21 January 2020 – A couple days ahead of the release of the initial results and main conclusions of a joint fact finding mission on the availability and sustainability on biomass, over 20 NGOs primarily based in the United States and Estonia sent a formal request that the results include NGO reports in their inquiry and that they are published in English. The inquiry is being carried out by the Planning Office for the Living Environment (“Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving” or PBL) in the Netherlands. Forests in the United States and Estonia are the primary locations from which the Netherlands sources from to import and burn wood pellet biomass in power stations and generate industrial-scale electricity. Following the conclusion of the study that the PBL will release in March, a council in the Netherlands will use those results to set standards for biomass. In the formal request, the NGOs clearly explain why non-peer reviewed evidence must be considered: namely, over the years, scientific inquiry has been limited. In general, it does not consistently establish the origin of the wood burned in Dutch power stations, examine the logging methods used, nor does it expose the direct impact this logging has on forests from which the pellet wood is sourced. This evidence has almost exclusively been gathered and distributed by NGO watchdogs (1), community group citizen science (2,3), and prominent media outlets (4, 5, 6, 7).Furthermore, the PBL has dodged requests that the results are posted in English. In order for transparency and review of the results of the joint fact-finding mission, the NGOs formally request that PBL posts results in English in order to allow international review from non-Dutch speaking scientists and NGOs.You can see the request here.
The lack of transparency, limitations of evidence, and limitation of independent scientists’ involvement in the consultation has been unsatisfactory to many parties. One scientist that was originally part of the consultation withdrew for this very reason (8).
2020 kicked off with important, major coverage of the wood pellet industry in two major North Carolina papers, the Raleigh News & Observer and the Durham Herald Sun. On the heels of our campaign victory achieved in the NC Clean Energy Plan in November, this is another significant break-through on biomass in North Carolina.
Our team at Dogwood Alliance and many of our partners provided data, sources, and quotes. The series also contains an interview with North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality Secretary, Michael Regan, in which he criticizes biomass and says he doesn’t “see a future in wood pellets.”
With this series, we see how the wood pellet industry has gone from a little-known issue in North Carolina to one of the most well-covered, top environmental issues in the state, and our elected officials are paying attention.
In Georgia, during last year’s legislative session, State Senator Lester Jackson introduced the Stand4Forests resolution, SR108. This year, we could see the resolution go to the floor for a vote! That means 2020 could be the year that Georgia officially stands for forests, endorsing the national Stand4Forests platform that opposes false solutions like biomass and advances protections for standing forests.
We’ll continue our strategic advocacy to policymakers in NC, throughout the region and abroad, to turn their statements into real, immediate action that pulls the brakes on the destructive wood pellet industry and ensures more protections that keep our beautiful Southern forests standing.
See links to the stories below, and please share with your networks and on social media using the hashtags #StopEnviva and #Stand4Forests.
EPES, AL – This week news broke that the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) approved Enviva’s application to build a massive wood pellet facility in Sumter County, just weeks after a public comment period ended in which hundreds of people submitted comments opposing the new mill. ADEM’s quick approval of the Maryland-based company’s 1.2 million ton wood pellet facility delivers a dangerous blow to the local community of Epes, the region’s forests, and our global climate.
As the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference continues in Madrid, the global calls for real climate action have become increasingly urgent. Millions of people walked out of schools and workplaces in recent youth-led climate strikes, over 11,000 scientists have declared we are in a climate emergency, and just this week the head of the U.N. warned that we are falling dangerously far behind on necessary global climate action.
“Do we really want to be remembered as the generation that buried its head in the sand?” asked U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, referring to inaction on climate. The statement could not be more apt than for governments, industries, and investors that still promote the burning of biomass for electricity — which flies in the face of a decade of scientific evidence that says burning biomass is worse for the climate than burning coal.
