The Region of Piedmont has decided to produce 20% of its energy it needs from renewable sources. How does it want to do this? By the destruction of woodland. To produce energy, 2.2 million cubic metres of wood each year will be used, according to the mad regulations of the new regional law on forestry (L.R. 4/2009). A law in complete conflict with the arrangements for sustainability of the Resolutions approved by the Ministerial Conferences on the protection of the forests in Europe. The Attila/Bresso law got bipartisan approval (and how else could it have been approved?) from both the PDL and the PDminusL. In a few years, part of the woodland of Piedmont will disappear, both in private and public ownership. In fact, according to a WWF communication: “By means of the mechanism of the provisional associative management in Piedmont (L.R. 4/2009, art. 18), the cutting down of woods can now happen without giving direct communication to the owner. If the owner wants to preserve the wood, it’s up to him to chase the administrations that decide to cut it down and thus oppose that; if he does nothing he finds the wood cut down! The timber will be paid at the real market costs, but whoever then uses it as biomass will get a super-valuation “drugged” thanks to public money, as discussed above.”
The woods are a precious resource and they are ever rarer. The per capita amount in 1861, the year when Italy was born, has halved. The woods should be passed on to future generations. To destroy the woods to produce electrical energy is not economic, as well as being criminal. In fact, wood has a low “energy content”, equal to about a quarter of that for oil.
Why has the Region of Piedmont approved a law AGAINST private property, AGAINST the environment and AGAINST the economy? According to WWF: “The response is in a system of excessive incentives, that have no equal in other European Nations and that is not accompanied by an adequate corollary of limitations. What’s missing is the evaluation of the environmental costs of the activity, that should be on the contrary, binding in the decision-making processes. What they are getting ready to do is a massive economic speculation, with devastating environmental effects. The French, the Swiss and the Austrians, our neighbours along the Alps, even though they are using the woods all the time, are not dreaming of producing electrical current from forest bio-mass, but they are limiting themselves to intelligently exploiting the by-products of working the timber for heating. If we were to overpay, at the current price of timber for construction purposes, the timber that it is planned to burn in Piedmont in a year, we would get to the figure of 58 million euro. In the current “drugged”, market, to use that same amount of timber and produce energy, the Public Administration will spend a sum that is much higher, that no one has calculated (or made public) , but of which we can have a perception if we consider that the declarations made by the Region: in the last 5 years 300 million euro have been allocated to promote the use of renewable energy sources and by 2013, they are forecasting investments in the sector that will reach a billion euro. The figure refers to renewable sources in general, but considering that the Region wants to get 60% of the energy from forest biomass, it’s automatic that most of the investments will finish up in that sector. Just to cite an example, of a related item of expense, it is considered that for the forestry affairs in Piedmont, it is forecast that there will be 2,000 kilometres of NEW FOREST ROADS and the same number of kilometres need maintenance work. That is money coming from the citizens who are shelling out for a kWh of biomass about three times its real value and that is paying for public investment that is supporting the so-called timber supply chain by means of various channels and relevant organisms: FESR, FAS, Social Fund, Rural Development Plan (that finances the power lines for agriculture) forestry consortia, IPLA, UNCEM, mountain and forestry public authorities, etc..".
We are destroying ourselves in silence. We are a race that is undergoing extinction. Let anyone who still has a heart and a voice, write an email to the President of the Region of Piedmont, Mercedes Bresso: presidente@regione.piemonte.it.
PS. Download and distribute the WWF document: "Il grande inganno energetico da biomasse forestali della Regione Piemonte" {The great deception of the Region of Piedmont and its forestry biomass energy}