Original subtitles

[bluegrass]

Now, when y'all get up there, you going to have to be careful.

And look at where you're walking and stuff.

I mean, it's cold enough, I don't...I don't think

there's any snakes out today.

But you don't never know.

We have a lot of snakes out here.

It's amazing how quick they can cut something like this.

I mean, they cut this probably less than two weeks.

Every time I come out here, you'll hear it.

[makes buzzing sound] And it's logging.

[heavy machinery buzzes, whirs]

[creaks, slams to the ground]

[bluegrass]

[music becomes ominous]

[pensive music]

- We call these areas bottomland hardwoods.

They're called that because they occur in these low, flat bottoms

that surround the big rivers in the coastal plain,

along the Atlantic.

These bottomland hardwoods are really among our most valuable

forests because they are wetland forest and so connected to the

rivers and the water system.

- The bottomland wetland forests along the rivers and in

the swamps represent the last remnants of what we could call

natural ecosystems across the South.

And they also happen to be the most critical in terms of

ecosystem services, or those services that we humans

depend on for life and for our safety:

Clean water, flood control, not to mention

that these forests are also incredibly diverse.

And we're tearing them down at an alarming rate...

and burning them in power stations.

When policies were created that incentivized biomass as

"carbon-free" source of energy, that was when we started to see

popping up all over the country more freestanding biomass

power plants that are burning wood for electricity.

And also these enormous pellet plants that are making fuel that

then gets shipped to Europe.

- We started getting reports from eastern North Carolina

in particular that vast areas of wetland forest were being

cut to supply wood pellets to Europe.

We become involved when we learned that, contrary to the

representations by the companies, that they were using

sawdust and other wood waste that, in fact, they're cutting

whole forests, whole trees as their primary source of biomass.

- Enviva come to this community and said,

"We're going to bring jobs and going to be green.

We're going behind loggers, and we're just going to

take the trash stuff.

And that's what we're going to make into these pellets."

And that ain't what they've done.

I mean, it's not even close.

If you don't believe it, go to the Enviva site

and look at all the damn logs.

And I don't mind saying they've flat-out lied to this community.

Lied to me.

[bright bluegrass]

- One of the roles that Dogwood Alliance has played is really

investigating the on-the-ground practices of the industry.

And how we do that is we identify the sites in which

the industry is harvesting its feed stocks for pellets.

And then from there, we go down to the ground,

and we ground truth.

[sloshing steps]

We identify that those sites are actually sourcing the facility.

We follow the trucks directly from the site to the facility.

[camera clicks]

We follow trucks from the facility back to the site,

and we document that extensively.

Then from there, we'll document the site itself.

- Enviva's raw materials consist of....

ADAM: When you go into these wetlands, you'll notice

that many of the trees are, as they say, deformed or diseased.

The trees are naturally hollow inside.

They can take what they call low-value wood, this unwanted

wood that needs a home, and chop it up.

DERB: The wood-based biomass industry in the South

didn't exist here five years ago.

This map shows the existing pellet mills

and those that have been proposed.

And overlapping sourcing areas accelerating cut and harvest

of hardwoods and swamp forest in the region.

What's clear is that there's a concentration in what we call

the coastal plain within 100 miles or so of the coast.

The reason for that is this is all for export.

So the trees will be harvested, pelletized, and then taken to

a port and transported to Europe.

This industry's been deceptive.

They have misrepresented their sourcing.

But I actually put at fault the countries

that are behind these policies.

The European Union got together, well, probably

10 years ago, and said, "We're going to be

the global leaders on this.

We're going to cut our emissions of fossil fuel carbon dioxide.

So you've got to supply 20% of your power from carbon-neutral

or non-carbon emitting sources."

It was a laudable thing to do except that, I think without

thinking, they decided that biomass

should be carbon-neutral.

That biomass energy is seen as a carbon-neutral option,

it's a pure political decision.

Here in Brussels, they more or less promised that Europe

will deliver, by 2020, 20% renewables.

So then the only thing that was very important is, OK,

let's make sure we will be delivering on this 20%.

Biomass is pretty easy.

You just get some wood and throw it in a coal-fired power plant,

and you do co-firing.

You don't need to change any infrastructure.

So it is an easy one, and you do get to your percentages.

So therefore, any idea to say, "Hey, but don't we need to do

proper accounting," was a bit put on the back burner.

So it's, "Yeah, we'll come to that later on."

And that's all pure politics in order to make sure that

no matter what, this 20% by 2020 will be achieved.

DERB: The United Kingdom decided its approach is going to rely

heavily on converting old coal-fired power plants

to burn wood biomass.

And a big culprit of that is Drax Power Station, which is

the biggest carbon emitter in the UK, the biggest

power station in the UK, and the biggest burner of wood

for electricity in the world.

We're in the middle of implementing a project to

turn it from being a coal station that burns a little bit

of biomass to a biomass station that burns a little bit of coal.

In forestry, it's mainly when you harvest a tree,

there are lots of twigs, branches that aren't used.

And also when you plant a forest, you overplant,

and then you thin.

That is what we call biomass.

DUNCAN: Last year, it burnt about 7 million tons of wood.

