Dan Leger, director of news content for The Chronicle Herald, published a column today about NewPage's plan to burn trees to produce power to sell to Nova Scotia Power.

What? Burning the forest creates ‘green’ energy?

CAN SOMEONE please explain how you can tear down millions of trees, burn them in a furnace and claim what comes out of it is "green energy"? Because that is what NewPage Port Hawkesbury and Nova Scotia Power Inc. want to do.

NewPage, with the province’s blessing, wants to strip millions of trees from the land, truck them to its plant and throw them in the fire. They’re calling it green power, something NSPI needs to meet renewable energy standards.

It’s biomass. Can something that sounds so nice really be bad? Anything "bio" is good, right? And it’s not scary nuclear, greasy oil or nasty old coal. When people think biomass, they think green.

And it probably is greenish when plants use the waste from their paper-making operations to generate electricity. But NewPage wants to go way beyond that.

NewPage proposes to harvest hundreds of thousands of tonnes of so-called "low-grade hardwood" every year to add to its plant waste. A related company will run the steam boilers and the generating plant, creating jobs in the woods and 60 megawatts of electricity to sell to NSPI.

Read the rest of Dan Leger's column (Chronicle Herald)