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Mind Boggling Forest-Gobbling Biomass Boondoggle
Who
knew that something as environmentally friendly sounding as "renewable
energy" could pose a monumental threat to forests and public health?
Burning, of forests and other "biomass" is in fact doing just that:
threatening to decimate lands, dump billions of tons of CO2 into the
already-overburdened atmosphere, and leave us all breathing
particulates and other air pollutants deep into our lungs to wreak havoc
with our health.
Nov 04, 2010
Who
knew that something as environmentally friendly sounding as "renewable
energy" could pose a monumental threat to forests and public health?
Burning, of forests and other "biomass" is in fact doing just that:
threatening to decimate lands, dump billions of tons of CO2 into the
already-overburdened atmosphere, and leave us all breathing
particulates and other air pollutants deep into our lungs to wreak havoc
with our health.
To
understand the magnitude of this assault, consider the recent
developments in Ohio: The states' Public Utilities Commission (aka
"PUCO") is on track to permit a whopping 2442 megawatts of electricity
to be generated from burning wood as a substitute for, or in combination
with coal. Estimates are that this will require around 26 million tons
of wood per year. Just to supply this amount of wood for the first year
of operation alone, would require harvesting 5 times the current annual
growth of all public and private forests in the state. In fact the plan
is to truck in woodchips from surrounding states as well - as far away
as Florida.
Ohio's
plans alone will nearly double the total amount of biomass-burning for
electricity in the entire United States. Incinerating forests and other
"biomass" is already the darling of "renewables" in this and other
countries, responsible for more than half of what passes as renewable
energy generation. Smokestacks, spewing more CO2 per unit of energy than
coal, along with particulates and other pollution, 24/7, not the
windmills and solar panels of our imaginations, predominate.
Ironically,
even as we are providing incentives to cut and burn forests, both here and
abroad, for so-called "renewable energy", climate negotiations have focused much
attention on how to protect forests as one of the easiest and most
effective ways to address global warming. This protection option is vanishing with policies and subsidies that reward burning forests
for electricity.
Presented
as a solution to global warming, biomass electricity is anything but.
Science (and common sense) clearly indicate that burning, and the secondary
impacts of overharvesting and soil depletion contribute to global
warming. The much publicized "Manomet Biomass Sustainability and Carbon
Policy Study" - commissioned by the Massachusetts Department of Energy
Resources - attempted to model CO2 emissions from a lifecycle analysis
of the harvesting and burning of wood for electricity. They reported
that the "carbon debt" resulting from biomass electricity will take from
20-90 years to "repay", depending on whether the biomass is replacing
coal or natural gas generation. Alarming as these findings are, they
seriously underestimate the impact, given assumptions of the Manomet
models (and spelled out in the review by Clean Air Task Force).
Ohio
apparently hasn't read the Manomet Study or any of the other burgeoning
literature that reveals what a sham biomass electricity is. The state
has a long and intimate history with coal. With global warming becoming
increasingly tangible, coal miners killed or trapped underground on a
near daily basis, and with activists from Appalachia becoming
increasingly vocal in their objection to having their mountain homeland
blasted to smithereens and their children poisoned - the public
perception of coal is shifting. That is not to say we are mining and
burning less of it (see "Coal's Comeback, Oct 31, Washington Post). But
there is distinct advantage in cultivating at least an appearance of
being more "green".
Ohio
is burdened with a collection of old, dirty and inefficient coal
plants, unable to satisfy current Environmental Protection Agency air
pollution regulations. Desperately seeking a fresh green makeover and an
extended lease on life for these facilities, the quick and easy (so
called) "solution" is to substitute "living coal" -- biomass that hasn't
yet been around long enough to mineralize and metamorphose into coal --
for the old dirty dead variety. Somehow, nonsensically, shoving forests
or garbage or manure, sewage sludge -- you name it -- into incinerators,
is still considered "clean and renewable" and we are subsidizing the
practice with billions of taxpayer dollars.
