some free entertainment and watch an environMENTAList screw themselves into the ground while their head spins the opposite direction, explain to them the difference between environmentalism and conservation. The MENTAL part is easy and self explanatory. Conservation OTOH has its roots in conserve - To protect from loss or harm; preserve. and conservatism, conservative. Watching their heads pop is entertaining if a bit juvenile.
I am bothered by the fact that UK feels the need to define wood pellets as renewables.
Irate is how we describe our reaction….
Yup, just as stupid as building solar farms and blocking the sun.
Interesting article from last month on BC including how shutting down nuclear in Japan led to more biomass imports..
"However, Ralston told reporters Wednesday (April 24) that “forests are not being turned into pellets,” adding that the source material for making pellets is sawmills, shavings, chips and forest residues.
He said all of those materials, which are taken to the Drax mills and made into pellets, would otherwise be burned in slash piles that “releases a lot of carbon and it wastes a lot of valuable forest products.”"
https://www.thenorthernview.com/news/demand-for-wood-pellets-fuelling-bc-forest-loss-report-claims-7349842
I don't know if I'm the only forest person here.. but here the story as EnvironMental suggests for US landowners in the SE is that they can get good prices for biomass left over from harvesting sawtimber.
I'm not a fan of the policies in Europe but we are not "clearcutting native forests" for chips. You can't always believe what ENGO's claim (I think you all know this.)
I've written about the SE and Enviva here (and a hit piece by CNN) It is very important to understand that Enviva’s pellets are made from low-value wood that is a byproduct of a traditional timber harvest. Enviva creates an additional market for private forest landowners to sell their low-value wood, such as “thinnings,” limbs, tops, or low-grade trees (deceased, crooked) that would otherwise go unused, and an incentive to keep their land as forests. We’re talking about material that is a relatively small source of revenue for a landowner, so it’s not driving their decision to harvest in the first place.
https://forestpolicypub.com/2021/08/26/the-other-side-of-the-story-cnn-story-on-enviva-and-helicopter-journalism/
Here are some posts about the West
https://forestpolicypub.com/2021/12/13/departisanizing-issues-biomass-utilization-and-fuel-treatments/
https://forestpolicypub.com/2022/04/25/yale-forest-forum-western-fuel-treatment-residues-bioenergy-webinars-of-interest/
Here's an interview with Brad Worsley who talks about restricting RE PTC for biomass facilities engaged in forest restoration activities. I don't know what happened with this. Some D politicians seem to wave away any forest biomass based on some ENGOs not liking it (in terms of exports from the SE US).
https://forestpolicypub.com/2021/07/09/support-renewable-energy-from-forest-restoration-guest-post-by-brad-worsley/
Here's one I wrote about BC
https://forestpolicypub.com/2019/04/15/slash-piles-burned-in-the-air-or-for-bioenergy-example-from-british-columbia/
The last article I saw from an ENGO was very careful to say "uses material from old growth forests" in Canada.. but biomass is a use for leftover material from the site. It kind of implies that the forests were cut to produce biomass, but that's not the case.
Finally, people already use a great deal of wood for heat.. depending on where you live this may be obvious or not, and when electricity is intermittent and it's cold, people are more interested in heating with wood. So if more renewables lead to more intermittency, we may have more primary wood use. If the electricity goes out, you can heat your house, cook and heat water for washing on a woodstove.
I spoke to BECCS for an article earlier this year. I was told that Enviva only account for ~15% of the groups fibre supplies. Not exactly the end of the world for Drax since other suppliers will look to fill the gap.
I was suspicious with a Krugman quote but could not stop grinning as I read this. I had wondered reading Doomberg's Drax article how much of our Canadian wood was being used. Thanks for clearing that up. The idea that wood from BC travels to the UK and is declared carbon free to be used by a biomass company that would be bankrupt without direct government subsidies is ridiculous. Compounded by the CCS plans to make Drax carbon negative and likely eligible for more largess. I am constantly amazed by these examples of the fact that we live in the stupidest time in history. Hopefully just for now as Doomberg has reminded me in comments there.
Cutting down North American trees, turning them into pellets, shipping them overseas, burning them for electricity, and then claiming that all the cutting, forming, shipping, and burning are somehow in the service of reducing CO2 emissions has always struck me as madness. Krugman got at least one thing right.
This makes even less than raising corn for low grade fuel
Yup.
In the classic film “Back to the Future” we were sold on hoverboards and flying cars. Yet in 2024 we are still burning trees for energy. Not the quantum leap for which civilization had hoped.
I’m excited to see how the story continues!
