Gov. John Baldacci’s wood-to-energy task force deserves credit for releasing an insightful final report about the state’s forestry reserves and industry, absent of the potential biases that marred the initial drafts.

The report relaxed its pellet-heat rhetoric – which with Les Otten, a pellet stove importer, serving as task force chairman, raised concerns about conflict of interest – and created a comprehensive document about the status and future of an important Maine natural resource.

In doing so, the task force has given lawmakers a foundation to bring forward-thinking legislation for increasing diversity and efficiency into Maine’s overly oil-dependent home heating landscape.

This report was harmed from the start by the prevalence of wood energy in Maine. We’ve burned cordwood for generations. Biomass is well-known. Pellets are the rage. Cellulosic ethanol is too new to discuss.

Where this report shines, though, is in telling us what we don’t know. Cordwood consumption or the number of homes with primary or secondary wood heating sources are unknown. All that’s known is Mainers burn wood. A lot of it. All over the state.

The other praiseworthy area details the unique challenges in the forestry industry: competition for resources, sustainable forestry benchmarks, dwindling native loggers and new, technological forest harvesting.

Forestry transcends many difficult issues: property rights, because so much of Maine’s woods are privately owned; immigration, because of the pressing need for Canadian workers to log Maine forests; and transportation, because of the inherent difficulty in transporting raw materials from rural areas.

Heck, the report even recommends common-sense changes for professional licensing and safety codes to allow for co-existence or adaptation from oil to wood-fired heating systems. The final report is detailed on myriad fronts.

Which is a long way from where it started. Rampant pellet-heat rhetoric in initial drafts threatened its credibility with the presence of Otten and two of his business partners on the task force.

The same cannot be said of the draft released last week.

It’s not really a “wood-to-energy” report. It’s better described as a forest policy report, because creating energy from wood is already a market priority. Government attention must be paid to forest harvesting and transportation. (Given current prices for cordwood, the market’s doing just fine.)

The report does well, too, in calling for incentives – across all economic strata – to invest in more efficient, diverse forms of home heating – wood, oil or otherwise.

Our praise for this report is based on its progress. Earlier drafts were toss-away efforts that, excuse the pun, generated a lot of heat about wood energy, but little light. The final version is exponentially better.