With a production capacity of 1.2 million tons of wood pellets per year, the Epes facility will require up to 30,000 acres of forests to be cut down annually. Combined with its new Lucedale facility, currently under construction, Enviva’s expansion in the Gulf South will place intense pressure on Mississippi and Alabama’s forests. In a region where the land has been degraded by the forest products industry for decades, intact forests and wetlands are now more important than ever to protect communities from the increasing frequency and severity of flash floods, landslides, hurricanes and heavy rain.
In a community that is more than 90% African-American, Enviva’s wood pellet facility will bring harmful air pollution, dust, constant noise, and dangerous truck traffic. Despite a rosy corporate image portrayed by the company of coming to uplift communities in the Black Belt, Enviva represents the worst of a story that has played out time and again — dirty industry that parachutes in to extract resources and wealth, degrading the community’s health and land, for the benefit of a few, and the peril of many.
Last week, we stood together with community leaders and climate justice advocates to host a press conference about the destructive impacts of the wood pellet industry and other extractive industries in the state. Following the NC Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) Environmental Justice and Equity Advisory Board Meeting, Belinda Joyner of the Concerned Citizens of Northampton County and Debra David of the Concerned Citizens of Richmond County shared their experiences living with the impacts of polluting industries — including Enviva wood pellet facilities, hog factories, Duke Energy’s power plants, and the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
Community members and advocates hold signs at the press conference in support of climate justice and in opposition to extractive industries and dirty energy.
Emily Zucchino, Dogwood Alliance’s Director of Community Engagement, and William Barber III of the NC Poor People’s Campaign and Climate Reality Project also spoke, renewing calls on Governor Cooper’s administration and DEQ to issue a cumulative impact assessment of extractive industries in the state, starting with the wood pellet industry.
The meeting and press conference came on the heels of DEQ approving Enviva’s third massive expansion this year — this time at its dirty Northampton County facility, just a few miles from Belinda’s home. Each time Enviva applied to expand, community members and North Carolinians from across the state spoke out in favor of forest protection and climate justice, urging DEQ to deny the production increases.
Belinda Joyner of Garysburg, NC, Concerned Citizens of Northampton County
“They [DEQ] had a public hearing in three different counties, and to come back with the same result, I find something wrong with that… Because they did not listen to anything that we said in Northampton County. They did not hear the cries of the people who can’t sit on their porches, can’t hang their clothes on the line, with trucks 24/7 up and down the highway.” – Belinda Joyner, Concerned Citizens of Northampton County
Throughout the press conference and at the Environmental Justice and Equity Advisory Board meeting beforehand, we kept hearing a similar refrain — a call on DEQ to stop treating communities like dumping grounds and sacrifice zones.
Debra David of Dobbins Heights, NC, Concerned Citizens of Richmond County
“Where I live in Dobbins Heights, we already have Duke Energy, Piedmont Gas, Perdue Farms, CSX Railroad, Trinity Chemical Factory, and we have Enviva built on top of that. So I feel like we are a dumping ground.” – Debra David, Concerned Citizens of Richmond County
The seriousness of the climate crisis demands transformative action to transition to a clean energy economy and dramatically scale up forest protection. Issuing permits now for expanded forest destruction and new fossil fuel infrastructure locks in dangerous emissions for decades to come, at a time when we urgently need decision-makers to pull the brakes on these harmful industries.
William Barber III, NC Poor People’s Campaign and Climate Reality Project
“When we allow our communities to be encroached upon by fossil fuel infrastructure, whether it be pipelines or power plants, and when we allow our forests to be cut down and consumed, it increases the amount of greenhouse gas emissions being dumped into our global atmosphere and lowers the probability that we will act in enough time to minimize the worst effects of the environmental crisis.” – William Barber III, NC Poor People’s Campaign and Climate Reality Project
Emily Zucchino, Dogwood Alliance
“Those hit first and worst by climate change are often the very communities who live with the pollution and disruption of the industries that have caused and are worsening the climate crisis. Yet our state laws and regulations keep us bound to a system that approves industry in a silo, failing to consider the full and long-lasting impacts.”