Companies
like First Energies who own Ohio's 312 Burger plant, one of the first
to be approved to burn a mix of 80% wood and 20% coal - will be allowed
to gorge on public subsidies, including funds from the American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act. Ohio, like other states, rewards the production
of renewable energy with Renewable Energy Credits (RECS). Normally one
REC is earned per megawatt of renewable electricity produced. But the
Burger facility is extra special: this facility will be eligible for so
called "Super" or "False" REC's. This is thanks to a "muliplier"
provision, written into Ohio Law, that will allow the Burger facility to
artificially inflate the RECs it generates from biomass burning, making
it exceedingly profitable for the company. Expectations are that this
will have profound impacts - flooding the market with RECs, hence
devaluing them, and creating a "death spiral" that will undermine the
state's non-solar REC market. In fact, estimates suggest that the Burger
plant will produce nearly enough RECs in June of 2012 alone to satisfy all of the in-state REC requirements through 2024 for all of the utilities in Ohio.
The
desktop of my laptop computer is awash in unread and yet to be filed
documents. Peaking out through it is an image I have special fondness
for: that famous photograph of the earth from space. Like a beautiful
marble, the land appears mostly a brilliant green, the oceans deep blue,
and all of it partly obscured by the fluffy smudges of cloud cover here
and there.
Unfortunately,
most of the documents that are strewn across this lovely image are news
articles and reports detailing the demise of all that loveliness -
global warming, biodiversity loss, hunger and poverty, and now the
boondoggle of renewable energy from biomass burning. I imagine that if
we were to take the same picture of earth from space today we would see
all that brilliant green fading under a brown haze of smoke. And the
worst irony is that people are applauding and rewarding all that cutting
and burning as "renewable energy".
An Urgent Message From Our Co-Founder
Dear Common Dreams reader, It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits. It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do. Many people said we wouldn't last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong. Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work. But here’s the urgent message from me today. It's never been this bad out there. And it's never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed, the threats we face are intensifying. We need your support now more than ever. We don't accept corporate advertising and never will. We don't have a paywall because we don't think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you. When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we. Will you donate now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives? —Craig Brown, Co-founder |
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Rachel Smolker
Rachel Smolker, Ph.D. is codirector of Biofuelwatch and member of the Campaign to Stop GE Trees and the Global Forest Coalition. She lives in Vermont.
Who
knew that something as environmentally friendly sounding as "renewable
energy" could pose a monumental threat to forests and public health?
Burning, of forests and other "biomass" is in fact doing just that:
threatening to decimate lands, dump billions of tons of CO2 into the
already-overburdened atmosphere, and leave us all breathing
particulates and other air pollutants deep into our lungs to wreak havoc
with our health.
To
understand the magnitude of this assault, consider the recent
developments in Ohio: The states' Public Utilities Commission (aka
"PUCO") is on track to permit a whopping 2442 megawatts of electricity
to be generated from burning wood as a substitute for, or in combination
with coal. Estimates are that this will require around 26 million tons
of wood per year. Just to supply this amount of wood for the first year
of operation alone, would require harvesting 5 times the current annual
growth of all public and private forests in the state. In fact the plan
is to truck in woodchips from surrounding states as well - as far away
as Florida.
Ohio's
plans alone will nearly double the total amount of biomass-burning for
electricity in the entire United States. Incinerating forests and other
"biomass" is already the darling of "renewables" in this and other
countries, responsible for more than half of what passes as renewable
energy generation. Smokestacks, spewing more CO2 per unit of energy than
coal, along with particulates and other pollution, 24/7, not the
windmills and solar panels of our imaginations, predominate.
Ironically,
even as we are providing incentives to cut and burn forests, both here and
abroad, for so-called "renewable energy", climate negotiations have focused much
attention on how to protect forests as one of the easiest and most
effective ways to address global warming. This protection option is vanishing with policies and subsidies that reward burning forests
for electricity.
Presented
as a solution to global warming, biomass electricity is anything but.
Science (and common sense) clearly indicate that burning, and the secondary
impacts of overharvesting and soil depletion contribute to global
warming. The much publicized "Manomet Biomass Sustainability and Carbon
Policy Study" - commissioned by the Massachusetts Department of Energy
Resources - attempted to model CO2 emissions from a lifecycle analysis
of the harvesting and burning of wood for electricity. They reported
that the "carbon debt" resulting from biomass electricity will take from
20-90 years to "repay", depending on whether the biomass is replacing
coal or natural gas generation. Alarming as these findings are, they
seriously underestimate the impact, given assumptions of the Manomet
models (and spelled out in the review by Clean Air Task Force).
