How to Defeat the Biomass and Logging False Solutions to Climate Change
“COP26 is full of false solutions, and we need to make sure they’re integrating real solutions, because we just don’t have much time,”
Rebecca Richie, 23-year-old climate advocate in Glasgow, Scotland, speaking to CBS News
Across the country from where I live in Oregon, my North Carolina friends Jack Spruill (ethical forest landowner ) and Andy Wood ( brilliant naturalist ) are two leaders within a growing environmental justice and preservation movement exposing the false lies of the powerful wood pellet and biomass industry.
They’re taking on big money with the one power the corporate executives will never have– a fierce love for home.
Their story is our story here in the Pacific Northwest, where the timber industry wants to drive the narrative of “green” energy with accelerating logging (often under the guise of thinning) of our forests and centuries-old carbon-storing trees. They try to win us over with their “false assurances,” as environmental champion Rachel Carson wrote with such prescience in 1962 within Silent Spring, the book that changed the world. In her words, “We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts.”
One key strategy applied by Andy, Jack, and many wonderful individuals and groups like the Dogwood Alliance, is a simple one. Take reporters into the field. Follow up, educate, and cultivate trained journalists. Encourage them to apply their investigative skills to the story. A prime example is the November 10, 2021 story I heard on National Public Radio: “Burning wood pellets isn’t the ‘clean energy’ it claims to be, critics say”
Show them firsthand the massive clearcutting of our last remaining bottomland hardwood forests in the southeast– crucial for filtering floodwaters, storing carbon, and preserving biodiversity. Andy Wood knows the intricacies of these elegantly beautiful forested swamps and their practical functions as the “liver and kidney” of surface waters.
Walk with reporters in the communities, where the world’s largest biomass producer Enviva operates wood pellet plants belching choking dust and pollutants. Let them breathe the air, too, and see firsthand who is exposed–mostly black and brown and undeserved communities
Invite journalists to join experts and community advocates aboard a boat in Wilmington, North Carolina, for a protest tour led by experts who give the facts behind the gargantuan domes at the port containing wood pellets to be shipped abroad–most to the UK to feed the dragon Drax, a highly subsidized company and its biggest CO2 emitter. This behemoth burns the pellets for electricity–spewing pollutants and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at higher levels than burning coal. From Enviva to Drax, the disdain for our life-giving forests is the same–writing off centuries-old trees as expendable, worthless, dead, dying, diseased, and without economic value.
The actions of advocates taking the press to the field are powerful and they are working. During the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, the media responded with articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, National Public Radio and more–all revealing the hypocrisy of Boris Johnson and the false biomass narrative. Guess who was often quoted? Andy Wood. Those field tours counted in a big way. I believe his words resonate a whole lot more than the prime minister’s platitudes.
“The world is at “one minute to midnight,” having run down the clock on waiting to combat climate change,” Johnson said. So true, yet he’s a major proponent of the biomass subsidies and greenwashing, hoping the youth of the future won’t notice.
They are taking notice. I’m proud to say my niece Becca Richie is one of the hundreds of thousands not buying the platitudes and false narratives. She has an admirable way with words, which captured the interest of the press on the streets of Glasgow this week, as in this excerpt from a November 5th CBS story:
“What is a promise if there’s no action behind it?” Richie, the protester from California, told CBS News. “These promises have become even more empty and meaningless exactly when they need to become more meaningful and powerful and true.”
Speaking truth to power is the only way we will ever make changes. The strategy of big industry has always been the same–to lie with false assurances, just hoping no one will actually go see what is happening on the ground. As the Glasgow COP26 climate summit comes to its disappointing close, I have two words for our inspiring youth activists and us older folks, too, who just might feel despairing: Rachel Carson.
Her 1962 book Silent Spring and her courage standing up then to the lies and bullying from those who value the almighty dollar over our children’s future remind us that no cause is too big, too overwhelming, or too far gone for us to walk away. So let’s roll up our sleeves and do our part wherever we live.
ACTION
- Contact President Biden and your congressional representatives and tell them to remove provisions in the Infrastructure and Build Back Better bills that are mandating logging on federal lands and committing to biomass false soloutions, instead of doubling down on solar, wind, and conservation. Read this open letter to the President and members of Congress from more than 100 scientists.
