Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

President Obama’s signature environmental initiative, his Clean Power Plan, is designed to fight climate change and crack down on America’s carbon-emitting power plants. But behind the scenes, a dispute is raging over obscure language that could promote the rapid destruction of America’s carbon-storing forests.

This highly technical but consequential fight over the Environmental Protection Agency’s approach to “bioenergy”—energy derived from trees, crops, or other plants—has gotten lost in the larger hubbub over the Obama plan’s impact on coal, and the potential upheaval in an electricity sector that will be forced to rein in its greenhouse-gas emissions for the first time. But while the overall plan was hailed by environmentalists and attacked by industry when it was unveiled in draft form last June, the EPA seems to be taking industry’s side on bioenergy.


A November 19 EPA policy memo suggests that the administration intends to treat electricity produced from most forest and farm products as carbon-free. In an interview with POLITICO this week, an EPA official tried to walk back the memo, calling it a mere “snapshot in time,” emphasizing that no firm decisions will be made until the plan is finalized this summer. But in private meetings with advocates on both sides of the issue, the EPA has indicated that it intends to exempt most biomass from its carbon rules.? (The EPA official requested anonymity to speak about a still unfolding and unfinished rule-making process.)

This would not be the first time Obama has disappointed conservationists, who are upset about his recent plan to allow some offshore drilling and his general “all-of-the-above” approach to energy, even while they celebrate his disdainful rhetoric about the Keystone pipeline, his new efforts to block drilling in the Arctic, and his continuing support for wind and solar power. But the arcane disagreement over biomass could have an outsized impact on the American landscape. Princeton University researcher Tim Searchinger has calculated that if government electricity forecasts are correct, treating biomass as carbon-neutral would produce a 70 percent increase in the U.S. wood harvest, consuming more than four times as many trees as Americans save through paper recycling programs. If the rest of the world adopts similar rules, the global timber harvest would more than double, he says.

Carbon regulation was never supposed to produce mass deforestation. “The stakes are so high because producing even a small amount of bioenergy requires cutting down a huge amount of trees,” says Searchinger, a former attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund who has published several papers on bioenergy.

Searchinger is the lead author of a new World Resources Institute report demonstrating the limited energy potential of biomass, along with the massive potential for destruction that could result from a global embrace of bioenergy. The report concludes that producing just 20 percent of the world’s energy from biomass by 2050, an oft-cited goal, would exhaust 100 percent of the world’s current food and fiber harvest, meaning it would require all the crops we now use for food and all the timber we use for houses and paper. WRI also found that on most of the world’s land, solar panels would produce 100 times more energy than biomass, a testament to the relative inefficiency of photosynthesis.

If you don’t cut them down and convert them into electric power, forests not only provide habitat for wildlife and other ecological benefits, they serve as “carbon sinks” that absorb greenhouse gases. But since U.S. timber companies plant more trees than they cut down, and the nation’s forests are expanding overall, the industry contends that bioenergy ought to be considered a zero-emissions weapon against global warming. David Tenny, president of the National Alliance of Forest Owners, says anything that boosts demand for wood will improve the economics of forestry, helping the industry expand its footprint and ultimately store more carbon.

The three-page memo from acting assistant EPA administrator Janet McCabe of the agency’s office of air and radiation seems to echo that reasoning, suggesting that bioenergy plants will be exempt from existing regulations if their feedstocks come from “sustainably managed lands,” and that states will be able to use bioenergy as part of their plans to comply with the new restrictions on carbon. A lot depends on the definition of “sustainably,” and EPA officials now insist that nothing is set in stone, but the memo certainly portrays bioenergy favorably.

“It’s very encouraging,” Tenny says. “It’s a bit vague, but they’re pointing in the right direction. They get that we’re part of the solution, not part of the problem.”

In recent years, a bipartisan coalition of timber-state legislators has backed the industry on carbon issues, including senators Al Franken of Minnesota, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and other supporters of Obama’s climate policies as well as Republican opponents like John Boozman of Arkansas and Mike Crapo of Idaho. And there is general agreement that burning forest waste or a paper-mill byproduct called “black liquor” does not create additional emissions, because it does not require additional timber. But green groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council have argued that it’s absurd to call the cutting and burning of carbon-rich trees a carbon-neutral activity even if the overall forest is expanding, akin to denying that firing people causes unemployment if the overall economy is growing.

“It’s a terrible black eye for this administration,” says Danna Smith, executive director of the Dogwood Alliance, an Asheville, N.C.-based forest protection group. “They talk about the importance of forests in avoiding climate change, but at the same time they’re saying, hey, cut them, burn them, it won’t affect the climate.”

The European Union has mostly exempted biomass from its own climate rules, and Smith has seen the result throughout the South, where nearly two dozen facilities have sprung up to manufacture wood pellets for export across the Atlantic. Once European utilities realized they could meet their climate goals with wood from the forest, they wanted a lot more wood from the forest in a hurry. If the U.S. adopts similar rules, the rest of the world might follow suit—and if that happens, the International Energy Agency forecasts that bioenergy would double worldwide.

“It’s very hard to imagine that other governments won’t decide to cut down their forests for bioenergy if the U.S. gets this wrong,” Searchinger says.

In the interview, the EPA official tried to downplay the McCabe memo, calling it “a bit of a unicorn,” saying there will still be a rulemaking process, a scientific peer review, and case-by-case reviews of state plans and individual permits. The behind-the-scenes lobbying war is just beginning.

“We’re hearing a lot of interesting analysis,” the official said. “We’ll have to examine it all very closely.”