And by the time its program of conversion to 50% biomass

is complete, it will be burning more than 15 million tons

of wood a year.

That's 1 1/2 times the entire UK production of

wood for all purposes.

The subsidies are a very significant part of

their economic model.

The UK taxpayer, or bill payer--because it comes out of

our power bills--is paying disproportionately large amounts

for a so-called renewable technology that is destroying

forests, biodiversity, and making climate change worse.

- If you're interested in reducing emissions now, then

burning something that puts more carbon into the air than the

thing you're replacing, which is coal, doesn't make sense.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

When you burn wood pellets or other kinds of woody biomass,

what you're releasing in the atmosphere is biogenic carbon.

Biogenic carbon is part of the natural lifecycle of wood.

It's about what the atmosphere sees.

That's the only thing that matters here,

is what does the atmosphere see?

How much carbon is the atmosphere seeing

when you burn different kinds of fuel?

And it's just a fact that there's more carbon coming out

of the stack when you burn wood than when you burn coal.

[ominous music]

The physics are the physics.

There's CO2 coming out of the stack.

There's nothing special about that CO2 that makes it have less

climate-warming potential than fossil fuel CO2.

What's different with bioenergy is that there's an assumption

that sometime in the future those emissions will be offset.

No one's making sure that happens.

There is no bioenergy company that I'm aware of that is

actually managing forests and assuredly proving that the wood

that they burn today, which is emitting CO2, is being offset

by new trees being planted, which are equivalent in mass

to the trees that they just cut.

If you want to be sustainable, that means that you have to be

restoring an area 20, 30 times as large, so that you're soaking

up as much carbon from the atmosphere as you put into

the atmosphere when you burn that wood.

A fourth-grader will tell you, trees are big, and seedlings

are small. And it really is that simple.

The industry likes to make it sound like it's super

complicated, you know, "Leave it to the experts.

Don't trouble your heads. We got it under control.

We would never do anything to harm the climate."

Well, they are, and they will, and they do.

And they'll get you to back them up

by telling you that it's green and clean.

You end up being duped by this industry.

The UK department of environment has come out with a report that

shows that the use of wood pellets for energy actually

decreases the greenhouse gas footprint of energy between

74% to 90% as opposed to the use of coal.

- Switching to biomass from coal can reduce carbon emissions by

between 74% and 90%.

MARY: The claims that Enviva is making are based on just not

counting any of the CO2 that's emitted when you burn biomass.

The carbon accounting framework that they use only counts the

emissions that are associatd with harvesting and transport.

But they would not count they CO2 that's emitted by burning it

at the stack.

And this was identified as the critical climate accounting

error in the Tim Searchinger et al. paper, which was so

important in getting this conversation started.

- So here's where the actual accounting error came from.

In a long story, we ended up developing an accounting rule

for global national reporting, that said for bioenergy purposes

we're going to count the carbon when you cut down the tree, so

we don't have to count it again when it goes up the smoke stack.

That rule works if and only if you're actually counting

the carbon when you cut down the tree.

[chain saw revs]

MARY: But the U.S. isn't really reporting those numbers,

at least not in an official way, and the UK is not reporting

trees that are being cut down in the United States.

So when it comes to those trees being burned

in UK power plants, those emissions are treated as zero.

Because if you were counting it both when the tree is cut

and at the power plant, then you'd be double counting it.

TIM: So a rule that's designed to prevent you from counting

carbon twice became a rule that says you never count it at all.

Once that mistake had been made,

all kinds of people started thinking

"Well, bioenergy can help solve our climate crisis."

The problem is that this mistake happened to also co-exist in

a way that would allow people to make a lot of money.

- By reliably providing customers throughout the world

with an alternative to coal, Enviva is part of a cleaner,

greener, low-carbon energy future.

The only green in this industry is the enormous amount of money

that these speculators are making in this pellet industry

in response to a policy in Europe that makes no sense.

- That wood as energy is carbon- neutral or is zero-carbon,

comes from the notion that if you burn something,

something else will grow and absorb the same

amount of carbon dioxide.

I used to accept that without question.

I thought, "Well, this is great, yeah.

Sure, this is wonderful.

What a great way to deal with this problem."

What I hadn't thought about was the lag time, and the lag time

is hugely important.

MARY: Yes, these trees may grow back in time, but we don't have

50, 70, 100 years to wait for those trees to grow back,

to take that carbon out of the atmosphere.

We need to do it right away.

BILL: We've jumped to a conclusion on a very simple

notion of carbon-in carbon-out of trees.

And because it grows back, it's carbon-neutral,

but it's not planet-neutral.

[bird calling] Pileated Woodpecker.

This land has been in my family since 1898.

Some of these tress are over 140 years old.

When I was small, our outings were squirrel hunting,

and we'd walk through these huge forests, trees so tall

that you couldn't see the tops.

I felt like I had stepped off into a adventure.

And now where they've logged and there's planted in pines, when

you walk in the woods there, you walk in the reed thickets.

You can't see the ground for the reeds and briars.

And every tree is planted in a row,

and they're all the same.

Some of the land around here, I've seen it cut three times

in my lifetime.

It started out as hardwoods and ended up as pines.

