Wildfires and such.

Well, I've been hearing a lot about wildfires lately and wanted to share a bit with you. The first I heard about was actually not California, but Canada. Apparently, the Mountain Pine Beetle has killed and dried up more than 50% of the mature pine trees in British Columbia, and experts say that there is likely to be a huge forest fire their in the near future because of the problem. Apparently, these dead trees are so dry it would only take one lightning strike to burn down the whole 20 million acres of forest(twice the size of West Virginia). Also, though the Canadian government is allowing loggers to chop them down, not many are doing it, because there's not much used for beetle-kill trees. The wood is much too brittle to build a house from or anything, all there is for their use is a small market for specially designed firniture that's supposed to look cool when made from beetle-kill.

Well, there is a solution. Have you ever heard of wood pellets? Apparently they're a new alternative fuel, basically would dried and compressed into tiny little pellets (looking like rabbit food). It's cleaner and cheaper than coal, electricity, gas or oil. Lost of people are starting to use it to heat their homes, and the Chinese government wants a large supply of it to make their coal electric plants cleaner and more efficient. Beetle kill is a perfect natural resource for make wood pellets. It's already dried up and so much easier to make into saw-dust than healthy trees.

The first I heard of it was from DailyWealth, a free financial newsletter I get via email just for fun. The first article I got on November 14th called Why Chinese Power Plants Need Rabbit Food, and the other I got on the 16th was The Alternative Fuel Industry You've Never Heard Of. Finally, I also heard more about it from this blog called Storybook, in the blogpost Anatomy of Wildfire.


In other news: I am going home to The United States of America for 3 months! See here for details.

Also, today is the 1st anniversary of Lisa and I being legally wed. We'll be going out to eat and that's about it. We're not fully decided on where we want to go, but I'll post about it in a comment tomorrow or something.