Tasmania

Here’s a thoughtful article written by my son who is working on a farm in Tasmania. Normally he is a historical tour guide in Europe. He’s not part of any organization but just decided to take action for sake of his generation’s future. It is amazing what he and his friends are up to. — Stephen

By Derek Leahy

FRANKLIN, TASMANIA

I sat down in a café in Franklin, Tasmania the other day trying to sort out all that has transpired these past few weeks. You see, May 5^thcould very well become a massive day of action. A lot of people from all over the world want to make their voices heard the week of May 5^th. International Stop the Tar Sands Day’s circle of friends just got bigger.

Anyway, I sat down in an practically empty café (Franklin is a pretty small town), opened up my journal to a blank page and took out a pencil. With the pencil I drew four separate thought bubbles on the page for four different campaigns or movements or whatever you want to call them.

The first was for 350.org’s Climate Impacts Day, which will take place the exact same day as ISTSDay; May 5^th. The second thought bubble was for the Occupy Movement because members of Occupy in Canada and the UK have stepped up recently to help us out.

The last two bubbles were for International Stop the Tar Sands Day and for Ecocide. I threw in Ecocide because of an email I had received earlier in the day (thank you Kirstie for the inspiration!). We have not talked to these guys about working together on May 5th. Yet.

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Burning trees for energy produces 1.5 times as much carbon as coal – study shows

By Stephen Leahy*

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 24 ’09 (Tierramérica)

Millions of trees, especially from the developing countries of the South, are being shipped to Europe and burned in giant furnaces to meet “green energy” requirements that are supposed to combat climate change.

In the last two months alone, energy companies in Britain have announced the construction of at least six new biomass power generation plants to produce 1,200 megawatts of energy, primarily from burning woodchips.

At least another 1,200 megawatts of wood-fired energy plants, including the world’s largest, in Port Talbot, Wales, are already under construction.

Those energy plants will burn 20 to 30 million tonnes of wood annually, nearly all imported from other regions and equivalent to at least one million hectares of forest.

“Europe is going to cook the world’s tropical forests to fight climate change; it’s crazy,” Simone Lovera, of the non-governmental Global Forest Coalition, which has a southern office in Asunción, Paraguay, told Tierramérica.

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Europe has committed to reducing its carbon emissions 20 percent by 2020 in an effort to fight climate change. Biofuels and biomass energy will have key roles in achieving those goals, experts say.

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