My neighbors tried talked me into logging mine at the

same time they logged theirs.

They said they could come right in and knock it out

in just a little while.

I said, "Yeah, it's a shame that they could devastate a forest

that took 150 years to develop, and they could wipe it out

in a couple of weeks."

Well, both my neighbors come to me after they had theirs logged

and said it wasn't worth the money.

They wished they had their trees back.

And you can come in here in the early summer,

and there's millions of fireflies back here.

And the whole ground,

they're just blinking, millions and millions of them.

[bird call] Our woodpecker friend is back.

I invite each and every one of you to join the SOS, Save Our

Southern forest movement, because it's as much about

pushing back the wood pellet industry as it is about

projecting a better future and scaling up protection

of our forest here in the southern U.S.

[upbeat bluegrass]

[cheering, laughing]

ADAM: People are filling out SOS messages, and they're going to

be sent to the President of the European Union.

Europe is developing what they're calling

the 2030 package.

So that's their post-2020 climate plan,

the well-intentioned plan that set off this industry.

This is taking that local action on a global scale.

CROWD: Save our Southern forest! [cheers]

[applause]

So thank you all so much for coming out tonight.

We're really excited to be here in Panama City.

In 2009, we were exporting a couple hundred tons

of wood pellets a year, the U.S. South.

A couple hundred tons is not a lot.

In 2014, we exported over five million, just a explosion of

an industry that's being completely driven by subsidies.

There's no one better to protect the forest of the panhandle

than the citizens of the panhandle.

We're really concerned that a lot of the private lands

in these flood plains now have a new market.

They claim that they only use wood that is not usable

for lumber and other uses.

They imply that wood residues such as bark, saw dust,

tree tops, limbs make up most of their raw material.

- What got sold to us as a really green, bio-diverse

biomass project was a lie, folks.

I mean, it was just a damn bold-faced lie.

ADAM: There are constant trucks coming in there loaded with

whole trees, mostly pine, trees that are going

into this facility to be processed into pellets.

- How many trucks did you count?

- There was 10 with trees and 8 with chips the whole time.

- What was that, in 20 minutes?

- 20 minutes 19 trucks: It's almost a truck a minute.

- That's pretty crazy.

The pellet industry here in North Carolina has worked with

our state department of commerce, who care more about

the pellet industry than they do about the local communities that

are going to be adversely affected by these pellet mills.

- It's loud.

You can hear it more at night than daytime.

The banging, it sounds like somebody's

just banging in a pan.

The dust, we're breathing it.

I let them know that it was not right for us to jump up

and leave, just because you know, this plant.

REPORTER: In North Carolina, a small community's

quiet lifestyle has been disrupted.

Some have even moved out.

You have residents that are stuck here because this is home.

They can't afford to, you know, just pick up because something

came in their neighborhood that's disrupting their lives.

They're being aggravated now with the constant noise,

the constant trucks 24/7.

DANNA: That's bad enough, but a lot of people don't realize

the extent of logging that's occurring in the southern

United States is significantly impacting these rural

communities' ability to revitalize their economy.

One of the reasons why these communities continue to be poor

is because the landscape is so degraded.

If logging were a way to pull these communities

out of poverty, they would be some of the richest communities

in the world, because we're at global ground zero

for industrial logging.

- The loss of natural vegetation types in the region

has been profound.

96%, 97% of the longleaf ecosystem having been lost

over the last several centuries, and something like 3/4

of the landscape is now covered by fields, cities, highways,

pine plantations that do not provide the kind of

bio-diversity values that natural or even

semi-natural forests provide.

There's an important distinction to be made between natural and

semi-natural forests and pine plantations.

They differ in quite profound ways.

We do sampling of forests and plantations where we basically

catalogue all the plant species in an area

roughly the size of a house.

In a natural forest, we often find 80 or 90 or 120 or even 150

different plant species growing in that small an area.

In general, in pine plantations, we just find a few species.

That means that the remaining natural and semi-natural forests

that we have in the southeastern United States are bearing an

increasing burden for maintaining the biodiversity

for the whole region.

The southeast U.S. as a ecoregion is the most heavily

disturbed forest landscape in the world.

On a percentage basis, we estimate in roughly a decade's

worth of time a third of the tree cover is either re-growing

or cleared, and that percentage is higher than any other

like landscape globally.

And it's really just the turning of the landscape

into a tree farm.

- What we've seen is a huge increase in these industrial

tree plantations, these tree cornfields.

This has been a real scam and a ploy that the forestry industry

has really promoted and been happy about, because they want

to be able to grow these tree plantations and harvest and get

more and more, and more and more, and that's a convenient

industrial monoculture way to do that.

And if you call it a forest, they get all the kudos for

growing forests, but they're not planting forests.

They're planting monocultures.

A plantation is nothing like this.

In a plantation you have one species of tree.

They're often managed with herbicides, if they're

coniferous plantations, to get rid of everything else.

Fertilizers are being used.

That means they're impacting the soil community as well.

So what you have is a very compromised system

that really lacks that biotic diversity and has

less resilience than a forest like this.

