Opinions
Our forests must be kept intact
There is a tendency in the environmental community to see renewable fuels - solar, wind, tidal energy, small hydro - as a panacea for our climate-change problem. To reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent, it will be necessary to generate a substantial portion of our energy from solar and wind sources.
But renewables are not without their problems. ...If forest land in New Hampshire was converted to wind power, there is such a large release of carbon in the land-use change that the benefit from substituting wind power for fossil fuels is lost.
November 17, 2009
by Joel Harrington
in Monadnock Ledger-Transcript
There is a tendency in the environmental community to see renewable fuels - solar, wind, tidal energy, small hydro - as a panacea for our climate-change problem. To reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent, it will be necessary to generate a substantial portion of our energy from solar and wind sources.
But renewables are not without their problems.
One of the problems is that they take much larger amounts of land to generate the same amount of power as fossil and nuclear fuels.
About 57,500 acres of forest were converted to other uses between 1987 and 1997 in the... [continue via Web link]
Web link: http://www.ledgertranscript.com/
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New Hampshire
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Impact on Landscape
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