NS Power: The Anti-Tree

So, Nova Scotia Power's magic-bullet solution to the problem of outages during natural disasters is to cut down all the trees within 20' of power lines. Besides Halifax's reputation for being the 'city of trees', I find this suspicious for several reasons.

The first was clearly stated by one of the NDP MLAs: Trees absorb CO2... and what do NSP's power plants produce? You guessed it.

The second is that trees save a boatload of money in electricity costs, due to the cooling they provide to urban areas. This is cooling that would otherwise be made up by costly air conditioning. Hmm.....

The other reason I find it strange is that trees seldom take out the massive transmission towers: those always seem too ready to fall over by themselves. I somehow doubt an apocalyptic clear-cutting of HRM is going to change *that*.