Burning more wood is for cavemen

Article published Dec 26, 2010

By Chris Matera

We need to get serious about global warming and clean energy, but wood-burning biomass incinerators are a false solution that will worsen our problems, not help solve them.

While the word “biomass” conjures up pleasant images, the promotion of this old caveman technology as “clean and green” is a colossal “greenwash” by the timber, trash and energy industries attempting to cash in on lucrative public clean energy subsidies.

One can become quite cynical to learn that our green energy subsidies are being directed to cutting forests and burning them in dirty biomass incinerators instead of promoting genuinely clean energy solutions, such as solar, geothermal, appropriately scaled and located wind and hydro, and most importantly conservation and efficiency.

Here is a biomass reality check.

Contrary to industry claims, biomass energy does not reduce carbon dioxide emissions, it increases them. Wood-burning biomass power production emits 50 percent more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than coal. That is not a typo, and is based on numbers from the proponents’ own reports.

Since burning wood is so inefficient, burning living trees is actually worse than burning coal. New electric biomass power plants emit about 3,300 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour, while existing coal plants emit 2,100 pounds per megawatt-hour, existing natural gas plants about 1,300 pounds per megawatt-hour and new natural gas plants about 760 pounds per megawatt-hour.

Not only is wood-burning biomass energy worse than fossil fuels for carbon dioxide emissions, but it also usually emits higher rates of conventional pollutants such as particulates, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide than fossil fuels. The McNeil biomass plant near Burlington, touted by biomass proponents, is the No. 1 air pollution source in the state of Vermont and emits 79 pollutants (see www.planethazard.com). In short, “clean” energy does not come out of a smokestack.

Wood-burning energy production is extremely inefficient; a typical power plant burns at about 23 percent efficiency, so 77 percent of the trees cut go up in smoke and without producing any energy. This means enormous amounts of forest need to be cut to provide tiny amounts of power. This large fuel demand will lead to increased clear-cutting of forests, which even the forestry consultant to the Beaver Wood Pownal and Fair Haven biomass proposals has admitted.

It is very important to realize that the vast majority of the fuel for biomass energy would come from living trees, not waste wood, as pitched to the public. The industry includes trees that it calls “junk” or “low grade” in its definition of “waste” and “residues” simply because they are a species, or have characteristics, that do not provide high commercial market value. However, to the rest of us and to nature, these are still valuable trees that filter the air and water, sequester carbon, maintain the soil, attract tourists, and provide fish and wildlife habitat.

The proposed Fair Haven facility alone would require nearly 600,000 green tons of wood per year for electricity and pellets. This is about 40 percent of the entire public and private annual timber harvest in Vermont and yet would produce only about 1 percent more heat and electricity for Vermont.

Achievable and more economical conservation and efficiency measures could reduce our energy use by 30 percent. “Phantom” loads alone — for example, when our TV is plugged in but not on — account for 5 percent of our electricity use and could easily be avoided by using power strips. While making better use of the energy we already have would have the least impacts, the damage is already done with Hydro-Quebec, so utilizing this available energy source would have minimal new impacts in comparison to increased cutting and burning of our important forests.

There are other large biomass burning proposals in Springfield and the Massachusetts cities of Pittsfield, Greenfield, Russell and Springfield that all have overlapping wood demands that would require cutting forests at more than 300 percent of today’s cutting rates and would seriously threaten our forests.

Tourists and recreationists come from around the world and support a lucrative tourism industry to visit New England’s “Golden Goose,” our forests, in their glory. They will not come to see them cut down, chipped, burned and belched into the atmosphere in industrial burners.

The reason these biomass incinerators are popping up like mushrooms on a rainy Seattle day is because of the enormous public subsidies being directed their way. A typical incinerator like the one proposed in Fair Haven is eligible for a $50 million to $80 million federal cash grant if it can break ground by Friday and about $20 million in annual public subsidies. Imagine all the genuinely clean jobs and energy that could instead be created with that money by installing solar panels and insulating homes. Rather than 25 to 50 or so destructive jobs cutting and burning forests, the $20 million annual subsidy alone could be used to support 400 clean and green jobs at $50,000 a year.

At this time of polluted air, global warming, already stressed forests and bankrupt governments, there is no reasonable argument for forcing taxpayers to subsidize the construction of new dirty, carbon-belching, forest-degrading biomass incinerators for minimal amounts of power that we don’t need, just to further enrich already wealthy out-of-state investors.

