The Energy Boom You Haven't Heard About: Wood Pellets.

Marks Sears
CE #9
URL: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/12/141208-wood-pellet-energy-boom-driven-by-exports/

I read the article, "The Energy Boom You Haven't Heard About: Wood Pellets." In this article it talks about how the US is creating pellet mills & exporting these pellets, mostly to the UK, so that they can be burned and used for energy. The UK is contributes to more than half of our exports and the high demand has doubled our biomass exports in the last year. Mills are being created rapidly as two more mills, being built by Drax (a UK wood pellet industry), are supposed to open next year in Louisiana and Mississippi. Many people criticize that it hurts our forests and climate, but wood pellet industries claim they are using wood by-products, that would otherwise go to waste. Adam Macon, a campaign director in a North Carolina Enviromental group says, "It's just crazy that there's an idea out there to cut down the things that are supposed to protect us from climate change. It's backwards thinking."

This is very relevant to us as humans on this Earth because if critics are saying that it's not by-product wood and they're cutting down trees, then that could be very bad for a major climate change. Trees help protect and help us prevent all this global warming and climate change, but if this pellet industry continues to grow as rapidly as it is than we could see some major damage in our forests, which will be very bad for our earth. Therefore, hopefully the companies are only using residue, waste wood and not hurting our environment.

This article was pretty good. It had lots of great information, but the author didn't organize her ideas well. She kept going back and forth between opinions and topics. She would throw in a paragraph about other random facts all of this made it very hard to follow. Also, I think she could have compacted her information better because there was some unnecessary information that made her article lengthy. Overall, I enjoyed reading this article because it was about something people don't usually pay attention to, and I hope in the long run this doesn't affect our planet.