So this structure out here, these stumps, the downed debris

of limbs and trunks of trees is called coarse woody debris, and

there's whole hosts of fungi, beetles, bacteria, all sorts of

things that are just specialized to decomposing

coarse, woody debris.

So if it's present, your system is much more biologically

diverse and much more resilient.

If a person has a compromised immune system, they're much more

likely to get sick, or if they get sick, have serious

complications from that illness.

Well, all the biota in that coarse, woody debris is part of

the immune system of a forest ecosystem.

It's part of that resiliency.

DANNA: The amount of wood that is going to be required

to generate even a small fraction

of our electricity needs is huge.

- FuturaGene's solution: Sustainable biomass production

through genetically modified plantation forestry.

FuturaGene, Arborgen...

there are a number of other companies that have been

promoting the idea that if we can engineer trees to grow

really fast, or have certain properties that make them easier

to harvest, or to otherwise be more useful to our bioenergy

demands, that we can grow more wood on less land.

That's what they keep saying: More wood on less land.

- Using biotechnology, we are going to cultivate

more productive and sustainable forests.

It's good for the environment and for you.

With trees, especially wind-pollinated trees,

ones that can hybridize, I'd be really worried about those

manufactured genes getting into natural populations.

And who knows how they morph or what that does.

We're in our infancy understanding these systems,

and when we start doing stuff like this, when we don't really

understand fully what the outcomes are, we could find

that we're really messing things up in a big way.

[birds, insects fill the forest]

We cut timber pretty much annually, so we're constantly

working at cutting timber.

We got more timber now than we had when we got started.

So you don't have to have it in rows and have it where

it's got to be a crop.

We're growing timber out here, but we're also dealing with

being able to keep endangered species where everybody else

is losing that. We got Gopher tortoises.

We got wire grass. We got the ground oak.

We got the Red-Cockaded woodpecker.

We got all of that.

You can sell quality for a lot bigger price than quantity.

So this is perfect.

I mean, it's your cake and eating it too.

- Okay. And largely right here, it's biomass is an emerging

market, and here I have in parentheses for all of us.

Yes, I know we've been using biomass in the industry

for quite a long time, but not to the potential scale

that some people have been talking about.

So when people talk about massively increasing bioenergy,

what they're talking about is massively increasing the amount

of trees we harvest on the planet.

The mistake that thinking that trees are carbon-free, which

leads you to harvest wood, could become a truly dramatic mistake,

if you keep making that mistake.

One study that was done by researchers at University of

Maryland, basically showed that to produce something on

the order of a little more than 20%, 30% of world energy by

2100, you would've cut down all the world's forests.

If there is this incentive for industry to go into wood pellet

production, and hardwoods are preferred, there's

a finite resource in the southeast.

And where are the remaining hardwood forests in the U.S.?

You think about the 50-100 year re-growth in the mid-Atlantic

northeast, these are the big stands of hardwood forests.

And if this incentive and driver is there, you could imagine

displacement outside of the southeast into higher latitude

forests, from Maryland up to Maine, as being a source

for "green" energy.

[atmospheric music]

- The forests of the eastern U.S. are almost the only place

on planet earth that went from brown to green over the course

of the last century, as they re -grew, as people stepped back,

as we began to preserve either because of the accidents of

economics or through conscious public policy.

The planet tries valiantly to sequester carbon.

It does it in the oceans, and it does it in the forests

primarily, and these temperate forests

are big sinks for carbon.

And it's safely locked up for the moment in those trees.

TOM: If we truly want to mitigate climate change,

then we've got to make sure our forests

are storing a lot of carbon.

Leaves are basically like photovoltaic panels.

Instead of making electric current, they're making

energy storage molecules.

So they're taking in carbon dioxide.

That's going in through small holes on the underside of

the leaf called stomatal pores.

So a leaf like this would just have millions

of stomata under here.

The carbon dioxide goes into the cells in the leaf where

photosynthesis takes place, and the roots of the tree

are taking up water.

That's another valuable resource in this process.

The cells are removing the oxygen from the carbon dioxide

molecule, removing the oxygen from the water molecule.

That oxygen from the water molecule gets released into

the air so we can breathe.

Then they link the hydrogen atoms onto the carbon atoms,

converting it into sugars, which is an energy storage molecule.

Those can get converted into cellulose and lignan to make

the wood of the trees that are around us.

In our forests, the soil is the major carbon sink.

By the time we get to about an 80-year-old forest around here,

half of all the organic material is down in the ground.

It looks like a lot of biomass in the trunks,

in the leaves and everything else.

It's dwarfed by what is actually down in the soil below our feet,

where carbon ends up and organic material ends up, and where you

have all these mycorrhizal fungi, that are linking

everything together, creating this system that's very tight in

holding its nutrients and very, very resilient.

Mycorrhizae associate with the roots of trees, and in that

association, they extract their carbohydrate energy from the

tree roots, but they're not parasites.

They actually benefit the trees they associate with, because the

mycelium, or the fungus in the soil, is so extensive that any

tree that associates with mycorrhizae can increase their

nutrient water uptake up to about tenfold.

Not only are nutrients and water going between plant species via

the mycorrhizae, but energy transfer is happening as well

even between different species of plants.

And phytochemicals can convey

plant information through the mycorrhizal network.