These policies will lead to increased clear-cutting, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously draining our public coffers, the exact opposite of what we need to do right now. “Green” taxpayer subsidies and other incentives should be directed only toward genuinely green technologies that produce clean, non-carbon-emitting energy and local jobs.



Chris Matera is a civil engineer and the founder of Massachusetts Forest Watch, a citizen watchdog group.

 

---

Biomass Capital Investment to Reach $33.7 Billion by 2015, Says Pike Research

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101223005133/en/Biomass-Capital-Investment-Reach-33.7-Billion-2015

Environmentalists plan to redirect strategies

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 21, 2010; A03

As 2010 comes to a close, U.S. environmentalists are engaged in their most profound bout of soul-searching in more than a decade. Their top policy priority - imposing a nationwide cap on carbon emissions - has foundered in the face of competing concerns about jobs. Many of their political allies on both the state and federal level have been ousted. And the Obama administration has just signaled it could retreat on a couple of key air-quality rules.

Hence a shift of focus away from the toxic partisanship of Washington back to the grass roots and the shared values that gave the movement its initial momentum more than 40 years ago.

"Certainly I think we have figured out we need to find a way to really listen harder and connect with people all over America, especially in rural America," said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund. "I don't think we've done a particularly good job of that."

The change casts a sudden pall over environmentalists' top-down approach.

"The tragedy is that they spent the last 10 years on this and not anything else," said Clean Air Task Force Executive Director Armond Cohen, whose group has pursued an array of alternative strategies aimed at curbing climate change and air pollution.

Now, instead of spending millions of dollars seeking to win over wavering lawmakers on the Hill, green groups are ramping up their operations outside D.C., focusing on public utilities commissions that sign off on new power plants and state ballot initiatives that could potentially funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to conservation efforts.

The Nature Conservancy, for example, successfully championed a ballot initiative in Iowa this fall that will devote a portion of any future sales tax increase to land and water conservation initiatives. According to its president, Mark Tercek, a series of floods helped focus Iowans' attention on the benefits of preventing soil erosion and other problems.

"The average Iowan is not liberal," Tercek said, noting the initiative could generate $150 million a year for conservation. "They're saying through this, 'We need to invest in ecosystems.' "

The Sierra Club, meanwhile, is bolstering its long-standing campaign to block the construction of power plants across the country, assembling a team of 100 full-time employees to focus on the issue in 45 states.
"This is where the environmental movement will make the most progress in the next five years," said Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune.

350.org founder Bill McKibben, who has been trying to foster a global grass-roots movement, wrote in an e-mail he sees it as the only way to overcome traditional opponents who are far better positioned in Washington: "Since we're never going to compete with Exxon in money," he wrote, "we better find another currency, and to me bodies, spirit, creativity are probably our best bet."

This strategic reassessment also has given hope to those working on lower-profile environmental issues, which were largely sidelined during the climate change debate. Vikki Spruill, president of the Ocean Conservancy, noted that the combination of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the fact that oceans have "less partisan baggage" could enhance the prospects for marine conservation next year.

And some of the philanthropists who have directed much of their spending on federal climate change policy in recent years are looking at funding local or international green efforts.

"We can't just depend on everything to happen in Washington," said Rachel Leon, executive director of the Environmental Grantmakers Association.

But several national green leaders said they cannot afford to abandon Washington, with Republicans indicating they may seek to limit the Environmental Protection Agency's powers under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases. Looking ahead, League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski said, "Sadly, too much of our work in Congress may be focused on protecting EPA's job to hold polluters accountable and protect our health."

It remains unclear how hard President Obama will fight to advance environmental priorities: last week the EPA said it would postpone regulations on smog until July 2011 and on industrial boilers until April 2012, handing two victories to business interests and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers who warned the stricter rules could exact a severe economic toll.

White House aides who had met with manufacturing and union representatives on the boiler rule urged EPA to take a closer look at its economic impact, helping prompt the delay.

U.N. Foundation president Tim Wirth, who served in both the House and Senate, said he is still working on "fathoming" the administration's environmental agenda. "One of the failures of the administration has been not developing the economic case for what they're trying to do," he said. "They've got to construct a bullet-proof case, and that's not been done."

