In late 2012, Dogwood Alliance Campaign Director, Scot Quaranda, testified as an expert witness in opposition to the Forth Energy proposal for new biomass utilities in Scotland. Late last week, the company cancelled its plans to build these new facilities. Read the press release from Dogwood Alliance and our allies at BiofuelWatch and Global Justice Ecology Project celebrating the announcement and placing it into larger context…
In November of 2011, Enviva, a major corporate wood pellet producer with international sales, began operations at a rebuilt, former Georgia Pacific sawmill in Ahoskie, NC. Residents close to the plant have faced 24/7 extreme noise and lights, dust that coats cars, buildings, and lungs in just a few minutes, along with dangerous heavy truck traffic. While European power plants seek huge shipments of wood pellets as supposedly “greener” fuel than the coal they burned in the past, eastern North Carolina has turned into the Southeast’s latest energy colony.
Burning the forests that are supposed to be our best defense against climate change to protect us against climate change has to be one of the most ridiculous ideas I’ve ever heard. Yet over the last few years, Europe has wholeheartedly embraced this false solution to climate change, and we’ve seen a dramatic increase in logging in the Southern US to fuel European demand. Along the way, the US South has become the largest wood pellet export region in the world.
Not only does clearcutting US forests, turning them into pellets, and shipping them to Europe to be burned for electricity have a grievous cost for our climate, but it also destroys the habitat of the South’s rich and biodiverse plant and animal ecosystems.
Last month we released our first investigative video in support of the Our Forests Aren’t Fuel campaign: Wetlands Up in Smoke. The short film featuring a wide variety of voices documents the growing impact of the wood pellet industry on our Forests, community and climate.
