Full-sized albizia house a model of innovation and

[kalakoa]

Burning trees to produce power is carbon neutral

Provided that you use the electricity to transport the trees to the power plant. Hu Honua will be using a fleet of diesel-powered trucks. The project only makes sense with magical "cost avoidance pricing".

At least it will irritate some entitled folks with expensive homes, so it's not a total loss.

[terracore]

Trees and petroleum (diesel, coal) are just stores of the sun's energy. The only real difference is how old these "batteries" are. They don't release any more CO2 in the air when burned than they took in when growing. Anything else would defy the laws of physics. Like my high school physics instructor kept hammering into us:

"In physics, the law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant, it is said to be conserved over time. This law means that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another." (he didn't write the wikipedia article that I know of, but he preached it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy )

[HI_Someday]

I was just reading about the eucalyptus trees while we were staying near Honokaa last week. We wondered why there are so, soooo many of them. I've read they were used for wind breaks, but there are more sources that say they were part of a reforestation effort from all the sugarcane farming, with millions planted in the 1930's. Here is one article;

https://www.hawaii-forest.com/eucalyptus-robusta/

Apparently there was a contract to harvest and sell trees to a Japanese company, but that fell through.

https://www.hawaiilife.com/blog/eucalyptus-trees-japan/

I found another, more recent article regarding the use of them for power generation. Interestingly, this article mentions trees planted in 1990. Not sure why when there already exists soooo many of them.

https://www.civilbeat.org/2017/08/alan-m...ig-island/

[Hotzcatz]

When sugar went down in 1996 (I think it was NAFTA that took away the government supports for domestic sugar) anyway, sugar died a sudden death. There were loads of folks with no jobs and the major employer had just folded. They were looking for a replacement for the entire sugar industry. I heard it was someone at Kamehameha Schools who had the bright idea of growing trees for paper pulp. I guess they've never been around a paper mill. But, folks had no jobs, they were trained to work sugar which was pretty much factory work done outside. None of the workers really had any 'farming' skills, just show up to work and do what they were told kinda skills. So, the paper pulp industry seemed like something that could fill in for the lost sugar industry.

Oji paper mill in Japan said they'd build a mill if enough trees were planted. So for a few years everyone was planting eucalyptus trees. After they'd planted trees everywhere they asked Oji to come build the paper mill. Oji said they needed twice as many trees, everyone said, nope, we've planted as many as we're gonna. So, no paper mill and the trees kept growing. There's a lot of investment companies who 'own' the trees as part of their portfolios and such, they traded them back and forth but in the real world - there's all these trees growing.

Some trees were harvested several years ago, it's not profitable to send them anywhere to be processed into paper until you get into the superfreighter size of quantity of trees. They stockpiled the trees over in Kawaihae until they could get enough to ship away. Several times their stockpile caught fire and burned up. Not sure how much of it was ever shipped away, but they did remove a lot of the trees.

There's still too many left, though. I've heard there's some sort of oil or something from them that washes down into the ocean and kills coral, but I don't know any more details than that.

Not sure what they're doing with them now, I've not seen any logging trucks go past lately nor heard the whine of them cutting the trees. It's really noisy when they do that - way beyond the legal noise limits and for some reason they log them at night as well as during the day.

The eucalyptus trees used for windbreaks are eucalyptus 'robusta', they have a really deep creviced bark and a lovely dark wood which is great for floors. Totally different eucalyptus tree than those wretched pulp trees.

In the meantime (since 1996 & the last harvest of sugar), there's been a lot of diversified farming and other little agricultural ventures which have popped up here and there. None of them are big enough to replace sugar, but if we get enough little ones, that will be a much more stable economy than depending on just one thing.

---

"I like yard sales," he said. "All true survivalists like yard sales."
Kurt Wilson

[terracore]

"When sugar went down in 1996 (I think it was NAFTA that took away the government supports for domestic sugar) "

It wasn't government support of domestic sugar, it was foreign dumping of subsidized sugar (but you are right, it was an effect of NAFTA):

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/thank...iian-sugar