The mycorrhizae are critically important in the health

of these systems.

[melancholy music]

- I ran for mayor, and I was elected mayor

in the trough of the misery.

The mill was closed and briefly reopened, and then they were

closed again when I got sworn in with no prospects of reopening.

Up until about 10 years ago, northern New England

relied heavily on the paper industry.

And at some point, the multinational corporations

that owned these paper mills decided that it was a bad

investment to keep modernizing old mills, so they starved them

out, liquidated their forest holdings, sold them off.

PAUL: We were losing tax base. The community's getting older.

We're not keeping our young people.

JAMIE: More than half of the storefronts are vacant.

So we're in the process of trying to figure out

how do we revive our economy?

PAUL: We worked very hard to get the Burgess Biopower plant

permitted and up and running.

[mellow jazz]

Wall Street abandoned us. It plundered our forests.

It ran down our mills.

It refused to invest to keep them competitive,

and then it dumped us.

And you want to bring them back and hope that the story is going

to end better this next time?

I don't see that.

We have been going on two tracks to re-invent our economy.

One is to chase another Wall Street investor to build

some big factory.

The other approach that is gaining a lot of support in our

communities here is to focus on the sort of things that limit

our vulnerability to global economic forces.

So let's focus on local ownership of businesses instead

of absentee investors and ownership.

Burgess represents the absolute worst kind of public policy.

It represents huge subsidies that are going to players who

don't live in our community, and if they didn't get those credits

and subsidies it wouldn't make economic sense

to invest in these plants.

What nobody talks about is the hidden subsidies that the public

is giving them in the form of externalities.

TOM: Forests provide a huge amount of services for us,

besides just the wood products they're growing.

They're really critical in the water cycle

and clarifying water.

They're critical in erosion control.

They're critical in sequestering carbon, in producing oxygen,

in removing pollutants.

They do all sorts of services that if we actually had to pay

for them on our own, the cost would be astronomical.

So they have real important roles for our well-being.

[water burbling]

- I'm looking here at the gouge in the land here.

Where there wasn't free-running water before this logging

operation, and now there's a kind of a stream bed that's been

cut carrying all kinds of silt down into the brook

at the bottom of the hill.

- When you do a heavy logging like that, you annihilate

that mycorrhizal community.

And of course, there's a huge flush of nutrients

right out of the forest soil.

Not just carbon coming out from decomposition, but huge flushes

of, you know, nitrogen and potassium and phosphorus, that

go right out into the watershed.

And it takes a good 20 years before that nutrient loss is

stabilized as the forest recovers.

JAMIE: These folks in the biomass plant are not paying for

the damage that they're inflicting to forest ecosystems.

They're given a free ride on that.

If they had to pay for the cost to society, it would be

an impossible thing to invest in.

It would be a absolute financial disaster.

So it's only due to misguided public policy that this

kind of plant is even plausible.

It's an important question as to whether our public subsidies are

actually rewarding the most efficient use of biomass.

I think if we're going to use wood for energy, we want to use

it in the most efficient manner possible.

The whole reason to do it is to displace fossil fuel use,

and we want to displace as much fossil fuel for unit of

wood that we harvest.

And in that sense you're much better off using the wood

to generate heat.

Many people, particularly in rural areas, heat their homes

with wood.

But that's not what we're talking about here.

We're talking about industrial scale that is just devastating

becauses it's so inefficient.

The basic efficiency of burning wood chips to make electricity

alone is 25%.

That also means that you are discarding 75% of the energy.

Well, if you've got a project with 100 trucks a day going in

to feed it, that means that 75 of them are being discarded.

- They are burning trees at that plant to the tune of 113 tons

an hour, which is more biomass than you would get if you went

out and cut down an acre of New Hampshire's forests.

So they are burning the equivalent of clear cutting

more than acre an hour.

To try to feed a 50-megawatt plant or a 100-megawatt plant

the amount of fuel is just huge, and the distance you have

to bring that wood is huge.

The fact that the whole tree is removed, everything, even

the rotten parts, you know, the crooked parts, anything that

can be run through a chipper, the branches and the tops

that have nutrients, that have organic matter. All the things

that help a forest be diverse and to grow and be productive

are taken from it.

- Our forests are the greatest carbon storage medium we have,

and we should have public policies that encourage that

forest to store more carbon.

That may run afoul of the economics of commercial forest

management, but I think the emerging markets for forest

carbon offsets can help in that regard.

It can provide landowners some financial compensation for

keeping more carbon on the stump, than might otherwise

make economic sense.

JAMIE: Biomass is the ultimate commodification of the forest.

It's that simple.

It treats it as an inanimate object to be degraded or used

and exploited for human purposes with no consequences.

And so I look at a project like this, and I say,

"This is what qualifies as sustainable green, clean,

carbon-free energy?"

This is a disaster.

This is not sustainable; and it is not green, and it is not

clean, and it is certainly not carbon-neutral.

The fact is Mr. President, that biomass energy is a sustainable,

responsible, renewable and economically

significant energy source.

Susan Collin's quotes are lifted directly from the website of

the American Forest and Paper Association word for word.

Our amendment supports this carbon-neutral energy source

as an essential part of our nation's energy future.

