Sunday 25 February 2007

How much timber?

I was looking for something else on the Gunns Pulp Mill site, when I came across this statement.
Against the question: "How much wood will be processed in the proposed pulp mill?"
They provide the answer: "The pulp mill will not require additional intensification of forestry operations. It will instead divert resource that otherwise would have been exported in chip form to the pulp mill for value-added processing. In the initial stages of operation, about 3.2 million green tonnes of pulp wood per year will be processed."(My emphasis).
I thought this had been shown to be false last year, and that the huge increase in harvesting had been acknowledged by Gunns. Haven't they made it clear that the export woodchip trade is going to fund the building of the mill? Why does the government pretend to be surprised when people don't believe them? No doubt there are some clever semantics around the conflicting statements, so that nobody's actually "lying", but perhaps we could refer to them as "disingenuous" or maybe even "misleading". Of course, they'd see it as being in a good cause, theirs.

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