Continued
Biomass: Lies, Misrepresentations, Injustice, and Exploitation
The biomass industry has convinced elected officials and regulatory bodies to accept their claims that this energy is “renewable” and to include woody biomass in energy incentive programs found in legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act and within several state level Renewable Portfolio Standards. However, the true definition of “Renewable Energy”, as defined by the U.N., is energy derived from natural sources that are replenished at a higher rate than they are consumed. Forests, which take decades or centuries to grow, but can be logged and burned or converted to pellets in days, clearly do not meet that criteria and should not be used as an alternative for clean renewable energy such as wind, solar, and geothermal. Because it takes trees decades to grow large enough to start sequestering carbon again, this energy cannot be considered "carbon neutral" either.
All in all, the biomass energy industry is one of the most polluting industries: 1) The simple act of logging, which the U.S. Forest Service misleadingly calls a “climate smart forestry management practice”, harms Americans as shown in the second article of this series; 2) Burning wood for energy emits any stored pollution back into the atmosphere, adding to the accumulating greenhouse gases. In fact, wood-burning power plants emit 150% the CO2 of coal burning power plants, and 300 to 400% the CO2 from burning natural gas - per unit energy produced. It is one of the least efficient ways to generate energy; and 3) logging eliminates important ecosystem services including: healthy soil generation vital for food security, water and air filtration, weather stabilization, providing habitat for biodiversity, and the list goes on. Despite this, the biomass industry receives government incentives such as production tax credits for “renewable” energy from the IRA (0.5 cents per kilowatt hour of “renewable” energy produced) and subsidies such as the Biomass Crop Assistance Program, Range Fuels, and Bioenergy Programs for Advanced Biofuels. All of these payments have created a black hole for public funds (U.S. taxpayer dollars) and a perverse incentive for increased logging.
When it comes to the production of wood pellets from logged forests, the biomass industry claims they only use wood waste, but investigations and whistleblower accounts have revealed that whole trees are being used precisely because they have the density needed for pellet production. In a series of investigations, the Dogwood Alliance followed logging trucks from clearcut sites in forests directly to an Enviva plant where the trees were dropped off for processing by the world’s largest producer of wood pellets. The replacement of these vital forest ecosystems with fast-growing monocrop tree plantations, which are then logged to also be burned, does not help Americans, our climate, or biodiversity despite claims from the forest service and industry.
The health impacts of the biomass industry are wide-ranging and well documented - be it for wood combustion or pellet production. A December 2023 study that looked at health impacts of biomass found that “biomass-burning facilities emit on average 2.8 times the amount of pollution of power plants that burn coal, oil, or natural gas.” Low and middle income communities in the Southern U.S. have suffered the most from the biomass industry and as the industry expands, so do the health concerns for all Americans. In fact, the largest pellet producers in the world, Enviva and Drax, are facing legal trouble for violating air pollution laws at their mills in the South. In 2023, Drax was fined $2.5 million for exceeding pollution limits in a Mississippi community and paid another $3.2 million in penalties for air pollution in Louisiana. The NAACP opposes wood biomass energy, calling for a moratorium on wood pellet manufacturing and for the UN to appoint a special investigator to probe “the human and civil rights atrocities associated with manufacturing of wood pellets, particularly in the Southeastern US.”
Unfortunately, the international demand for biomass continues to put pressure on our already at-risk forests. For example, subsidies in Japan incentivize the burning of biomass alongside coal, which in turn drives the destruction of vital forests in the US, Canada, and Vietnam. Do we want to continue sacrificing our forests, and our health to provide energy to other countries?
Protect our forests so Americans can continue to enjoy clean air, water, healthy soils, recreation, and good health. Instead of wasting money to incentivize and subsidize an industry that harms American communities and exploits our ecosystems and resources, we need to keep the biomass - the trees- in the forest so we can all enjoy the benefits they provide.