Hey, it was a movie.... ;)
You can use all kinds of low carbon or zero carbon energy sources for electricity & heat. Nuclear, hydro or NG. The one thing you can't do with those plentiful energy sources is you can't directly produce low emissions liquid fuels. Key fact: typical liquid fuels are >10x the cost per unit energy of electricity fuels coal, nuclear & gas. So the economics of focusing biomass on liquid fuel production is overwhelming. Biomass to replace coal or gas is just plain stupid. A total waste of biomass. The simple fact is fuels for mobile applications and for remote energy supplies are by far and away most practical as liquid fuels. But every practical liquid fuel contains carbon.
So if you REALLY want low carbon, then you must consider biomass is a treasure as a supply of liquid fuel carbon. Why not use biomass to produce a liquid fuel fully utilizing all the biocarbon captured from the atmosphere? The whole idea is to use the ability of plants to convert CO2 to usable carbon. They are good at that. That's DAC (Direct Air Capture) at its finest. Plants have been doing DAC for the past billion years. But plants are terrible at solar energy conversion, 0.1-1% efficient vs solar panels at 20% efficient. So the rational objective is 100% conversion of biocarbon to liquid fuel carbon not wasting it stupidly as an energy source for electricity generation or alcohol fermentation. That's just crazy. Biomass carbon can be directly converted to methanol with 100% carbon efficiency with added nuclear hydrogen.
So the common sense thing to do with biomass waste is to convert it directly to liquid fuels for transportation, remote power generation, off-grid homes, building heat where NG isn't available. Also can be used as chemical industry feedstock. That's the efficient use of biomass carbon.
Best way to make liquid fuel from biomass is convert it to methanol, a distillation process. Ethanol is a fermentation process with a very low carbon efficiency. Methanol has been made from biomass for hundreds of years, that's why they used to call it Wood Alcohol. Methanol is easy to transport, spills are benign, burns more efficiently than diesel in high compression engines, more efficiently than NG in gas turbines. Excellent for cooking fuel, heating fuel and chemical industry feedstock. Can be converted directly into DME which is the best fuel for diesel engines.
We have all these destructive wildfires burning. Western US forests, for instance, are 30% overstocked, which also causes insect infestations. 1992-2001 wildfires in Oregon alone, released 65M tonnes of CO2 = 740M barrels of crude oil. If converted to methanol, the annual biomass consumed by wildfires worldwide, would be sufficient to supply all the World's annual transportation fuel. Instead of having to breath particulates from wildfires, you can harvest forest overgrowth, cut firebreaks and directly convert that biomass into methanol with tractor-trailer sized methanol plants. One dry ton of biomass produces 166 gals of methanol.
Color us skeptical on converting biomass to methanol. We "get" the abundance and the conversion rates/technology.
It's just not obvious to us that its scalable (we consume ~20mm bpd just in the U.S.) at a level that would make a difference. Or, what the energy requirements to make it, and market cost, are by comparison to current fuels.
You are missing the key point. Many countries are burning biomass in powerplants displacing coal. Whereas instead, if they converted it to methanol, they would be displacing gasoline, diesel, HFO & MGO which have ~10X the energy cost of coal. Which makes more sense to you?
Who said anything about "scalable" to 20mbpd? It could certainly displace well over the 10% corn ethanol used stupidly in gasoline. It could produce 8X the methanol for the same amount of biomass input.
For the long term, methanol/DME are really the only viable replacement fuels for oil products. That's the conclusion of the Nobel prize winning chemist, George Olah, who wrote a book on the subject: Beyond Oil & Gas: The Methanol Economy. You can make methanol/DME in unlimited quantities using any carbonaceous feedstock: stranded gas, flare gas, coal, biomass, waste, flue gas (i.e. cement plant), volcanic CO2 or seawater CO2 plus nuclear hydrogen. Nuclear, of course will have to be the next energy source, but to supply portable liquid fuels for remote applications and mobile equipment, methanol/DME are the obvious replacements for Oil products. Except Jet fuel, which can be made synthetically from methanol.
In the case of wildfire prevention, that has its own benefits beyond that of the methanol production. Methanol is just probably the most cost effective use for the biomass harvested, which can be produced locally with mobile production plants @ an estimated cost of $1.90/gal, displacing gasoline/diesel amount equivalent in value to ~$4/gal. Beats the hell out of displacing Coal @ $100/ton, equivalent to ~$0.40/gal.
And we haven't even touched on a massive problem with burning biomass as fuel for electricity generation - what to do with all the ash left behind. Biomass can have up to 50% of its mass as incombustible minerals (ash), which MUST be disposed of. So not only is the transportation wasteful from a CO2 perspective, they are also transporting material that has next to no net benefit or use, which is a completely wasted cost from time and money. At least with burning coal, most of the ash has been removed ages ago due to geological processes.
Insanity doesn't seem to cut it.
There is a market for some coal-ash waste, used to make gypsum board. Some other uses.
But historically, large coal-fired power plants had on site landfills or wet ash ponds on site at the plant.
On the plus side, North Yorkshire permanently smells like a campfire.
