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Home-Grown Fuel

 

Roseburg Forest Products, Weed, site of state-of-the-art cogeneration plant

It was great news to many people, including the twenty-one Fire Safe Councils throughout Siskiyou County, that Roseburg Forest Products moved forward with upgrading their electrical co-generation facility to a cutting-edge operation in Weed.

We of Able Tree Services and the Fire Safe Council of Siskiyou County wholeheartedly endorse this type of project because it simply makes good sense, from not only an economic standpoint but also a fire safe perspective. We need to offer incentives to our citizens, land managers, and businesses to help transform the lands they manage to properties that are cost-effective, healthier, and less fire-prone. We also need to grow living wage jobs and businesses in Siskiyou County, not export them! We need to utilize wood fiber that is growing to overstocked proportions, manage our forests well, and not rely on fossil fuels as much but instead, on renewable energy like wood energy.

With our present energy crisis deepening to alarming depths, NOW is the time to capitalize on alternative energy use so we can become more energy independent!

Presently, Pacific Power electrical generation is fired 38% by coal and 33% by natural gas. The combined emissions of these finite fossil fuels contribute to not only significant air pollution but also global warming. Additionally, large-scale hydroelectric projects provide Pacific Power with 24% of their energy resources, with the future chances of bigger hydro-dam building damned by voters in nearly every western state. Amazingly, biomass utilization is less than one percent of Pac Power’s energy production. This same amazing lack of renewable energy utilization is also evident with PG&E, Southern California Edison, and virtually all major California metro area energy producers, including the City of Redding, hydro power being excepted.

Biomass is renewable, and Siskiyou County’s forests are producing it in abundance, at an average rate of more than four times the reduction (harvest) rate. We need to collectively realize that biomass utilization is a positive solution to our economic downturn and plan strategically in Siskiyou County for its implementation. Using biomass as a sustainable energy source could be a critical key to unlocking the shackles of Siskiyou County’s economic development! Additionally, performing vegetative fuel reduction (biomass) around our communities means greater fire safety, which is essential to our very survival. It just make good sense, not to mention dollars, that we need more co-generation plants like Roseburg’s established throughout the county, ideally in every community. What a big economic boost this could be for a struggling, subsistence-starved area like ours!

Please, we urge our friends, neighbors, business associates, and elected officials to eagerly endorse expediting biomass projects throughout Siskiyou County for our good and that of our future generations.

We need to utilize our biomass NOW or watch it burn in large wildfires. Examples would be those that burned last summer and autumn in Siskiyou County, and also the devastating Boles burn in Weed that destroyed over 2,000 structures in 2014. Wildfires return, some catastrophically, belching out quite possibly weeks, if not many months, worth of associated smokey, choking, health-hampering air quality, that demand convoys of thousands of fire vehicles, while producing great grave threats to the lives of our brave firefighters. Let’s change this anathema now!!