Destructive industries like the wood pellet industry have been approved to expand repeatedly, without proper scrutiny of their full impacts on our forests, climate, community resiliency, and public health. It’s time for the Cooper administration to conduct a cumulative impact assessment of the industry’s full impacts, and not continue to allow them to go unaccounted for.
After these leaders spoke out to call for a cumulative impact assessment and shared their experiences, we gathered for community reflections — a powerful session facilitated by Jodi Lasseter, co-convener of the NC Climate Justice Collective.
We gathered in a circle at the Walnut Creek Wetland Center to make space for community reflections.
The permitting of Enviva’s expansion has failed to reflect the real concerns of North Carolinians across the state, and these expansions will be a tremendous loss for our forests and communities. So as we continue to urge our decision-makers to halt the expansion of this destructive industry, we also make space to recognize and mourn the devastating impacts of these facilities.
We ended the day with gratitude, in recognition that the movement for forest protection, climate action, and justice for all grows stronger every day — and we’re strongest when we stand together.
Before a crucial vote occurs November 26 in the Netherlands on a coal ban and biomass subsidies, environmental organisations from the United States & Estonia demand the Netherlands close its coal power stations without converting them to biomass and redirect subsidies supporting the burning of wood to genuinely low-carbon renewable energy such as wind and solar power.
In an open letter from NGOs in the sourcing region of Netherlands utility RWE’s biomass demand- the United States and Estonia- and joined by concerned international organizations, Dutch Climate Minister Wiebes & members of the Dutch House are warned that transitioning from coal to biomass would be simply replacing one carbon-intensive energy source for another. The Netherlands already subsidizes the burning of 3.5 million tonnes of wood pellets each year heavily. Those subsidies make it profitable for energy companies to continue burning coal for several more years, and result in wasted public resources, ruined forests, harmful community impacts, and biodiversity loss.
“Biomass is the new coal. Burning biomass increases carbon in the atmosphere and means warming for decades to centuries. We need to protect and expand forests as part of our climate strategy— we cannot log and burn our way to a stable climate future,” says Rita Frost, Campaigns Director at Dogwood Alliance.
“Estonian forests are experiencing most intensive exploitation in history as logging rates are record high. This puts a huge pressure on forest biodiversity and damages both the carbon stock and sink for decades to come, limiting our own possibilities for achieving carbon neutrality. The logging incentive driven by wood burning subsides in other countries is an unnecessary fuel for this environmental destruction,” says Siim Kuresoo, Estonian Fund for Nature.
Massive new subsidy payouts have recently been approved by the Dutch government and the Netherlands is at serious risk of compromising its climate goals by locking in dirty bioenergy infrastructure for years to come. Three of the Netherlands’ newest coal plants face early closure due to a climate coalition agreement. Emerging science makes it clear that biomass is a risky investment that cannot be afforded when time and money are of the essence to tackle climate change.
In order to respond responsibly to the climate emergency, the NGOs make it clear to the Netherlands that allowing for the conversion of coal stations to biomass is an impediment to the clean energy transition. Greenlighting biomass provides a life-line for dirty infrastructure and pulls investments away from true renewables like wind & solar power.
Current policies that treat biomass as carbon-neutral do not reflect their real impacts on the climate and public money should only be used to subsidize technologies that genuinely reduce carbon emissions.
See the letter here: https://www.dogwoodalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/NL-Coal-Phaseout-Sign-on-Letter.pdf
We’re excited to share with you the final Stories Happen in Forests video for this year: Grow & Forage! Meet Indy Srinath, a manager of urban gardens. She’s not only a gardener, but she’s an educator and a forager, too. Indy is passionate about honoring the sacrifices of those who paved the way for her, permaculture, and mushrooms!
In the video, Indy shares her belief that urban gardening is one of the most radical things a person can do. She also shares her deep respect for our forests: from her drive to learn and understand what the forest is communicating, to her desire to exist in harmony with all life in the woods.
I learned a lot from Indy on our tour of the community garden and on our hike through some of her favorite foraging spots. From how fruits and veggies grown in the garden are shared among the community, to how to identify mushrooms and the role they play in the forest. A big thank you to Indy for sharing her wisdom with you and with me.
