Fire up your chainsaw and cut down a tree. Not so you can decorate it for the Christmas holiday; so you can set it on fire to help combat global warming. That’s right, burn a tree to save the planet. That’s the notion behind biomass, the new (yet ancient) technology of burning wood to produce energy.

It might seem crazy that anyone would even consider the incineration of wood and its byproducts to be a green substitute for toxic fuels such as coal. Yet that’s exactly what is happening all over the country, and it has many environmentalists scratching their heads in disbelief.

Wood waste, such as forest trimmings and other agricultural debris, is being used in numerous power plants across the country with the impression that it is a renewable, green resource.

“People get easily confused by biomass because it is always lumped in with other green technologies,” said environmental activist and filmmaker Jeff Gibbs, who co-produced Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” “Burning our trees in the name of renewable energy to produce power is about as Machiavellian as it gets.”

NASA’s James Hansen says that the burning of coal is the single largest contributor to anthropogenic global warming, so any alternative fuel source must decrease the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere if we are to put the breaks on climate change. Biomass, despite its label as a renewable energy source, does not solve the problem because burning trees actually emits a large amount of CO2.

Proponents counter that biomass only releases as much CO2 as the trees absorb while growing in nature. So as long as replacement trees are grown at the same rate they are burned in incinerators, biomass will always be carbon neutral.