From Tyler Gilmore <tyler@350pdx.org>:
350 Portland has been getting involved in resisting industrial biomass as corporate bad-actor Drax plans to expand to the Pacific NW, proposing a plant in Longview, WA. We have learned much about industrial-scale energy production via biomass, and every part of the industrial biomass process has adverse climate and community impacts. To be clear, we aren’t talking about wood pellet stoves; we are talking about a massive increase in industrialized biomass energy production.
Why Industrial Biomass is bad:
- Logging an immense amount of forests, even sometimes logging old growth trees (despite their lies about only using logging byproducts) to be pulverized into pellets.
- Air Pollution that contributes to serious health risks in local communities, often in violation of air quality regulations.
- Noise Pollution from round-the-clock pellet production and truck traffic.
- International Shipping which uses huge amounts of energy and is also very dangerous: Several shipping personnel have died from deadly concentrations of harmful gasses created by unventilated wood pellet storage confinements and stored bulk piles of wood pellets can self-heat which can lead to spontaneous combustion.
- Emissions that are worse than fossil fuels: Overall, for each kilowatt hour of heat or electricity produced, using wood is likely to add two to three times as much carbon to the air as using fossil fuels.
- Greenwashing resulting from a mistake in carbon accounting which allows the industry to be sustained by government subsidies: Drax receives over 750 million dollars a year in subsidies from the British government!
- Biomass harms local economies by creating fewer jobs per unit of wood than other timber jobs, and it also is not sustainable financially: Drax depends on the subsidies mentioned above.
The more we learn about industrial-scale biomass energy production generally and Drax’s international infamy, the more committed we are to keeping Drax out of the Northwest, and out of the climate solution conversation altogether.
Join us in the fight! Support Sen. Booker’s bill:
Senator Booker has introduced “The Forest Biomass Emissions Act,” legislation designed to assess emissions from forest biomass, alongside co-sponsors Markey, Warren, and Van Hollen. Here is Senator Booker’s press release.
This bill is meant to thwart the attempts of the forest biomass energy industry to secure federal subsidies, which are a MAJOR lifeline for how these industrial biomass companies and projects sustain themselves. The bill requires EPA to reject any assumption of “carbon neutrality” of forest bioenergy in its rulemakings and regulations and to instead rely on science. The bill also requires EPA to analyze and publish the impacts of the wood pellet industry’s pollution on disadvantaged communities living in proximity to the industry’s operations.
You can help by emailing your Senators, asking them to sign on to this bill. Pushing this through the legislature would be a huge win in helping us prevent Drax from expanding into our communities, and a huge win for environmental justice in low-income, BIPOC communities in the South which have been suffering from biomass for many years.
Email our Senators; talking points here:
Sen. Murray: https://www.murray.senate.gov/write-to-patty/
Sen. Cantwell: https://www.cantwell.senate.gov/contact/email/form
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