Many will say fighting climate change is expensive. Calculating the cost of inaction, though, makes it obvious that the investment in climate mitigation (reducing our greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation (making our communities more resilient to climate impacts like flooding) is worth it. But funding false solutions? Here’s where we can all agree: we don’t have the time nor the money to waste on so-called solutions that don’t work.
Enviva’s Northampton Biomass production facility
Led by countries in the European Union, governments around the world are turning towards replacing coal with biomass energy as a categorized renewable energy source. This move flies in the face of research, which has shown time and time again that burning biomass from forests for energy is dirty and destructive. Burning forest biomass has shown itself to be a significant contributor to (not a solution to) climate change because it releases large amounts of greenhouse gases, removes crucial forest ecosystems that provide habitat and are carbon-capturers, and harms communities where the facilities are located.
Coal-to-biomass conversions are uneconomical compared with genuine clean energy alternatives. A 2017 analysis of the UK power sector, for example, found that by 2025 Drax’s existing biomass plants will be more expensive to operate than building completely new solar and wind capacity.
This week, a critical new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council detailed how 15 EU member states are wasting billions of euros on dirty bioenergy subsidies each year. Burnout: EU Clean Energy Policies Lead to Forest Destruction shows that $7 billion euros are paid out every year to utilities and end users of biomass. Enviva, the world’s largest supplier of biomass, reaps these benefits when they sell to European utilities. Renewable energy subsidies should help address the climate emergency, not make it worse.
Even more, scientists are urgently calling for the world to protect forests, not destroy them. Renewable energy subsidies should be going towards truly clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar, while we also invest in climate solutions like keeping forests standing. One of the most important places for that to happen is in forests in the Southern US.
The new NRDC report shows how much Europe funds destruction of Southern forests for biomass. We don’t have the time nor the money to be swindled by biomass as an energy source any longer. Enviva has plans for a massive scale-up of their wood pellet production in the Southern US. This is bad for our forests, climate, and communities.
There are over 35 million acres of wetland forests in the 14 states of the US South, providing critical ecosystem services, like cleaning air, filtering water, and protecting communities from floods. We know that, on average, natural wetland forests left standing, not logged, are worth over $18,000 per acre. That doesn’t exactly tell us what we could lose, though, if the wood pellet industry has its way.
The Yadkin-Pee Dee River flows through North and South Carolina, with headwaters near Blowing Rock, NC and an endpoint in the Winyah Bay near Georgetown, SC. Known as the “Tigris and Euphrates of the South“, the river is a main source of drinking water and economic opportunity for the surrounding communities and has been the site of human civilization for over twelve thousand years, home to the Pee Dee Tribe and other indigenous societies.
Watersheds are land areas that surround rivers, and water from those areas flow into the main river systems. The Pee Dee watershed, which surrounds the Yadkin and Pee Dee rivers, encompasses 18,864 square miles of land in both North and South Carolina.
Perhaps most importantly, the Pee Dee Watershed is home to roughly 1.5 million people in 19 counties across two states. The communities in these counties rely on the natural infrastructure and ecosystem services that wetland forests provide, equivalent to $36 billion in value. These wetland forests provide critical, life-giving services to urban centers and rural communities like the Pee Dee Indian Tribe throughout the watershed. But these ecosystem services are at risk. The wood pellet industry targets wetland forests just like these for logging.
The forest products industry is skilled at hiding its forest destruction and degradation behind fancy words and misleading statements. When a logging company goes into a forest in the US South, regardless of where the logs are going, the standard operation is to create a massive clearcut, removing all available wood, leaving only minimal branches, bare earth, and weeds behind. The wood pellet industry often claims it only uses “waste” wood, but their definition of “waste” is very broad, including whole trees not suitable for the paper or lumber industry — like cypress trees in wetland forests.