White House spokesman Clark Stevens said regardless of the political climate, the administration "will continue to take steps to develop science-based, common-sense policies that focus on creating jobs, reducing dependence on foreign oil, and cutting pollution."

Many both inside and outside the environmental movement say it needs to overhaul its traditional policy prescriptions, as well as the way it frames what's at stake.

This fall three think tanks - the Breakthrough Institute, Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute - offered the idea of a "post-partisan power" plan to devote $100 billion a year to pioneering low-carbon energy.

Others suggest these groups would be better off cutting modest deals with Republicans, whether it involves new energy efficiency mandates or subsidies for nuclear power plants.

"It shouldn't be all or nothing," said Keith McCoy, the National Association of Manufacturers' vice president for energy and resources policy .

But Green Strategies president Roger Ballentine, who chaired the White House Task Force on Climate Change under President Clinton, said neither a big spending program nor government mandates are likely to gain traction in the near future.

"Any policy in the past that's based on government largesse is doomed to failure because we are entering an era of financial retrenchment," he said.

Instead Ballentine and others, such as National Wildlife Federation President Larry Schweiger, argue Obama and his allies need to make the moral and scientific case for addressing climate change and other environmental challenges.

"This is a values issue," Schweiger said.

And in the end, Wirth said, it will be younger activists and politicians who need to chart a new course for environmentalists.

"The next generation has got to define the new agenda," he said. "The current generation has got to hold onto what we have."
  

Pine forest study aboard Lejeune to have impact beyond base

December 13, 2010 8:55 AM

HOPE HODGE

 

Camp Lejeune’s 15,000 acres of longleaf pine trees will soon fall under the scrutiny of the USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station.

The base is one of three U.S. military installations selected for a five-year, $2.4 million study commissioned by the Defense Department’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, which will examine the way the conifers, known for their dense wood and longevity, store and retain carbon dioxide. Scientists hope the results of the study will help both landowners to better manage their forested land and use trees to offset carbon emissions.
Kurt Johnsen, a plant physiologist based in Durham’s Research Triangle Park and SRS’s principal investigator on the study, said the study would not only benefit defense installations.

“What we want to do is have a fairly complex model that land managers can then use to manage their forests,” he said. “We’ll take this fairly complex information and distill it into tools for the managers.”

The study, he said, will involve site work at Fort Benning, Ga., and Fort Polk., La., as well as Camp Lejeune. Researchers will meet with base environmental personnel at each location this summer to discuss how to proceed with the work. Later, they will isolate certain tree stands to study.

Collaborating on the study are researchers from Auburn University and the University of Florida.
Lisa Samuelson, director of the Center for Longleaf Pine Ecosystems Auburn and this project’s leader, said the military bases provide a uniquely pristine environment to conduct an extensive study of this sort.

“They have very good records, and they’ve been planting long leaf pine for awhile,” she said. “Not only military but the private landowner will be able to use these models when we finish them.”

According to researchers, the three bases were selected to survey as wide a climate variation possible among longleaf habitats in the southern U.S.

Since only three million acres of the once-plentiful pines remain in the south, the roughly 15,000 stable acres of longleafs on each of the bases is also significant.

Camp Lejeune environmental officials said they will support the study while not taking an active role.
“We believe your research will be of benefit to MCB CamLej and will support and facilitate access to research sites on the base,” Lejeune Environmental Management director John Townson wrote in an Oct. 5 letter to Samuelson.

But, Townson wrote, no scheduled military training or natural resources management activities would be disrupted on account of the researchers.

At any rate, it will be several years before work begins in earnest aboard Camp Lejeune. The analysis of the trees — which will include study of root structure, decomposing taproots, and carbon in the soil — will move forward at the rate of one base per year beginning in March. Fort Benning is expected to be the first base studied.
Samuelson said she looked forward to seeing the results, expected to be presented to DoD officials in 2016.

“It’s exciting,” she said. “It hasn’t been done before and it’s a really useful project.”

© Copyright 2010 Freedom Communications. All Rights Reserved.
  

Court to Weigh Private Interests' Intervention in NEPA Disputes

---

December 10, 2010

By LAWRENCE HURLEY of Greenwire

A federal appeals court will consider next week whether to abandon a legal rule that makes it difficult for private interests to intervene in environmental disputes in the Western states.