If this amendment goes through, it will have

very serious consequences.

First of all, it will mean that in the, U.S. power plants

trying to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions under

the clean power plan, would be able to falsely claim that

burning wood reduces those emissions.

But it's even more significant than that because

if the U.S. makes this error, then countries all around

the world will make the error.

Next slide.

What I'm trying to illustrate here is if you think about it

on a larger scale, when you cut down a tree, it takes that stand

of timber less time to sequester that carbon.

And then when you think about it on the landscape level, you know

it's almost sort of an instantaneous sequestration,

so long as you have a positive growth to drain ratio and

sustainable forest management practices.

So this is a question.

I'm Mary Booth with Partnership for Policy Integrity.

Given that EPA and the science advisory panel explicitly

disavowed the approach that instantaneous sequestration

happens, I'm wondering why the panelists are advancing this

completely discredited approach to carbon accounting.

It's not instantaneous.

The atmosphere sees the carbon, and it affects climate.

EPA MC: Seth or Justin?

SETH: Yeah, so I'm not sure about the EPA's policies.

I focus on economics and the industry.

So it's really important to consider that too, that these

are rational economic actors who are managing the forests.

And if a tree isn't cut for biomass or pulp

and paper or whatever, then there's really no reason

for it to be a forest from an economic perspective.

New Hampshire has an energy strategy, and in that strategy

one of the reasons in support of biomass is to try

to increase fuel independence.

EPA MC: Two final questions, and then we're going

to move to the break.

Mary Booth, Partnership for Policy Integrity.

Per megawatt hour, biomass at a free-standing plant emits about

50%-60% more than a modern coal plant,

more CO2 per megawatt hour.

So I just wonder if you could comment a little bit

on how you are reconciling these physical realities,

of more molecules of CO2 coming out of the stack per megawatt

hour, with the need of the clean power plan and the planet

to reduce emissions. Thanks.

In response to the question, I don't think it's fair just to

compare the emission rate of biomass power plants

to coal-fired power plants.

You really have to look at the lifecycle, and you do have to

take into account that there is some carbon sequestration

that goes on in the forest.

[pensive music]

I am approximately 100 yards away from

the Warden electric plant.

The so-called green energy or biomass that they're burning

here, is creating a toxic cloud of ground-up railroad tie dust.

This is a creosote-treated wood fiber that's going airborne,

becoming fugitive dust.

In the industry they call them "fines" that blow

right down into town.

Yeah, that's the plant here that close to our place here.

Oh, yeah, it's affect my breath especially when

I do gardening around here.

You know, it's like maybe my chest is burnt like that and

then also my, irritates my eyes also.

You can't barbeque outdoors at my house.

I can't open the windows on my house,

because the stuff gets in so heavy.

I tried putting furnace filters in my windows so I could

still open them, but the ultrafine dust from this process

is still getting in.

I don't want to die early. [nervous laughter]

Yeah.

In the beginning, when they first announced they were

going to open up this plant, it was going to be a green plant.

And they were going to be using forest products, residues

and things like that.

They never told us they were going to be

burning railroad ties.

I think people wanted to believe them when they first came here.

People here don't speak out very much, and they don't think

there is anything they can do.

They don't feel empowered.

Once a company or a plant is opened up here, and local people

have jobs, then people don't want to speak out because they

might have friends or family that work there.

I've got a lot of friends in there too.

It's a small town.

The problem is we're going to have a rash of cancer in this

town, 10 years down the road that's going to be epic.

You don't want to be perceived as somebody against jobs,

even though you know in the back of your mind or in your heart

that this is not a good idea.

So in 2008 we enacted the clean, renewable, and efficient energy

act requiring that the state utilities derive 10% of their

electricity from clean energy resources.

The definition of clean energy resources is of course,

wind and solar, but it also includes biomass.

I know there was a lot of enthusiasm for it:

Well, it's green and it's sustainable and it's renewable.

And I'm not even sure what green means anymore, because I think

anybody can give it an interpretation that sounds good,

and they don't really mean it.

It's just a word that they use in order to make it

more palatable, to my mind.

And sustainable? I'm not sure about that either.

So there might be a lot of deception involved in it.

MARY: The L'Anse Warden Plant in Michigan is representative

of plants in the U.S that are not just burning wood

but burning post-industrial waste

and other kinds of contaminated materials.

At the Warden plant, they've been burning

kind of a witch's brew of a lot of different fuels,

including chipped railroad ties, chipped railroad ties that are

treated with Pentachlorophenol, which is a banned pesticide

in the United States.

But they're importing those ties from Canada.

They're burning clean forest wood, and they're burning tires.

They're burning chipped tires, which might contain 20% rubber

by content, and so that has been treated in some

regulatory contexts as biomass.

CATHERINE: We love living here. We love our lifestyle.

A lot of us aren't here because we're making a lot of money,

but we're here because we love being here.

It's just a beautiful place, and we don't want to see it spoiled.

[heavy engine grinds to a halt]

- I worked in the pulp yard from February of 2006

to August 1st of 2014.

I just started not feeling well, and the first thing was always

as soon as I would get to work, about an hour

I'd have a headache, and it would last all day.

