• mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I would love to see a generation of treefarmers.

    Hear me out: these forests (especially in north america) need a tremendous amount of work - clearing dry deadfall, constructing new larger firebreaks, and coppicing to prevent new fires from spreading quickly. Why not use that work to create new biomass - shift every coal plant in the US and Canada to biomass wood pellets created by this work.

    It’s gotta be managed or it’s gonna burn, as we’ve seen throughout the US and Canada’s horrific fires of the last decade. If it’s going to burn uncontrolled, it’s a CO2 disaster (much less, the economic, wildlfife and human tragedies) - but if managed, we can divide every forest up into work districts, and a new WPA / Green New Deal will employ thousands to provide the effort. The savings in insurance alone seem to justify this.

    Imagine how much usable biomass dry forests could contribute, making them safer and providing CO2 consumption without cutting down the trees that take decades to grow. And the people paying less to insure against something we know is only going to get worse if we leave it.