{"id":55283,"date":"2020-10-11T12:41:08","date_gmt":"2020-10-11T17:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55283"},"modified":"2020-10-11T12:41:08","modified_gmt":"2020-10-11T17:41:08","slug":"b-c-gives-pacific-bioenergy-green-light-to-log-rare-inland-rainforest-for-wood-pellets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55283","title":{"rendered":"B.C. gives Pacific BioEnergy green light to log rare inland rainforest for wood pellets"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Conservation North director and ecologist Michelle Connolly sits in front of B.C.’s rare inland rainforest, which it set to be logged for pellets this winter. Photo: Sean O\u2019Rourke<\/div>\n
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NEWS<\/div>\n

B.C. gives Pacific BioEnergy green light to log rare inland rainforest for wood pellets<\/a><\/h3>\n
Prince George plant will grind ancient cedar and hemlock into pellets to be burned for fuel overseas, destroying forest that\u2019s home to endangered caribou and vast stores of carbon.<\/div>\n
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Sean O\u2019Rourke was hiking in B.C.\u2019s\u00a0globally rare inland rainforest<\/a>\u00a0this spring when pink flagging tape indicating a planned cutblock caught his eye. Finding flagging tape is nothing new, but when he looked closer, he realized the tape had the name of a nearby pellet company on it \u2014 Pacific BioEnergy.<\/p>\n

The company operates a plant in Prince George where it turns waste wood products \u2014 sawdust from mills, tree bark, wood shavings and clippings \u2014 into pellets to be burned to produce heat or electricity, replacing coal and fossil fuels. More than 90 per cent of Canadian wood pellets are shipped overseas to Europe and Asia,\u00a0according to the Wood Pellet Association of Canada<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But the ancient cedars and hemlocks in the rainforest in Lheidli T\u2019enneh First Nation territory, about 60 kilometres east of Prince George, are most certainly not waste wood.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Rourke, a field scout with\u00a0Conservation North<\/a>, a grassroots organization advocating for the protection of old-growth forests in northern B.C., took photos of the flagging tape to show his colleagues. He later combed through the publicly available harvest data to confirm the province had indeed issued permits to Pacific BioEnergy to log the old-growth forest.<\/p>\n

\"Pacific<\/p>\n

Flagging tape marked \u201cPBEC\u201d \u2014 Pacific BioEnergy Corporation \u2014 tipped off Conservation North field scout Sean O\u2019Rourke that the area was going to be logged for pellets. Photo: Conservation North<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"Conservation<\/p>\n

Sean O\u2019Rourke takes a photo of a Douglas fir tree destined to be turned into wood pellets. Photo: Conservation North<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conservation North director and ecologist Michelle Connolly sits in front of B.C.’s rare inland rainforest, which it set to be logged for pellets this winter. Photo: Sean O\u2019Rourke NEWS B.C. gives Pacific BioEnergy green light to log rare inland rainforest for wood pellets Prince George plant will grind ancient cedar and hemlock into pellets to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65,94,4553,27289,21042],"class_list":["post-55283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-bc","tag-british-columbia","tag-forests","tag-matt-simmons","tag-the-narwhal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55283"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55284,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55283\/revisions\/55284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}