Europe’s Crazy Climate Policy Is Threatening Forests And Wildlife

Europe’s appetite for wood pellets may lead to higher CO2 emissions for decades to come, while also putting US forests and wildlife habitats at risk.

Little remains but stumps and puddles in what was once a bottomland hardwood forest on the banks of the Roanoke River in northeastern North Carolina. The trees were turned into wood pellets for burning in power plants in Europe. (Joby Warrick/The Washington Post)

OAK CITY, N.C. —For the sake of a greener Europe, thousands of American trees are falling each month in the forests outside this cotton-country town.

Every morning, logging crews go to work in densely wooded bottomlands along the Roanoke River, clearing out every tree and shrub down to the bare dirt. Each day, dozens of trucks haul freshly cut oaks and poplars to a nearby factory where the wood is converted into small pellets, to be used as fuel in European power plants.

Soaring demand for this woody fuel has led to the construction of more than two dozen pellet factories in the Southeast in the past decade, along with special port facilities in Virginia and Georgia where mountains of pellets are loaded onto Europe-bound freighters. European officials promote the trade as part of the fight against climate change. Burning “biomass” from trees instead of coal, they say, means fewer greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

But that claim is increasingly coming under challenge. A number of independent experts and scientific studies — including a new analysis released Tuesday — are casting doubt on a key argument used to justify the cutting of Southern forests to make fuel. In reality, these scientists say, Europe’s appetite for wood pellets could lead to more carbon pollution for decades to come, while also putting some of the East Coast’s most productive wildlife habitats at risk.

“From the point of view of what’s coming out of the smokestack, wood is worse than coal,” said William H. Schlesinger, the former dean of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences and one of nearly 100 scientists to sign a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency last year asking for stricter guidelines on using biomass to generate electric power. “You release a lot of carbon in a short period of time, and it takes decades to pull that carbon back out of the atmosphere.”



Wood pellets made for power plants look similar to the ones sold to residential customers for heating stoves, but use different feedstock and processing. Here, a customer holds a handful of home-use wood pellets at a store in Cambridge, Mass. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)

The pellet makers and their supporters dismiss the criticisms, saying their industry will help lower greenhouse gas emissions over time, in part by giving landowners an incentive to plant still more trees. “Healthy markets have contributed to a 50 percent increase in volume of trees since the 1950s, which help offset 15 percent of U.S. carbon emissions annually,” said Gretchen Schaefer, spokeswoman for the National Alliance of Forest Owners, a trade group.

The controversy is prompting renewed scrutiny of a rapidly growing industry that is reshaping Southern landscapes from coastal Virginia to the Gulf of Mexico. All but nonexistent a decade ago, pellet mills have sprung up in seven states to fill galloping demand for renewable fuels to reduce global dependence on coal and petroleum. […]

The concern over emissions is compounded by what ecologists describe as a growing threat to forests and wildlife in the Southeast as demand for wood pellets grows. In North Carolina, the heaviest logging is occurring in flood plains and wetlands that are among the region’s most productive natural habits. In Georgia, where most of the trees for wood pellets are grown on pine plantations, natural forests are rapidly disappearing as landowners see new opportunities to make money, said Ben Larson, forestry and bio-energy program manager for the National Wildlife Federation.

The landscapes most at risk, Larson said, are traditional Southern savannas with a canopy of tall pines and an understory of grass and shrubs that provide food and shelter for wildlife. With more land converted to pines to make wood pellets, the vital understory is disappearing, replaced by stands of fast-growing pines that are raised as a cash drop.

“The result may be more ‘forests,’ but they will mostly be pine plantations,” Larson said. “And that’s bad for wildlife.”

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