Has your MP read this?

• Author: Robinson, Dave
• Position: ECONOMICALLY SPEAKING

Where do we get good ideas, and what do we do with them? Where is pretty easy--for example consider reading "The Greenhouse Gas and Carbon Profile of the Global Forest Industry" by the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement in the USA. Heavy going, maybe, but it is more fun than Special Report 06-04 titiled "Considerations on the Use of Toxic Equivalency Factors (TEFs)" by the same organization.

Someone in Northern Ontario should be reading the greenhouse report and figuring out what it tells us. But even if we knew what to do, could we even decide to do it?

After all, Northern Ontario has no brain--in the sense of democratic institutions with the power to make decisions. We are run from Queen's Park. We are just the tail of the dog. The brontosaurus that had a separate brain for its tail, but Queen's Park doesn't have even that much processing capacity for Northern Ontario. The premier himself couldn't tell you how much Queen's Park collects from Northern Ontario or how much they spend. No one is in charge of coming up with a coherent plan.

So why bother slogging through these reports? If you have no real influence, why waste your time learning about ways to make the North more productive? So what if a little light goes on in your head? So what if you start to dream up ways to turn Northern forests into a solution to the climate problem that Prime Minister Harper discovered in February?

What if you thought about replacing the fuel used in logging trucks with biodiesel made from wood? That is a pretty modest idea. It is quite a small amount of fuel in the big picture, but it would make the forestry sector an environmental champion. It is actually pretty tame. CVRD is doing it with all the locomotives that move iron ore in southeastern Brazil. We can be at least as progressive in Northern Ontario, can't we?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Or we could be a bit more creative. We could combine the biodiesel program with a technology from the University of Georgia. They have a biofuel derived from wood chips and pellets that has carbon as a by-product.

The pyrolysis process is actually an improvement on the ancient technique for producing charcoal. New research in agriculture and archaeology shows that powdered charcoal can be added to forest soils to make them much more...