From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
"I should like to have that written over the portals of every church, every school, and every courthouse, and, may I say, of every legislative body in the United States. I should like to have every court begin, 'I beseech ye … think that we may be mistaken.'"
“In the beginning and at the ending let us be content with the Guess’’
- U.S. Appeals Court Judge Learned Hand (1872-1961), legendary federal appeals court judge and philosopher of the law.
I haven’t liked a plan to build a electricity-generating plant in Springfield, Mass., that would burn wood chips. I have feared that it would lead to cutting down a lot of trees, which absorb carbon dioxide. Maybe I was wrong.
The Palmer Renewable Energy Co., which would build the plant, has fired back at its critics. It says that the wood wouldn’t come from cutting down a lot of trees but from the limbs trimmed to protect the power lines, much of which in New England are run through woodlands to avoid residential and commercial areas. But would that provide enough fuel for the plant?
The company notes that the linemen grind these limbs into wood chips that they spray into the woods, where they decompose, releasing the greenhouse-gas methane. The company asserts that methane is “25 times more destructive to our atmosphere than carbon dioxide.’’
Anyway, burning wood chips would be more environmentally sound than generating electricity with fossil fuels, which, unlike wood, has to be bought from outside New England.
I’m sure that the debate over the plant will grind on for a while but the company makes a plausible argument.