After harvest — provided that the land is not converted to another use, like development or agriculture — the land may either be planted, usually with commercial monoculture species, or left to regenerate more naturally. If every tree is removed from the area, there will be no trees left to drop seeds for the next generation. This means that the cut down area will only grow with seeds from nearby areas, which may mean that the trees that come back are nothing like the trees that were cut down.
Because wetland forests are special ecosystems, clearcuts can be especially problematic. For example, scientists know that cypress trees — keystone species in bottomland hardwoods and floodplain forests — have very strict requirements for regrowth.
Cypress seeds:
In other words, unless extreme care is taken in wetland forests, cypress trees will not recover from clearcutting.
The Pee Dee Watershed includes a variety of protected areas, including public use areas, parks, national forests, national wildlife refuges, and wildlife management areas. Wetland forests, highly acclaimed for their ecosystem services, make up nearly a quarter of forests in the Pee Dee Watershed.
There are three currently active wood pellet production facilities that source from the Pee Dee Watershed: Enviva Hamlet (Hamlet, NC), Nature’s Earth Pellet Energy (Laurinburg, NC), and Enviva Sampson (Faison, NC). Of the three, the two Enviva facilities use and produce the vast majority (over 90%) of wood pellets from the region, exclusively for export to feed Europe’s growing energy demands.
Wood pellet facilities will accept wood from up to 75 miles away in any direction. That means that when combined, the three facilities have a potential sourcing impact on 1.4 million acres of wetland forests in the watershed. That is over 80% of total wetland forests in the watershed. Over the course of even a decade, impacts from logging can be staggeringly large. If these three facilities affect just 1% of available wetland forests for ten years, 140,000 acres of wetland forests could be destroyed in the Pee Dee Watershed alone.
These impacts are not just felt in the forests, but also in the quality of life for residents of the watershed. We know from our work on ecosystem services that wetland forests in the Pee Dee Watershed provide $26 billion in ecosystem services, which includes:
If 140,000 acres of the watershed were degraded through logging, it would mean:
I don’t know about you, but $2.4 billion in lost ecosystem services — like clean water, food production, protection from extreme weather events, and quality of life — seems like an awfully high price to pay for subsidizing Europe’s energy demands.
NC DEQ’s approval of Enviva’s Northampton facility expansion is the latest contradiction between the Cooper administration’s stance critiquing biomass and its continued inaction to address the threats the industry poses to our forests, communities, and climate
Yesterday, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) approved yet another massive expansion of the wood pellet export industry led by Enviva — this time at its dirty Northampton County facility. This approval represents another contradiction between the Cooper administration’s stance critiquing biomass in the state’s Clean Energy Plan and the agency’s continued greenlighting of the industry’s expansion. With this additional production capacity, North Carolina will now become the world’s largest wood pellet exporter.
The permit allows Enviva to increase its annual production to over 780,000 tons of wood pellets, which requires an equivalent of 18,750 acres of North Carolina’s forests to be clearcut each year. At a time when standing forests are more important than ever to store and sequester carbon and protect communities from flooding, the company’s four wood pellet facilities in the state will require over 60,000 acres of forests each year to be cut down to meet its 2.6 million ton production capacity.
The wood pellet industry has garnered statewide opposition from impacted community members, environmental justice advocates, health professionals, scientists, and other residents. During the public comment period, hundreds submitted comments opposing the permit — and thousands more have signed petitions to Governor Cooper urging his administration to place a moratorium on the expansion of the wood pellet industry until a statewide cumulative impact assessment is completed.
Despite a mounting body of scientific evidence warning governments against the large-scale use of bioenergy — such as the IPCC’s latest special report on Climate Change and Land1 — the Cooper administration has allowed this industry to expand without proper scrutiny, ignoring calls for a state cumulative impact study. As the permitting process has failed to account for the industry’s dangerous threats to forests, climate, and communities, it remains as urgent as ever for the Cooper administration to take a closer look at this industry and protect North Carolinians from the impacts of its expansion.
