by The Oregonian Editorial Board Saturday May 02, 2009 http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2009/05/rural_oregon_has_energy_to_bur.html
More than 1,000 people from 25 countries gathered in Portland last week for a conference on the vast promise of crop residues, wood waste and other sources of biomass to help power a greener, cooler, safer world.
At roughly the same time the world's biomass experts were in town, the Democratic leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives released an energy bill that explicitly disregards the largest available source of biomass in Oregon: federal forests.
That makes no sense as a matter of energy policy, economics or environmental stewardship. Oregon has hundreds of thousands of acres of federal forests that are overgrown, infested with insects and disease and vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires. It has rural communities struggling with 17 percent unemployment. It has everything it needs -- and every economic motivation -- to become a center for biomass energy.
But that won't happen, can't happen, if Congress approves an energy bill that sets out incentives and an ambitious goal -- requiring that 25 percent of the nation's energy come from renewable sources by 2025 -- and then expressly discounts biomass from the nation's federal forests.
Congressman Greg Walden, a Hood River Republican who represents much of rural Oregon, has a reasonable question: "What's the science behind this decision to say biomass from federal lands is not a renewable energy source?"
Walden said he can't get an answer, not from Democratic leaders, not from former Vice President Al Gore, who testified on the bill last week, and not from the leaders of national environmental groups who helped draft the energy legislation. . .
It's all here in rural Oregon, the woody biomass, the motivation and the unemployed work force. Congress must not let all that good energy go to waste.