Ohio
apparently hasn't read the Manomet Study or any of the other burgeoning
literature that reveals what a sham biomass electricity is. The state
has a long and intimate history with coal. With global warming becoming
increasingly tangible, coal miners killed or trapped underground on a
near daily basis, and with activists from Appalachia becoming
increasingly vocal in their objection to having their mountain homeland
blasted to smithereens and their children poisoned - the public
perception of coal is shifting. That is not to say we are mining and
burning less of it (see "Coal's Comeback, Oct 31, Washington Post). But
there is distinct advantage in cultivating at least an appearance of
being more "green".
Ohio
is burdened with a collection of old, dirty and inefficient coal
plants, unable to satisfy current Environmental Protection Agency air
pollution regulations. Desperately seeking a fresh green makeover and an
extended lease on life for these facilities, the quick and easy (so
called) "solution" is to substitute "living coal" -- biomass that hasn't
yet been around long enough to mineralize and metamorphose into coal --
for the old dirty dead variety. Somehow, nonsensically, shoving forests
or garbage or manure, sewage sludge -- you name it -- into incinerators,
is still considered "clean and renewable" and we are subsidizing the
practice with billions of taxpayer dollars.
Companies
like First Energies who own Ohio's 312 Burger plant, one of the first
to be approved to burn a mix of 80% wood and 20% coal - will be allowed
to gorge on public subsidies, including funds from the American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act. Ohio, like other states, rewards the production
of renewable energy with Renewable Energy Credits (RECS). Normally one
REC is earned per megawatt of renewable electricity produced. But the
Burger facility is extra special: this facility will be eligible for so
called "Super" or "False" REC's. This is thanks to a "muliplier"
provision, written into Ohio Law, that will allow the Burger facility to
artificially inflate the RECs it generates from biomass burning, making
it exceedingly profitable for the company. Expectations are that this
will have profound impacts - flooding the market with RECs, hence
devaluing them, and creating a "death spiral" that will undermine the
state's non-solar REC market. In fact, estimates suggest that the Burger
plant will produce nearly enough RECs in June of 2012 alone to satisfy all of the in-state REC requirements through 2024 for all of the utilities in Ohio.
The
desktop of my laptop computer is awash in unread and yet to be filed
documents. Peaking out through it is an image I have special fondness
for: that famous photograph of the earth from space. Like a beautiful
marble, the land appears mostly a brilliant green, the oceans deep blue,
and all of it partly obscured by the fluffy smudges of cloud cover here
and there.
Unfortunately,
most of the documents that are strewn across this lovely image are news
articles and reports detailing the demise of all that loveliness -
global warming, biodiversity loss, hunger and poverty, and now the
boondoggle of renewable energy from biomass burning. I imagine that if
we were to take the same picture of earth from space today we would see
all that brilliant green fading under a brown haze of smoke. And the
worst irony is that people are applauding and rewarding all that cutting
and burning as "renewable energy".
Rachel Smolker
Rachel Smolker, Ph.D. is codirector of Biofuelwatch and member of the Campaign to Stop GE Trees and the Global Forest Coalition. She lives in Vermont.
Who
knew that something as environmentally friendly sounding as "renewable
energy" could pose a monumental threat to forests and public health?
Burning, of forests and other "biomass" is in fact doing just that:
threatening to decimate lands, dump billions of tons of CO2 into the
already-overburdened atmosphere, and leave us all breathing
particulates and other air pollutants deep into our lungs to wreak havoc
with our health.
To
understand the magnitude of this assault, consider the recent
developments in Ohio: The states' Public Utilities Commission (aka
"PUCO") is on track to permit a whopping 2442 megawatts of electricity
to be generated from burning wood as a substitute for, or in combination
with coal. Estimates are that this will require around 26 million tons
of wood per year. Just to supply this amount of wood for the first year
of operation alone, would require harvesting 5 times the current annual
growth of all public and private forests in the state. In fact the plan
is to truck in woodchips from surrounding states as well - as far away
as Florida.
