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Author Topic: You will have to pick a side. There is no longer Room for Procrastination  (Read 9814 times)

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AGelbert

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July 13, 2021




Europe’s Biomass Blunder Shows Why Trusting 🐘🦖 GOP’s Trillion Trees Climate 😉 Plan Would Be A Bad Idea

The American Conservation Coalition’s campaign to greenwash Republicans exists to generate ‘man bites dog’ type stories, like hits in the Washington Post and Fox News on Monday, about how maybe the GOP isn’t so bad on climate change, since they spout catchphrases like “innovation” and claim to support climate policies (that actually reward polluters), like the Trillion Trees proposal. 

While on the surface the GOP’s trillion trees sound like they might be a great win for the environment and climate, we already know what the reality of this sort of approach would mean: more pollution. We know this is the case because it’s already happening, thanks to a Sequoia-sized loophole in a European Union policy similarly aimed at reducing emissions. 

A recent CNN feature on Enviva’s North Carolina wood pellet production facility (and a major feature by Danielle Purifoy, writing for Scalawag Magazine, Southerly, and Environmental Health News, last fall) make it clear that subsidizing the timber industry is no climate solution. 

It started in 2009, when the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive “classified biomass as a renewable energy source — on par with wind and solar power.” Instead of burning coal, they could burn biomass, and supposedly reduce emissions by making use of waste wood that would otherwise go unused. Unfortunately, though, the policy doesn't require that it has to be waste wood, so now companies are felling forests and sowing plantations across the American Southeast to satisfy European energy demands. (Seriously, the paralells to the slave trade are stark.) As a result, those communities are facing dangerous levels of PM2.5 and other air pollutants, leading to a litany of health complaints. 

CNN spoke with people like Andrea Macklin about symptoms and impacts from the biomass industry, finding issues ranging from a loss of sleep due to the 24/7 noise from the plant, to a majority of residents experiencing high blood pressure, with Macklin’s heart condition forcing the 44-year-old out of work and his wife and son’s asthma being exacerbated by the pollution from Enviva’s plant. “Since the plant started operating,” CNN reported, “his wife and son can’t spend more than five minutes outside without coughing.” 

Adding insult to literal injury? It’s not even actually reducing the levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. The only place where levels are dropping are in the record-keeping of the European companies, because the biomass’s carbon emissions are recorded based on where the trees were cut, not where the biomass was actually burned. That classification was made to avoid double-counting when doing scientific calculations and was not intended to be the basis for public policy where all emissions end up in our one shared atmosphere no matter where they’re burned. The climate doesn’t care if the wood pellets processed in Northampton County, North Carolina are burned in Northampton, England. The carbon pollution is going back into the same atmosphere. 

While 🦕😈 🐘 deniers sometimes rail against U.S. climate action by pointing out that it will just push industry out to countries with looser environmental standards, increasing the total amount of pollution on the planet, in this case, the U.S. is that polluter-permitting country whose own citizens are suffering for the illusory benefit of foreign carbon accounting balance sheets.

As usual, the specific people left to suffer with the downsides of industry are those who already face a disproportionate burden . CNN analyzed records on pollution and demographics, because not only is Northampton, home to the Macklins and Enviva’s plant (along with three additional major air pollution sources), is predominately Black, but eight of Enviva’s nine plants are sited “in communities that have higher percentage of Black residents than their states as a whole.” All nine “are in census tracts that have lower median household incomes than their states.” 

Enviva says it takes environmental justice concerns “very seriously” and that they “work closely” with locals “to ensure our operations bring both positive economic and environmental impact,” before writing off the complaints as “generic” and coming from “the same activists we’ve heard from before.”

Which is not to say that trees aren’t part of the answer. But it’s not just trees, it’s forests. The entire 🌲🌳 forest ecosystem needs to be functional for carbon to be stored long term. As Dogwood Alliance co-founder Danna Smith explained to CNN,”the forestry industry and the wood pellet industry says that trees are renewable, but we aren’t renewing thousand-year-old ecosystems. They’re renewing forests for commercial 💵 production. So you’ll see trees on the landscape that are maybe, you know, 30 years old. That’s not an ecosystem — that’s a fiber farm.”

Still, some conservatives will insist subsidizing the timber industry and further polluting historically excluded communities is an acceptable price to pay to make it look like the GOP is acting on climate. They'll also claim those polluting industries will bring wealth and prosperity to those who live nearby.

As Smith points out, however, “if the wood products industry and biomass were a way of growing strong rural economies in the southeastern region, these rural communities should be some of the wealthiest on the planet. We are in the world’s largest wood producing region. But you don’t see any evidence in these rural communities of thriving rural economies. The opposite is actually true.

Subsidizing the timber industry in the name of climate action doesn’t help the climate and offers little-to-no real economic benefits to the local communities it floods with air pollution. Anyone buying into the GOP’s trillion trees greenwashing wood do well to reconsider.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

 

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