Blazing our way to apocalypse: The unexamined source of our climate catastrophe Much has been made of fossil fuels, but few understand the dangers of wood burning. Part 2 of a 3-part series

SOUTHAMPTON COUNTY, Va. A truck laden with tree trunks pulled into an unloading zone at a dusty mill. The driver stepped out, into the sapping Southern heat. In a single sweep, a crane hoisted the load off his trailer, depositing it atop a much larger stack of trunks. As he drove off for his next load, another truck pulled in behind him, ready to repeat the industrial ritual. This scene plays out all through the day here, day after day. In satellite pictures, the towering mounds of leafless trees — all of them destined to become wood pellets — resemble thousands and thousands of sepia-toned pick-up sticks.

An American company named Enviva, the world’s biggest producer of wood pellets for power plants, built this mill near Virginia’s border with North Carolina in 2012. It’s a noisy amalgam of metal equipment that billows steam over a 120-acre site, which was carved from thick forest. Bulldozers move massive piles of woodchips. Convoys of trucks deliver logs and chips from nearby logging sites. A separate convoy hauls the finished pellets off to a port, to set sail to be burned in foreign lands.

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The mill eats through a million tons of wood every year. Mills like it began popping up in rural areas like this in Virginia and North Carolina between 2006 and 2010, spurring logging during an economic downturn. This one opened just outside the city limits of a forlorn town that’s home to a modest forest-based industry and a long strip of chain stores. Nearly a quarter of the 8,500 residents of that town, Franklin, Va.,live in poverty — double the state average.

But Enviva’s young business is thriving. It is now operating, building or acquiringfour pellet ports and seven pellet mills, from Virginia to Florida, across to Mississippi and Alabama. The industry’s expanding footprint this year reached Louisiana, where a British power company began operating a pellet mill and a wood pellet port. Currently, there are 27 wood pellet mills scattered across the Southeast producing pellets for European power plants, and at least 25 more mills are being planned.

The wood at Enviva’s mills, and at all the mills like it, is ground down, heated up, dried out and pressed into hard pellets one to two inches long. So much moisture is baked out of the wood that a ton of tree trunks produces only half a ton of pellets. The wood pellets are trucked from mills to ports along the Eastern seaboard and Gulf Coast, then shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands and other nations, where they’re burned for electricity, pouring carbon dioxide into an overheating atmosphere.

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As the world struggles to cope with the flooding, drought, and heat-wave disasters that climate change is amplifying, producing these finger-sized pellets in America and burning them in Europe is throwing fuel on a global climate crisis. The power plants are based in Europe, but it’s American forests that are doing the most to feed their boilers.

“The consequences are very serious,” said Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University whose work focuses on bioenergy. He is a prominent critic of the use of wood energy. “It takes a massive amount of trees to make a very small amount of energy.”

Burning wood pellets to produce a megawatt hour of electricity produces 15 to 20 percent more climate-changing carbon dioxide pollution than burning coal, analysis of Drax data shows. And that’s just the CO2 pouring out of the smokestack. Add in pollution from the fuel needed to grind, heat and dry the wood, plus transportation of the pellets, and the climate impacts are even worse. According to Enviva, that adds another 20 percent worth of climate pollution for that one megawatt hour.

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Felling the trees needed to produce those pellets contributes to climate-changing deforestation. Most of the trees are being cut down in American states where forests

lack environmental protections. This is particularly true in the Southeast, one of the planet’s most biologically diverse and heavily logged regions.

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Scientists and environmentalists agree that wood energy can sometimes help the environment. The main factors that determine whether it could help save the planet — or help destroy it — are the scale of the operation and the source of the wood. Using sawdust and mill leftovers to heat and power a school in a Pacific Northwest timber town may help. Cutting down forests to fuel an international energy market will not.

“You do biomass wrong, and you’re going to have big carbon impacts, big ecosystem impacts, big public health impacts,” saidNathanael Greene, director of the renewable energy policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an American nonprofit that campaigns against the use of wood pellets in power plants. “It can be every bit as damaging as burning coal.” The U.S. pellet industry quickly grew too big to rely on logging and sawmill waste. The American logging industry’s ups and downs are rooted in construction sector trends — and experts say it wouldn’t be feasible for Europe’s power plants to depend on an undependable flow of its trash wood. “I can’t see the energy industry having its feedstock affected by a housing cycle,” said Robert Abt, a forestry professor at North Carolina State University. “You just can’t build a significant energy sector from picking up the slash from a cyclical lumber industry.” The wood pellet mills are paying for trees to be cut down — trees that could be used by other industries, or left to grow and absorb carbon dioxide. And the mills are being bankrolled by climate subsidies in Europe, where wood pellets are replacing coal at a growing number of power plants. The subsidies are being spent on wood energy because of an entrenched loophole in European Union energy rules. That loophole treats all wood energy as clean energy, as though it releases no climate pollution. That artifice is rooted in the fact that trees can regrow, meaning wood energy is considered renewable. Treating wood energy as zero-carbon is an accounting sleight-of-hand, however, that’s plainly rejected by more than 20 years of climate science.

27 Mills Across the Southeast Produce Wood Pellets for Europe And at least 25 more are on the way DOWNLOAD “The potential consequences of this bioenergy accounting error are immense,” a European Union science committee warned in a report in 2011, noting that “more realistic expectations for bioenergy potential are necessary.” Exports of U.S. wood pellets have more than doubled since then. European nations are exploiting the regulatory weak link, sinking hundreds of millions of dollars worth of public subsidies into coal-to-wood conversions at privately owned power plants. That’s helping them comply with European climate laws while preserving expensive coal infrastructure — without reducing climate pollution to required levels. Without the loophole, the pellet mills — which are expanding rapidly south and west of the sector’s initial hub in the Southeast — would never have been built. While the growth it’s fueling delights many in the forestry industry, it’s threatening natural forests in the U.S.

