SNP admits to felling 16 million trees to develop wind farms
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Almost 16 million trees have been chopped down on publicly owned land in Scotland to make way for wind farms, an SNP minister had admitted amid a major drive to erect more turbines.
Mairi Gougeon, the Rural Affairs Secretary, estimated that 15.7 million trees had been felled since 2000 in land that is currently managed by agency Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) – the equivalent of more than 1,700 per day.
She insisted there was a planning presumption in favour of protecting woodland and wind farm developers would be expected to undertake “compensatory planting elsewhere”.
But Liam Kerr, a Scottish Tory MSP, said the public would be “astonished” at the total and cited concerns about the developments that had been raised with him “by communities all over the country.”
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Any mention of where these 16 million trees, ‘planted in compensation’, are located & how they are being cared for & managed.
Seems likely to me they were mostly planted in the 1950s to supply pit props for all the coal mines we were going to need – another example of government short term and unjoined up thinking
I would question if the forestry resources existed to plant 1700 trees a DAY!
But our wonderful government is going to force farmers to lose 10% of their land to plant trees. The CS seems to think that all farmland is flat and amenable to being taken out of food production.
How much CO2 inspiration/O2 aspiration has been lost by these 16 million ecofactories being felled – who will do the calculation comparing the CO2 that is left in the atmosphere compared to the “dirty” source that is currently employed in the mix of fuels used to ensure back up spinning capacity when the wind cannot supply the grid?
I mention this not because I am concerned about CO2 – well I am if the level drops towards extinction event level ~180ppm – but I am concerned at the level of hypocrisy displayed by these Scottish jerks? Virtue signalling bollux of the highest water.
It would be interesting to see a CO2 analysis of the complete process, not that I believe in the magic gas but it would be playing them at their own game.
Precisely.
Did they send the wood chips to Drax?
Wong sort of timber probably, drax prefers green wood from the USA bought over by boat.
you couldn’t make it up.
A lengthy set of numbers to crunch but dried timber has an energy density of about 5kWh/kg. I’m no expert on trees (any experts on here to help with that one?) but (according to a google search) a *typical tree weighs in at about a tonne. So that’s 5MWh per tree available energy. Drax has an energy efficiency of about 35% burning wood pellets so about 1.75MWh per tree. The 15.7 million trees figure is over 22 years so say 720,000 tree per annum @ 1.75MWh per tree gives 1,260,000MWh (1.26TWh) per annum or an average power output of about 140MW.
To put these figures in context, in 2021 all the UK hydro electric plants combined only produced marginally more than the above at 1.38TWh.
All of which demonstrates hydro electricity and burning native wood is never going to provide any meaningful amount of energy for the UK. With solar being all but useless in our high latitude for six months of the year we are left with the most stochastic option imaginable of wind turbines…that we have to cut the trees down for! Something not adding up is it?
*I am guessing these trees could be mature above average specimens giventheir location so figure could be up to 5 tons each andall numbers correspondingly larger.
I think dry hardwoods come in at around 700kg per cubic metre.
So a tree 6 metres tall with a trunk of an average diameter of half a metre would weigh about 3 tonnes possibly a bit more, not counting any major branches. Softwood would not be as heavy, so say 2 tonnes for a mature softwood.
Wave it off with “compensatory planting elsewhere.”
Always behind the 8-ball when burning/removing trees. They exist. They hold carbon. Plant the trees, grow them for 50 years, then cut them. Else, you are ADDING to atmospheric CO2.
Then there is the biological issue. Trees grow where trees can grow. Their idea is that they can grow trees where they haven’t been growing before. I wouldn’t put it past these geniuses to cut down trees to plant trees to claim they have planted trees.
How much CO2 would have been sequestrated by those trees compared to the amount saved by the wind turbines, taking into account the CO2 produced in their manufacture, installation and servicing.
When you consider that at almost every step in this project conventional vehicles are doing the transportation you realize how important fossil fuels are. There is no replacement for gasolines (or the renewable biofuels on which they depend). Many tons of fossilized algae were oxidized back to CO2 and water. The same holds true for land being razed to install solar panel “farms”, much of it agricultural farm land.
If you are gonna make an omelette, you gotta break some eggs. Forget all that drivel learned in middle school about trees absorbing CO2 and converting it to Oxygen–we got windmills ! Now, if we can only figure out where we pour in the Magic Unicorns, inertia, and spinning reserve we’ll really have something Green.
I’m afraid Harry has the answer. Our area is besieged with wind farm applications, our community is currently being “consulted” about seven monster schemes.
But we are also seeing very large schemes where upland ground is proposed to be taken out of grazing, and planted with trees. All with very nice grants thank you, and part of the Net Zero policy. So there will be very large scale planting of trees which the governments will cite.
This is sufficiently lucrative that a number of financial institutions are buying up land to plant on. And so far most of the schemes I have seen are mostly sitka spruce with a scattering of native species to placate those who criticise. Some landscapes will be drastically changed as a result. Together with plentiful turbines of course.
Stop all ‘grants’ just another name for ‘subsidy’ and who pays it, US the taxpayer?
The reports such as this one are enough to make a grown man weep.
Will anyone ever be held to account, personally, for such reprehensible activities?
And
Is it time that our public servants had a mental checkup, an IQ test and that they have a normal sense of morality, before they are considered for employment?
Probably more evironmentaly damaging than the wildfires making the headlines currently. Trees are felled and the bilk including trace minerals are taken away, debris is burnt in pyres randomly spread round the area. In a wildfire much of the nutrient content is left in ash and partially burnt material.
Fun Fact: This same process of clearing and burning of trees to make land for agriculture in South America over the preceding decades, has left the continent with soils devoid of nutrients where the intended farming is marginal at best. And those folks didn’t even get any Magic Unicorn windmills out of the deal.
SNP bunch of hypocrites just pay lip service?