It would take probably the weekend to feel better, and

as soon as I'd go there Monday, it'd start all over.

Of course, they're burning volatile hydrocarbons,

which are carcinogenic.

And again, they're not monitoring the air quality,

so these things have been a chronic source of irritation

and concern for me.

MARY: What's not coming out of the stack at the Warden plant?

It's basically the periodic table of heavy metals,

contaminants, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which

PAHs, which is partially burned compounds that are

highly toxic and carcinogenic.

And also from the chipping operation there, that's a lot of

dust from the fuel before it's burned.

CATHERINE: There is a Catholic elementary school within

very close proximity.

There's a BHK Head Start school for pre-school kids

right next to the facility.

There was a lot of concentration of this black material

all over the snow.

And when we would go outside to play, the children

with lighter-colored snow clothes then would get

this black material on their clothing.

A protest is growing in L'Anse as more and more villagers are

speaking out against the L'Anse Warden Electric Company and

alleged air and water pollution.

- We sent the DEQ videos of fugitive dust releases,

massive fugitive dust releases, and they came up.

And because they didn't see it they said,

"Well, you know we can't admit there's a fugitive dust release

unless we see it."

When we have to determine whether there's a violation on

rule 901 creating a nuisance, we have to see that that dust is

actually impacting a residence or another property.

I don't know what more evidence you need.

- I'm not saying this is the kind of problem

they're experiencing in Flint, but I'm saying that somebody,

not necessarily you people, but somebody in your agency has been

sitting around like last year's Christmas tree

and not doing their jobs.

[applause, whistles, cheers]

So we're trying to negotiate with the company a compliance

plan that we know is solid that we can ensure that

the facility's in compliance.

We're going to have another public meeting and public

hearing, once we have a draft compliance plan in place.

- The community is wondering how is it that it can continue

to run when they're not in compliance,

and why is that allowed?

I mean, you and I aren't able to burn tires as individuals.

We are not able to burn railroad ties, and somehow

corporations are able to do that.

How is that possible?

I mean, that's a real basic question for most people

in our community.

- We're going to start out with a one-hour question and answer

session, and then the official public hearing starts at 7:00.

The plant is in my front yard.

Twice now I had come outside, and the gas or the poison in

the air took my breath away, and it terrified me.

I have three small children.

I ran inside, and I had to close all of my windows.

I think it's important that we know who owns Warden Plant.

Warden is owned by a conglomerate called Traxys.

I'll spell it: T-R-A-X-Y-S.

Traxys provides, "Worldwide finance and

commercial services," unquote.

Traxys Peru, Traxys Mexico, Traxys Germany, Traxys Turkey,

Traxys Luxembourg, Traxys Spain, Traxys Moscow, Traxys Paris,

Traxys China, Traxys Hong Kong, Traxys Shanghai.

Would you think Traxys cares about us here?

Do you think they care about us?

Do you think they care about our children?

Do you think they care about our environment?

Do you think they care about our air, our water, our health?

Who cares about us here?

We need your help.

Who else do we have to turn to?

Thank you. [applause]

The EPA ordered air monitors and a meteorological tower

inside the plant.

We were thrilled when we heard that.

Somewhere during the consent negotiations, that disappeared.

That's the only hope that we had was getting these air monitors,

having the plant pay for them as they should, put them near

the fence so we could have some real data.

You know, it's like you don't believe us.

Go down to South 4th street. There are five houses,

and one house has residents. The other four houses are empty.

What does this tell you? What do we have to do?

Do we have to come up here and drop dead

while we're talking to you?

- Thirty seconds.

- You are our only hope, but nothing is being done,

nothing is changing.

- Your time is up.

In this consent agreement, you're permitting 20 tons

an hour of railroad ties to be burned.

That's about 480 tons a day.

So that means the Warden Plant downtown can burn 19 truckloads

of railroad ties every day.

Are you kidding me?!

You guys negotiated that for us, the community?

You negotiated with the Warden Plant with us in mind?

Let's talk about the tires.

All right, four ton an hour.

That's 8,000 pounds of tires to be thrown

in the hopper every hour.

I did the math, simple math.

A tire weighs about 20 pounds.

Divide that up in the course of a day, and you've permitted

the Warden Plant to burn close to 10,000 tires a day.

Are you kidding me?

- 30 seconds.

- Yeah, well, we'll make it quick.

This is an incinerator! [applause]

It's terrible.

You've got to throw out that paper altogether and start all

over, and make it known as an incinerator.

I mean, we're not going to stand for it.

This community, we've decided, you can go back

to your office tomorrow, tell your people

the people in L'Anse are not buying this.

[applause, boisterous cheers]

[accordion waltz]

ADAM: One of the really exciting things about this campaign is

that there is a growing international coalition of

organizations who are working very closely

together on this issue.

- I think it's absolutely crucial that organizations like

Dogwood Alliance, the NRDC, people from organizations that

see what the impacts on the ground are, and see what are the

influences of European policies, come over here to the European

decision makers to tell that.

I'm Danna. I'm executive director at Dogwood Alliance.

I think it's really important for everyone in Europe

who's looking at this issue to understand the context

in which the biomass market and the wood pellet

export market is happening.

