Editor, The Times:
Kudos to councillors Shelley Sim and Gord Heisterman for objecting to the purchase of carbon offsets on the part of Clearwater.
If something looks like a scam, it probably is a scam. It's nice to see that when some politicians feel uneasy about a program, even though they may not have all of the details, they exercise their duty to back off.
There are many questions to be asked about carbon credits but, at the core of the matter is the belief that some process may be absorbing enough carbon from the atmosphere to offset the excess in carbon emissions from another process. In this case, the former has to do with the heating of greenhouses using biomass and the second with the excess production of carbon through heating the Dutch Lake School.
The burning of biomass is promoted as a way of obtaining energy, under the label “carbon neutral”. This idea, handed down from the highest levels and enthusiastically embraced in Europe has a lot of people fooled. In B.C., as elsewhere, it serves the corporate interest but does nothing to alleviate climate change. Instead, it is a very powerful engine for the addition of carbon to the atmosphere. How could we embrace such a rotten idea without due attention? It's being imposed.
Consider time. Let's compare the time it takes a tree to absorb carbon with the time it takes to release it back to the atmosphere when burned. A tree may grow for a hundred years to the point where it is harvested for burning. It's of no importance whether it dies from a beetle epidemic or from the blade of a chainsaw. In a biomass plant, this tree may be burned in a matter of hours. Let's assume 10 hours, to make for easy arithmetic. So, it takes 100 years (876,000 hours) to absorb the carbon that is released in 10 hours. Right?
To offset the rate of carbon release, as described, we'd have to have a new growing forest of 87,600 trees to absorb the carbon in order to wear the label “carbon neutral”. At the heart of the matter, it's as simple as that.
The burning of biomass can't generate carbon credits but it does generate a tidy, corporate cash flow highjacked from local taxpayers. What's that, if not a scam?
David Simms
Clearwater, BC