Partnership For Policy Integrity

The Tennessee Valley Authority doesn’t need renewable energy that increases forest harvesting in the Southeast.

How did something that emits so much conventional pollution, and more greenhouse gases than coal, come to be incentivized as “green” energy?

Gasification is not a magic technology that makes toxics disappear. New garbage gasifiers in Massachusetts will emit hundreds of tons of air pollution and consume materials that should be recycled.

Pennsylvania has spent millions of dollars in public funds on bioenergy that emits more pollution than oil and gas.

Lithonia, GA and Manchester, UK, are facing polluting, high-emissions biomass power plants sold as “green” power, even though air pollution is already at unhealthy levels.

Considering renewable energy is supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including low-efficiency, high-emissions biomass power in state RPS programs doesn’t make sense.

Plans for forest thinning and biopower in California would require logging millions of forest acres per year. Is this really the state’s “carbon free” renewable energy plan?

The biomass plant proposed for North Springfield VT will be a large source of pollution and use unsustainable amounts of wood for fuel.

The State of Massachusetts is serious about reducing carbon emissions and policymakers realized that providing renewable energy subsidies to a technology that makes climate change worse didn’t make sense.

High-emissions biomass power doesn’t belong in a renewable energy portfolio alongside no-emissions technologies like wind and solar.

Americans across the political spectrum want renewable energy that protects health and the environment, and understand that burning trees for energy is not “clean and green”.

There’s no faster way to move carbon into the air than by cutting and burning forests, and permit data shows biomass is dirtier than coal. But consumers pay more for this so-called “clean” energy.

“Until the state has a solid understanding of how much wood is realistically available without diminishing the long-term health and diversity of our forests, and until there is a protective harvesting standard in place, there should be a moratorium on any new, large-scale facilities in Vermont.”

New ratepayer subsidies to burn trash in New Jersey ? Sounds like a plan that only the waste industry could love, but it’s the state’s “green” Energy Master Plan that writes a new chapter in NJ’s waste industry story.

Lisa Jackson: “We all remember ‘too big to fail’; this pseudo jobs plan to protect polluters might well be called ‘too dirty to fail.’ How we respond will mean the difference between sickness and health — in some cases, life and death — for hundreds of thousands of people.”

Numbers from the Beaver Wood Energy biomass plant reveal it will be one of the biggest polluters in Vermont.

By pretending that cutting and burning whole trees doesn’t add carbon to the atmosphere, the newly watered-down Massachusetts regulations claim the legitimacy of being “based on Manomet” – while ignoring that study’s key finding.

The biomass industry often claims they don’t burn whole trees for fuel. New pictures show that not only are whole trees used for fuel, but these are very large trees indeed.

EPA has been presented with ample evidence that biomass energy increases greenhouse gas emissions, but has ignored the science to favor a politically-connected industry.

What do Australia and Massachusetts have in common? Both governments are have cutting edge energy policies that acknowledge the drawbacks of biomass energy – showing that biomass energy is truly an emerging threat to forests worldwide, but that sane policy responses are possible.

The goal of the Vermont Energy Plan is to help the state develop energy sources that are abundant, safe, and healthy, and above all, do not exacerbate climate change. Biomass energy does not meet these criteria.

Taxpayers and ratepayers should not have to pay extra for “renewable” energy that accelerates forest cutting, increases greenhouse gas emissions, and pollutes the air.

It’s a measure of how pervasive the “biomass benefits climate” myth has become that even the well-respected Climate Progress blog, edited by the great Joe Romm, seems to have bought into the propaganda.

A new report gives the most comprehensive listing to date of biomass power facilties proposed around the country, and the taxpayer and ratepayer-funded incentives driving explosive growth in the biomass industry.

What the NH biomass plant operators know, and what their statements demonstrate, is that biomass fuel is getting scarce and costly, the biomass industry is heavily dependent on subsidies, and that pollution controls can be prohibitively expensive.

The Massachusetts rules will require for first time anywhere in the world that renewable energy credits for biomass energy be granted based on a common sense, life cycle assessment of the carbon emissions of burning forest wood to generate electricity.

Only in the la la land of biomass energy would burning trees be considered pollution control. But that’s where renewable energy policy is headed if the industry has its way.

Packaging Corporation of America worries that the 50 MW We Energies biomass plant will result in unforeseen forest management impacts, including clearcutting of northern hardwood stands for whole tree chips.

By delaying regulation of biomass carbon, EPA is greenlighting biomass emissions of 350 million tons of unregulated CO2 a year, equivalent to all the coal fired power plants in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio.

The environmental impact assessment from the Department of Energy reads like a biomass industry talking points memo, with whole chunks of text lifted straight from documents submitted by the developer.

NAFO’s strategy to convince EPA that biomass carbon emissions shouldn’t count relies on outsourcing carbon pollution to forests somewhere else.

It’s been an article of faith with many in Congress that everything from Godzilla (nukes) to unicorns (coal with carbon capture) belongs in a Clean Energy Standard. We’re so grateful to find Republicans that acknowledge that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a worthy goal, we figured we’d play along, and submit our comments on why biomass doesn’t belong in a Clean Energy Standard.

Health organizations, and the American people, tell Congress to stop legislating science and stop weakening one of the preeminent public health laws in the U.S.

EPA does not need to wait three years to assess the greenhouse gas implications of burning biomass for energy, and doing so will create a fleet of permanently unregulated plants that are huge greenhouse gas emitters.

Carbon dioxide emissions from the biomass boiler will be 3,120 pounds per megawatt-hour, more than six times the 510 pounds per megawatt-hour allowed for the facility’s new natural gas burner.

Many public officials don’t seem to recognize the threat that large-scale biomass plants and wood pellet manufacturing plants present to the State’s forests.

The Manomet study relies on a number of assumptions that minimize the calculation of net carbon emissions from biomass, meaning that actual emissions are likely significantly greater than the study concludes.

The only independent, multi-stakeholder study of the carbon impacts of burning trees to generate electricity found that it would take 40 years of forest regrowth just to get to parity in carbon pollution with burning coal for those same four decades. To get to parity with natural gas would take almost a century.

Acting as if the carbon emitted from trees cut and burned here will be sequestered by trees over there makes as much sense as letting a coal plant write off its emissions because it’s not cutting trees over there, either.

The current boom in biomass energy depends entirely on the mutually reinforcing myths of renewability and carbon neutrality. But in practice, biomass energy is far carbon neutral and actually looks a lot more like coal and oil.