"Gooooooooood, Morning Selby!
I love the smell of dioxin in the morning!"
Great piece, thanks. So burning wood produces more CO2 emissions than coal, and shipping wood from BC in Canada to the UK burns a million gallons of diesel, and it's unprofitable without subsidies, but not to worry - carbon credits for uncounted biomass emissions can be sold to other CO2 emitters.
Pretty much.
Thanks for the compliment.
Hard to follow up with anything, great read!
We'll do our best. Likely Wed'ish next week.
Further, irrefutable, proof that the global warming/climate change agenda has never been about policies that are environmentally sound, but rather about control and profit. I get a lot of grief when I point out the difference between environMENTALism, (oddly, a term I coined over a decade ago) and conservation, or stewardship.
I grew up in northern California. To some, the Mecca of the environmental movement, but somewhere around halfway through high school I noticed policy rarely, if ever, matched reality. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of California's water supply, especially for southern California, a natural desert, relies in snowmelt, runoff from the Sierra Nevada mountains. Much of that was used in the San Joaquin Valley, the same real estate that made California a giant in the agricultural field which was directly responsible for the economic juggernaut California used to be, but now is threatened daily by those self proclaimed environmentalists that care more for a bait fish than the land and population they deludedly state benefit from their policies. The eradication of dams that could be used in hydroelectric power generation, provides a boon to fish, game, agriculture, and more In February of 2019 an estimate of 18 trillion gallons of rainwater alone, was allowed to simply runoff into the Pacific. At the same time, we heard ad nauseam about 𝑢𝑛𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑒𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑑 drought. California's weather, sorry for the truth, but climate 𝐈𝐒 weather, more specifically, the records of accumulated weather patterns over time, runs in cycles Even I noticed this in my meager 16 years on the planet. From the time I was around 5 - 12 years of age, we experienced a 𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑑 𝑏𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 drought. Car washing was verboten except for even and odd days, depending on the last digit on your license plate. The same held true for lawn watering, dependent on the last digit of your street address. Homeowners were advised to place bricks in their toilet tanks for displacement. Reservoir levels dropped, so much so that Dairies that could afford it, drilled wells to keep their cattle ponds replenished. As is the way in most agricultural communities, those less fortunate were were teamed up with those that could afford the wells and dairy herds grew in size just to keep them hydrated. El Niño events were welcomed, even if they brought costly flooding and road washouts. They meant plenty of water for everyone and abundant snowfall to the mountains that assured water would no longer be in short supply, at least for a time.
then the environMENTAL movement secured the MENTAL part of their moniker. Before, juvenile delinquents were often diverted to the CCC, or California Conservation (there's that mean word again) Corps. Kids from 12 - 16 were put to work in State and Federal forests to cut firebreaks, clear deadfalls and brush. All abundant fuel sources for fires that were as much of California life as earthquakes, mudslides and the Pacific Ocean. But some 𝑑𝑜𝑔𝑜𝑜𝑑𝑒𝑟 or five in the State Legislature decided that using budding young criminals learning useful skills and providing a highly useful service was akin to slavery or something. So instead of learning vehicle maintenance, small engine repair, EMT type medical training, and forest management, these kids were locked into criminal college and learned how to be better crooks, rather than useful members of society. Sure, there were drawbacks and a few isolated abuses in the CCC, but compared to the benefits and lack of recidivism CCC graduates achieved, keeping them locked up with career criminals was deemed somehow kinder and safer than teaching them personal responsibility and how to navigate both in reality ad metaphorically. Now a spark can burn down half the state and the number of experienced, woodland firefighters has dwindled domestically and California constantly has to rely on out of state smoke jumpers and firefighters, because they made teaching a new generation illegal.
Don't get me started on what State regulations have done to PG&E. Somehow it's supposedly better to carry and increasing load of electricity on above ground, outdated, and under capable transmission lines rather than allowing them to upgrade and or bury transmission lines reducing fire risk by orders of magnitude because somehow the current(sorry, unintentional) situation is somehow more environmentally friendly.
Seriously, I could go one for another 10,000+ words, but I'll bail here. If there's a right way to do things, look to what California is doing and do the opposite. If you want some free entertainment and watch an environMENTAList screw themselves into the ground while their head spins the opposite direction, explain to them the difference between environmentalism and conservation. The MENTAL part is easy and self explanatory. Conservation OTOH has its roots in conserve - To protect from loss or harm; preserve. and conservatism, conservative. Watching their heads pop is entertaining if a bit juvenile.
"...that care more for a bait fish than the land and population they deludedly state benefit from their policies". You said it, Brother.
Look to CA in the U.S., and look to Germany in Europe. 'Nuff said.
Do not hesitate to go on for 10,000+ words. That's what we're here for!
Why don’t they just nuke the world and get it over with
They're afraid of nuclear everything? Beats us.