So part of where we are right now is that we don't see

the problem in Europe, because the solution came from

imports from the U.S.

We now have a traffic jam of boats

on the North Sea coming here.

And a little anecdote: In 2007, we made a McKinsie study

showing that the shortage of wood would be enormous.

At the very last meeting, we were drinking a beer, finalizing

the study and someone said, "Let's get it from the U.S."

The entire team of consultants said,

"No, that would be stupid."

- Since we will be discussing now the policies in place until

2030, it becomes very important that we have the criteria right,

that we have the accounting right.

So the discussions that are coming up

is really crucial at the moment.

I think the political fight is going to be that everyone

will acknowledge that no, of course, burning a tree is

a stupid thing to do, but we are not doing that.

They will all play the game to say,

"No, we are only using waste flows."

Well, it's going to be very important that we are

getting this proof on the table.

To show really, "Guys, what we are doing here is not burning

waste flows. We are just burning roundwood and trees here."

Today we are delivering the voices of

over 100,000 U. S. citizens.

And the message is very simple: Burning trees to produce

electricity is bad for ecosystems, it's bad

for climate, and it's bad for communities.

[Baroque music]

DANNA: That was fun. [chuckles]

DUNCAN: We were meeting officials at the

Department of Energy and Climate Change.

We were talking to bureaucrats, I felt.

And the problem is that doing away with biomass electricity

is very, very problematic for them, and we were sympathetic.

This government, no fault of these guys, is doing all sorts

of absurd things like cutting genuine low-cost, low-carbon

renewables like wind, onshore wind and solar, and so biomass

is ending up being funded at the expense, not of fossil fuels

but of genuine solutions.

So it felt slightly like talking to a sponge.

BILL: To me one of the most stunning things was, here

we have a policy that declares something to be zero emissions,

when, in fact, it's not zero.

And so I pointed out several reasons why that was the case.

And finally the lawyer said, "Well, you don't understand.

If we don't count this as zero, we cannot meet our

obligation to the European Union."

Which, I almost fell off my chair when I heard that.

The amount of biomass that's being burnt for making

electricity in the UK is exponentially increasing.

It's doubling every year at the moment.

- There is an alternative to Drax.

There is an alternative to filthy energy,

to dirty, destructive energy.

We can power the UK renewably.

♪ You make subsidies that keep you alive ♪

♪ while sun and wind and water have to struggle and strive ♪

♪ So hit the road Drax and don't you come back no more ♪

♪ no more, no more, no more ♪

♪ Hit the road Drax and don't you come back no more ♪

[upbeat music]

As we stand here, corporate biomass CEOs and profiteers

are wining and dining each other, and patting themselves

on the back for figuring out a way to profit off of

the destruction of southeastern forests.

Biomass has got to go

Hey, hey, ho, ho Biomass has got to go

Hey, hey, ho, ho...

[same chant continues, echoing through the building]

What do we want? Climate justice.

When do we want it? Now.

[cheers]

[turbine blades slice the air]

If fossil fuels continue to increase, and we say goodbye to

the two degrees and go on to three degrees, four degrees,

five, then it really almost doesn't matter what you do

with forests or anything else, I think.

We're cooked.

I'm making the case that you can use forests to keep the CO2

concentration from going up as you phase out fossil fuels.

We can stop deforestation, which is now accounting

for some emissions.

We could let young forests grow back, just leave them alone,

let them store carbon as they age.

And then we can even establish forests

on areas that used to be forested and that are not now.

Those three things together are big enough to offset the carbon

that would be emitted from fossil fuels as we phase

them out, as we went to a renewable future.

They give you a bridge to get from today, 10 billion tons

of carbon emitted a year, to zero from fossil fuels.

A few decades. Has to happen.

DUNCAN: The thing about bioenergy is that if we give it

the green light, it will take over the world.

Because there simply isn't enough biomass

to remotely replace the free gift

of fossil energy that we've had over the last century.

And we will kill ourselves in trying.

We will stamp on the biosphere.

JAMIE: When I look at a huge biomass plant, I don't just see

that this is a business that generates energy by burning

trees; I see this as a cultural phenomenon that affects

every aspect of our life.

And it has implications for how we, as a species,

relate to the land itself.

This is what we're up against is that our economic system values

forest destruction over forest protection, and at the

end of the day that's what we have to change.

It boils down to money. They're making money.

Somebody's making money on that deal, so you know, when it gets

to that bottom line, the land is always the one that suffers.

It's always that way.

And certainly the public should not be subsidizing actually

putting more carbon into the atmosphere in the name of

addressing climate change; and when those subsidies go away,

which I think they will, this industry is going to go away

as fast as it appeared in the U.S.

And we have to be actively reducing carbon dioxide,

not even just holding it constant.

The best technology for that is trees!

It seems to me like climate change is a kind of

final exam for our species.

We'll find out if the big brain was in fact a good idea or not.

Maybe if it's connected to a big enough heart

to make a difference.

And I just refuse to believe that this interesting creature

that we are can't come to grips with this and do something.

We've been given ample warning by

the world's scientists.

Now the question is whether we'll heed it or not.

[bluegrass]