The Greens have slammed a forest bioenergy proposal for the North Coast labelling it ‘madness’ and ‘dead koala power’.
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Recently, the NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI), released a report stating that forests and sawmills on the North Coast could power more than 200,000 local homes per year.
NSW Greens Forests spokesperson, Dawn Walker said the idea of using forests on the North Coast for electricity generation could effectively be called ‘dead koala power’.
“Koala populations are plummeting across NSW and rather than looking at serious ways to protect our precious koalas, like supporting the Great Koala National Park plan, we see outrageous proposals like this that will intensify logging in vital koala habitat across the NSW North Coast,” Ms Walker said.
“Using forests to produce energy is madness when we know it takes decades for new trees to absorb carbon, which is released when we burn timber from forests for energy.
“What the NSW Department of Primary Industry describe as ‘forestry residue’ in this proposal is actually smaller trees that would otherwise be retained after logging operations. Put simply, this bioenergy proposal is nothing more than a naked attempt to increase the intensity of logging operations in our precious North Coast forests and obliterate more koala habitat.
Ms Walker called on the government to immediately rule-out the proposal which she said “essentially equates to ‘dead koala power’”.
“The people of the North Coast want clean, renewable energy from wind and solar, not convoys of log-trucks lining up with trees from some of the most biodiverse forests in the world to feed into dirty polluting furnaces”.