Q: When is embattled climate-denying Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt willing to say that reducing carbon emissions is a good thing?
A: Only when he’s granting a favor to a powerful industry (and their Pruitt-pals-turned-lobbyists), harming public health and the environment, and contradicting science.
On April 23, EPA administrator Pruitt declared that the agency will treat burning wood from forests to produce electricity (“forest biomass energy”) as “carbon neutral.” Effectively, he claimed that generating power from burning wood does not contribute to climate change. But burning wood unquestionably releases carbon dioxide, and rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are driving climate change. If Pruitt’s forest biomass power policy doesn’t sound right, that’s because it isn’t.
First, Pruitt claims that his policy is not a scientific determination. But how forest biomass energy affects climate change is an issue of physical reality, which can only be answered through science. Pruitt’s policy contradicts the science.
Here’s the issue: First, as trees grow they take carbon out of the atmosphere, but the effect of biomass power on climate change is more complicated than that. When forests are burned for energy, the carbon they contain is released immediately as carbon dioxide, but regrowth (and removal of carbon from the air) takes decades, if it occurs at all. After all, once a forest is cut, the land may be used for other purposes or replanted with trees that take up less carbon. In the meantime, the extra carbon in the air warms the planet for decades, at least. In addition, trees are a relatively less-efficient source of energy, and they require a lot of energy inputs to turn into fuel (think harvesting, transport, and production into wood pellets that can be burned in a power plant). In fact, more carbon is released per unit of electricity generated from biomass energy than from coal. A recent scientific study by MIT researchers and others found that burning wood in place of coal actually increases the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and it takes roughly 40-100 years just to eliminate the carbon debt incurred by switching from coal to biomass. The EPA science Advisory Board concluded that, in no uncertain terms, biomass energy is not carbon neutral.
Second, Pruitt’s policy touts biomass power, but completely ignores the harms. Pruitt’s policy fails to acknowledge that biomass energy affects human health by increasing emissions of particulate and smog-forming pollution, which harm our hearts and lungs. The policy ignores the environmental harms from encouraging forest clear cutting -- with loss of wildlife habitat and damage to streams and soils -- and conversion of native hardwood forests to managed plantations -- with pollution from fertilizer use, water-quality degradation, and loss of habitat. Biomass energy can also cause direct economic harms from the loss of existing tourism and recreation industries in forested areas that are clear-cut. But Pruitt’s policy only mentions the impacts that support his position.
So who pushed Pruitt to issue this unfounded and harmful policy? Big surprise: It was the forest-products industry and its hired-gun lobbyists. The National Alliance of Forest Owners, which includes Weyerhaeuser and many other timber companies, met with Pruitt in 2017 and pushed Congress to include language in the EPA’s funding bill directing the EPA to adopt policies that “reflect the carbon-neutrality of forest bioenergy.” Among others lobbying on this issue were two former colleagues of Pruitt’s from Oklahoma -- Glen Coffee, a colleague from the state senate, and Crystal Coon, Pruitt’s former chief of staff -- neither of whom had lobbied before 2017, when Pruitt came to Washington, D.C.
It turns out that even a climate-denier can tout “carbon neutrality” -- but only if it will boost industry profits. And all that practice denying the science of climate change comes in handy when you want to pretend that burning forests doesn’t actually harm people or the climate, all evidence to the contrary.