TO THE EDITOR:
I take exception to the position taken by the Daily Tar Heel editorial (“Don’t smoke the trees,” April 9).
Forestry experts now tell us that a century of suppressing fires as a policy to preserve the forests has created conflagrations out West. Foresters now say timber-stand thinning must be used to maintain the health and yield of our forests and thus the harvesting of live trees becomes a tool in forest management.
In fact, thinning increases the value of the forest and supports restoration. Foresters should have the freedom to practice their profession without outside political interference that the DTH implies is necessary.
The Obama administration recently announced the Biomass Crop Assistance Program to help the country adopt a sustainable wood energy policy. N.C. forests were estimated to be able to sustainably produce 6 million to 13 million tons of wood per year.
Duke professor Daniel D. Richter Jr., wrote an article last year, where he used North Carolina as an example for Advanced Wood Combustion (AWC). Richter stated if North Carolina were to install one community scale AWC project (at 75 hp, 0.75 MW thermal) per year in each of the 100 counties over a five-year construction period, that the state could recognize fuel savings of $100 million to $180 million per year and emissions of fossil CO2 could decrease by 0.75 million to 1 million tons per year.
Ritchter also writes that he thinks that such a program would require approximately 20 percent of an estimate of the state’s energy-wood supply. Duke Power is taking the first step to make that prediction a reality and the editorial represents an unjustified attack on its commendable efforts toward renewable energy.
Jeremy Todd Browner
Chapel Hill