Industry and recreational groups are pushing hard for the change, while environmentalists are largely staying silent.

At issue is the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' "federal defendant rule," which prevents anyone other than the federal government from defending claims under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the main legal mechanism for challenging government actions that affect the environment.

The argument in Wilderness Society v. U.S. Forest Service in Pasadena on Monday will be before an en banc panel of 11 judges, rather than the usual three-judge panel, because the court is considering whether to overturn one of its precedents.

The rule, unique to the 9th Circuit, irks business and recreational interests in particular. They feel their voices are not always heard when environmental groups file suit.

Some federal district courts within the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction have even started to apply it to cases outside of the NEPA context, including Endangered Species Act cases.

Industry groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, see the rule as a growing threat.

If the court were to abandon the rule, "it would be devastating to the environmental groups," said Robin Conrad, who heads the group's legal arm. "It's an effort to shut out an opposing point of view."

The chamber has filed a friend-of-the-court brief that has been joined by the American Petroleum Institute, the National Association of Manufacturers and other industry groups, calling for the rule to be axed.

Intriguingly, environmental groups appear somewhat conflicted about the matter. They have stayed neutral on the question of whether the rule should be kept and have downplayed the importance of the case.

Legal observers say that is because while the rule might help them in some cases, in others, it does not.

As a whole, the rule is "disturbing and misplaced," said Richard Frank, director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center at the University of California, Davis.

The rule effectively stops interested parties from making perfectly valid arguments that could help the court reach better decisions, he added.

What the court decides to do following the arguments Monday is of consequence because the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction includes the nine Western states, and its caseload therefore includes a substantial number of environmental cases in which the federal government is the defendant.

"This is a very important issue, because industry groups are often concerned that the government will not adequately defend the actions it took to comply with NEPA," said Arthur Hellman, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Elizabeth Howard, a partner at Dunn Carney Allen Higgins & Tongue in Portland, Ore., who represents ranchers and farmers who use public lands and has filed a brief in the case, noted that her clients suffer when they cannot intervene.

"A lot of environmental groups are trying to effectuate change through the legal system, so they spend of lot of time and energy filing lawsuits," she said. "Right now, we are being precluded from intervening."

Recreation groups at forefront

Although the business community has weighed in, the lead on the issue is actually being taken by recreational groups, including the Magic Valley Trail Machine Association, which wanted to intervene when the Wilderness Society and Prairie Falcon Audubon Inc. sought to challenge a U.S. Forest Service decision concerning motorized travel in the Sawtooth National Forest in Idaho.

The environmental groups argue that the Forest Service wanted to allow too much access for motorized vehicles, and asked the courts to restrict that access.

Their opponents had the opposite view: that the Forest Service had already restricted access too much. But U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge of the District of Idaho ruled that the recreational groups could not intervene.

A three-judge panel heard arguments on the issue but did not issue a ruling. Instead, the judges asked for the court to hear the case en banc so that the future of the federal defendant rule could be dealt with.

Law professor Hellman said the rule is of particular importance when actions taken by a prior administration are being challenged when another administration is in power. Now for example, George W. Bush-era decisions are being defended by the Obama administration.

"Private groups that support the earlier administration's approach may fear that the new officials will throw in the towel," Hellman said.

Although it is business and recreational interests that are currently concerned about the rule, in the future, environmental groups could find themselves in the same position when a Republican administration is tasked with defending Obama administration decisions, Hellman added.

The environmental plaintiffs do not want to get into that debate, admitted Megan Anderson O'Reilly, a lawyer at the Western Environmental Law Center who is arguing the case for the plaintiffs.

She agreed that the rule "cuts both ways," indicating that was the main reason environmental groups have not advocated a particular position on the rule.

As for the federal government, it filed a brief saying the case "does not properly present the issue," in part because the recreational groups only want to intervene concerning the possible remedy that the plaintiffs are seeking.

Under 9th Circuit precedent, "that type of participation has been allowed by this court even with the federal defendant rule in place," the government's brief states.

The mere fact that the appeals court has decided to hear the case en banc is significant, according to the University of California, Davis' Frank.

"It may signal that the court as a whole is willing to revisit the rule," he said. "I, for one, think that is most welcome."

Copyright 2010 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

For more news on energy and the environment, visit www.greenwire.com.
Greenwire is published by Environment & Energy Publishing. Read More »