SECTION 2. Hardwoods = Hard to Replace Photo by Ted Blanco The forests of the Southeast have prospered since before the last ice age, spilling over riverbanks and mountaintops in warm and wet conditions, producing one of the planet’s richest hotspots of biodiversity. Alligators, black bears, bobcats and other wildlife roam the forests, which cover 200 million acres from Virginia to eastern Texas to Florida. Those forests are also home to hallmark hardwood trees, from bald cypresses to southern live oaks, flowering dogwoods, red maples, water tupelo and Atlantic white cedar. But to the forestry industry, trees are lumped into two categories: hardwoods and pines. Treated with pesticides, loblolly pines grow on plantations where natural hardwood forests once grew. The best pines become utility poles. Small and crooked ones, called pulpwood, can become paper or building products. Now, they can also become wood pellets. Hardwoods are treasured because they’re native, fostering the forest wildlife that evolved with them. They grow in the understories of pine plantations. They also flourish on private lands that haven’t been planted with pine or vegetable crops or turned into strip malls. Cypresses and other species anchor swampy wetlands. When logged, the finest hardwoods are turned into furniture. And it’s hardwoods that are making up the bulk of many of the wood pellet shipments that are being shipped overseas to burn for electricity. That’s not just bad news for natural forests and their ecosystems — it also exacerbates climate change. Hardwood forests in the Southeast can take a long time to recover; they grow much more slowly than pine. Pound for pound, these hardwoods take longer than pine to absorb carbon from the atmosphere, making the climate impacts worse when they’re chopped down and incinerated. To reduce competition with the fluff pulp mill industry — which uses pines to produce the absorbent materials used in everything from diapers to toilet paper and tampons — wood pellet mills across the region are using hardwoods, indifferent to their role in the environment. The pellets from Enviva’s mill are roughly 90 percent hardwood, despite the town of Franklin being surrounded by pine plantations. “The Southeast U.S. is a tree farm,” said Matthew Hansen, a geography professor at the University of Maryland. He led research that used satellite data from 2000 to 2012 that found logging was four times more disruptive in the forests of the Southeast than in South American rainforests. Almost a third of Southeastern forestland was either cut down or regrown during the 12 years studied.1 “It stands out globally. This is super-intensive use.” Drax Sources Mostly Whole Trees in the U.S. Wood Pellets DOWNLOAD 1. Hansen et al. (2013) High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change.Source Many of the hardwood forests being clear-cut in the Southeast now are 40 to 100 years old. Logging for timber and paper increased here in the 1990s when mills were shuttered in the Pacific Northwest after owl habitats received federal protection. No other country or U.S. region produces more wood and pulp every year than the Southeast, where loggers are cutting down roughly twice as many trees as they were in the 1950s.2 “These forests haven’t been conservation priorities for some of the big national conservation groups,” said Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecology professor at Duke University. He worked on mapping research, published in March in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that identified a “mismatch” in the U.S. between the vast acreage dedicated to parks and other protected areas in the West, and the unprotected Southeast, which needs the parks most3. “The biological reality is that the Southeast is extremely important.” Further fueling the boom, some U.S. states are offering tax breaks and other enticements to lure the wood pellet mills. “It’s like the movie industry — they offer all sorts of incentives and subsidies,” said Louisiana State University agriculture professor Richard Vlosky, who specializes in wood-based products. Government support for pellet mills makes it harder for other members of the American Forest & Paper Association to compete for tree trunks and wood chips, pushing up prices. Those companies, which include chipboard and particleboard manufacturers, say that creates an uneven playing field. 2. U.S. Forest Service data shows 186 million cubic meters of timber was harvested in the Southeast in 2011 — about 60 percent of the U.S. total. In that same year, U.N. data shows Canada, Brazil and China each harvested 140 to 150 million cubic meters. 3. Jenkins et al. (2015) US protected lands mismatch biodiversity priorities. Source No other country or U.S. region produces more wood and pulp every year than the Southeast As the wood pellet industry expands across a widening swath of the country, forest owners face few regulatory hurdles in managing their forests and selling to the mills as they see fit. With some exceptions, such as those that shelter endangered species, the forests providing most of the wood pellets being burned in Europe lack meaningful protections from any local, state or federal agencies. In the U.S., state governments and federal agencies largely view trees as crops. Most of the forests in the Southeast grow on privately owned land. In the American West, more than two-thirds of forestland is publicly owned, according to U.S. Forest Service researchers, but in the nation’s east, 80 percent of forests are owned by families and corporations. That leaves tremendous swaths of wetlands and forests throughout the Southeast vulnerable to economic trends and to the whims of their owners. Nationally, more than 20 million people own — and control the fate of — an average of 25 acres of forest apiece. The targeting of hardwoods for wood pellets frustrates groups that have been working to protect and restore the region’s native swamps, groves and forests. “We need to be scaling up forest protections,” said Danna Smith, executive director of the Dogwood Alliance. Foresters and groups such as Tenny’s see increased demand for wood as boons for forest health. Logging provides revenues that can be used to manage land, they say, and property owners are less likely to convert their land to parking lots if a market for wood is strong. Conservationists and ecologists deride that perspective. “Markets that drive logging create incentives for landowners to manage forests for short-term commercial purposes,” Smith said. “Not for long-term ecological sustainability.”