1“The production and use of biomass for bioenergy can have co-benefits, adverse side effects, and risks for land degradation, food insecurity, GHG emissions and other environmental and sustainable development goals (high confidence).” (SRCCL for Policymakers, B 3.3)
The Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) has issued a draft permit for Enviva to construct an enormous new wood pellet plant in Epes, Alabama. This is the first of four wood pellet facilities that Enviva hopes to build in Alabama.
If built, this plant would produce 1.2 million tons of wood pellets per year and would require nearly 80 acres of forests to be cut down per day, turned into wood pellets, and shipped overseas to be burned for electricity in Europe and Asia. It would be a huge emitter of greenhouse gases and other toxins that would threaten our climate and the local community’s health.
Alabama organizations know that their state will not benefit by allowing Enviva to build these facilities. In North Carolina, where Enviva operates four wood pellet facilities, NC Governor Roy Cooper recently delivered harsh criticism of the industry in the state’s Clean Energy Plan.
Local organizations concerned about Enviva’s proposed facility recently sent a letter to local residents warning them of the negative impacts of this industry.
Dear Resident, Enviva is planning to build a 1.2 million ton per year wood pellet production plant in Epes, Alabama. As Alabama-based organizations working to protect the health and natural resources of our state and its residents, we are concerned about the negative impacts of this industry. Enviva is the world’s largest wood pellet producer, and they’re based in the Washington DC area. The company has been constructing wood pellet facilities across the region to feed the demands of the biomass industry. Here’s what that means: Tens of thousands of acres of forests will be chopped down every year, turned into pellets at Enviva’s polluting facility, and then exported by boat overseas. If you’ve already heard about Enviva, you’ve probably only heard its side of the story — the one about coming here to save and uplift the Black Belt. The truth is that Enviva is part of the same story that has played out in Alabama for decades. Our communities have been exploited by a system that does not work for us. The Black Belt has been targeted by extractive industries (absentee landowners) that have harmed our communities and polluted our water resources . What was once forest will be shipped out of Pascagoula as far as the UK and Japan to be burned in power stations. European commitments to 20% renewable energy use by 2020 placed biomass on the renewables list. This has incentivized increased logging for wood pellet export in the southeast. Wood pellets made from whole bottomland hardwood trees, when burned, will emit carbon pollution comparable to, or in excess of, fossil fuels such as coal for approximately five decades. We’ll get the dust, the noise, the truck traffic, loss of native plants, trees, and wildlife habitat, and water pollution — but we’ll hardly reap in the benefits. Enviva’s wood pellet plants bring air pollution, 24/7 noise, and truck traffic that tears up local roads. The dust and pollution from this type of facility has been linked to respiratory illness, heart disease, and cancer. In North Carolina, Enviva was the subject of a lawsuit brought by concerned citizens for violating the Clean Air Act. Outside industries profit, while we are left with pollution, illness, and declining real estate values. Time and again, these industries come in with the irresistible promise of jobs and wealth. If industrial logging were a way to pull people out of poverty, Alabama would already be the wealthiest place on earth because we have some of the highest logging rates in the country. But the reality is that Alabama is the 6th poorest state in the nation. There has to be a better way. Enviva has a history of not being a good neighbor. To reap the benefits while leaving the community with the burden is an injustice. We care about you as our neighbor and the state of Alabama as our home. We are strong supporters of economic development and bringing in jobs that support our local communities. But our communities do not benefit from the destruction of our forests and the pollution of our people. We want economic development that is clean, healthy, and protects people and the environment. The Alabama Department of Environmental Management will be holding a public hearing to hear comments regarding the facility. The public hearing will be held on November 7, 2019, at 7:00 p.m. at the Livingston Civic Center on 101 Country Club Rd in Livingston, AL. An informal information session will be held immediately prior to the hearing from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. For more information, contact Michael Hansen at [email protected] or at (205) 701-4277. If you cannot attend in person, you can submit a public comment by November 8th to Ronald W. Gore, by email at [email protected], or to PO Box 301463, Montgomery, AL 36110. Sincerely, Alabama Interfaith Power & Light Alabama Rivers Alliance Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network Black Warrior Riverkeeper Gasp Mobile Bay Sierra Club
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