Ohio's
plans alone will nearly double the total amount of biomass-burning for
electricity in the entire United States. Incinerating forests and other
"biomass" is already the darling of "renewables" in this and other
countries, responsible for more than half of what passes as renewable
energy generation. Smokestacks, spewing more CO2 per unit of energy than
coal, along with particulates and other pollution, 24/7, not the
windmills and solar panels of our imaginations, predominate.
Ironically,
even as we are providing incentives to cut and burn forests, both here and
abroad, for so-called "renewable energy", climate negotiations have focused much
attention on how to protect forests as one of the easiest and most
effective ways to address global warming. This protection option is vanishing with policies and subsidies that reward burning forests
for electricity.
Presented
as a solution to global warming, biomass electricity is anything but.
Science (and common sense) clearly indicate that burning, and the secondary
impacts of overharvesting and soil depletion contribute to global
warming. The much publicized "Manomet Biomass Sustainability and Carbon
Policy Study" - commissioned by the Massachusetts Department of Energy
Resources - attempted to model CO2 emissions from a lifecycle analysis
of the harvesting and burning of wood for electricity. They reported
that the "carbon debt" resulting from biomass electricity will take from
20-90 years to "repay", depending on whether the biomass is replacing
coal or natural gas generation. Alarming as these findings are, they
seriously underestimate the impact, given assumptions of the Manomet
models (and spelled out in the review by Clean Air Task Force).
Ohio
apparently hasn't read the Manomet Study or any of the other burgeoning
literature that reveals what a sham biomass electricity is. The state
has a long and intimate history with coal. With global warming becoming
increasingly tangible, coal miners killed or trapped underground on a
near daily basis, and with activists from Appalachia becoming
increasingly vocal in their objection to having their mountain homeland
blasted to smithereens and their children poisoned - the public
perception of coal is shifting. That is not to say we are mining and
burning less of it (see "Coal's Comeback, Oct 31, Washington Post). But
there is distinct advantage in cultivating at least an appearance of
being more "green".
Ohio
is burdened with a collection of old, dirty and inefficient coal
plants, unable to satisfy current Environmental Protection Agency air
pollution regulations. Desperately seeking a fresh green makeover and an
extended lease on life for these facilities, the quick and easy (so
called) "solution" is to substitute "living coal" -- biomass that hasn't
yet been around long enough to mineralize and metamorphose into coal --
for the old dirty dead variety. Somehow, nonsensically, shoving forests
or garbage or manure, sewage sludge -- you name it -- into incinerators,
is still considered "clean and renewable" and we are subsidizing the
practice with billions of taxpayer dollars.
Companies
like First Energies who own Ohio's 312 Burger plant, one of the first
to be approved to burn a mix of 80% wood and 20% coal - will be allowed
to gorge on public subsidies, including funds from the American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act. Ohio, like other states, rewards the production
of renewable energy with Renewable Energy Credits (RECS). Normally one
REC is earned per megawatt of renewable electricity produced. But the
Burger facility is extra special: this facility will be eligible for so
called "Super" or "False" REC's. This is thanks to a "muliplier"
provision, written into Ohio Law, that will allow the Burger facility to
artificially inflate the RECs it generates from biomass burning, making
it exceedingly profitable for the company. Expectations are that this
will have profound impacts - flooding the market with RECs, hence
devaluing them, and creating a "death spiral" that will undermine the
state's non-solar REC market. In fact, estimates suggest that the Burger
plant will produce nearly enough RECs in June of 2012 alone to satisfy all of the in-state REC requirements through 2024 for all of the utilities in Ohio.
The
desktop of my laptop computer is awash in unread and yet to be filed
documents. Peaking out through it is an image I have special fondness
for: that famous photograph of the earth from space. Like a beautiful
marble, the land appears mostly a brilliant green, the oceans deep blue,
and all of it partly obscured by the fluffy smudges of cloud cover here
and there.
Unfortunately,
most of the documents that are strewn across this lovely image are news
articles and reports detailing the demise of all that loveliness -
global warming, biodiversity loss, hunger and poverty, and now the
boondoggle of renewable energy from biomass burning. I imagine that if
we were to take the same picture of earth from space today we would see
all that brilliant green fading under a brown haze of smoke. And the
worst irony is that people are applauding and rewarding all that cutting
and burning as "renewable energy".
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