EPA

- Mike Ewall and Samantha Chirillo

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"370","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"400","style":"width: 333px; height: 333px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"400"}}]]In December, 900 Americans, including 100 organizations across the U.S. collectively voiced their concerns about major parts of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, in comments submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Citizens specifically asked the EPA to:

·      set more aggressive targets and address environmental justice

·      not encourage more fracking (gas) or nuclear energy, and close the methane loophole

·      disallow a shift from coal to biomass and trash burning and close the biogenic CO2 loophole

The EPA released their revised framework in November 2014, shortly before the comment deadline on the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan.  In a memo dated November 19, 2014, EPA announced its decision to virtually ignore the carbon dioxide emissions of biomass energy in its revised Framework for Assessing Biogenic CO2 Emissions from Stationary Sources. After years of urging to accurately account for these emissions, grassroots advocates across the U.S. contend that the EPA’s biogenic carbon loophole will open the door to an onslaught of incineration that will harm public health, exacerbate runaway climate change, and degrade our nation’s forests and drinking watersheds.

Ignoring its own Scientific Advisory Board, the EPA has demonstrated that politics trump science when it comes to climate change. Sound science has shown that biomass energy facilities are not “carbon neutral” and emit 50% more carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced than a coal-fired facility.  Trash incineration emits 2.5 times as much CO2 as coal per unit of energy produced.

Sound science has also shown that a biomass energy facility emits higher levels of dangerous pollutants, such as particulate matter, per unit of energy produced than a coal-fired facility, harming especially children and the elderly.  In the case of trash incineration, it's far more polluting than coal by every available measure.

This new EPA policy allows CO2 emissions from burning waste to be completely ignored.  This would include incineration of trash, food waste, animal waste (such as poultry litter), sewage sludge and construction/demolition waste.  This is justified on the assumption that these wastes would cause more global warming emissions if landfilled, as if conventional landfilling is the only alternative.

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The new EPA policy, still largely uncertain, will at best ignore CO2 emissions from forest and agriculture-derived biomass and at worst provide political cover for the destruction of the public’s natural resources in the most vulnerable states. Each state gets to choose whether it will address these sources in its compliance plan to meet Clean Power Plan goals. The memo states that “. . . the EPA expects that states' reliance specifically on sustainably-derived agricultural- and forest-derived feedstocks may also be an approvable element of their compliance plans.” Rather than specifying the requirements to pass a sustainability test, “the agency expects to recognize the biogenic CO2 emissions and climate policy benefits of waste-derived and certain forest-derived industrial byproduct feedstocks, based on the conclusions supported by a variety of technical studies, including the revised framework” and consultations with various stakeholders. This could include industry, industry-funded scientists, and environmental groups funded to make deals with the industry.

“Government agencies already work with industry, biased scientists, and compromised environmental groups to label destructive public forest logging as ‘sustainable.’ What’s worse with this new EPA policy is that it falsely portrays this logging as beneficial for the climate, and now the states most politically dominated by the timber industry can get more money to log more of our forests without taxing the multinational private forest owners,” explains Roy Keene, public interest forester for 40 years and Executive Director of Our Forests, based in Oregon, the state with the largest timber harvest volume.

The EPA recognizes that some states, like Oregon, already have “sustainable” forest management plans without critically evaluating from even a carbon accounting standpoint what is “sustainable” or “sustained yield,” as forest management plans call it. The O&C Act of 1937 mandated that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) sustain the whole forest and its multiple uses by the public -- the waterways, soils, recreation value, and timber harvest – although never implemented as such. The National Forest Management Act mandates that the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) calculate non-declining yield (a.k.a. “sustained yield”) levels from the sale of timber from each forest.  However, the mandates and the reality are totally different. Already an increasing trend not only among state agencies, but also in the U.S. Forest Service, managers are hiding data on timber harvest and soil and telling nonprofits they’ll have to file a Freedom of Information Act request to get data.

Over time, these agencies, including the USFS, have shifted from using the board foot to the inappropriate cubic foot as a unit of measurement yet still claim a “sustainable yield” of timber. The cubic foot is adequate when measuring the entire volume of the tree. However, the board foot, used to measure just the wood that can be made into lumber, is generally considered the more honest unit of measure of harvest volume from a forest when comparing among trees of different sizes or stands of different ages. A larger tree without defect has more board feet per cubic foot that can be made into lumber than a smaller tree. The larger tree historically has had a higher price per cubic foot than a smaller tree, although biomass energy market is now increasing the value of that smaller tree that is meanwhile less suitable for use in construction. Agencies using cubic feet overinflate the harvest volume of younger trees to justify replacing one slower-growing older tree with six faster-growing seedlings. Even if the cubic feet in a logged stand increases, the quantity of wood in that stand that can be made into a board foot of dimensional lumber declines.

The total carbon stored also declines then, especially considering that half of the carbon in Pacific Northwest forests is stored in the soil and largely lost upon logging. In his book Reforming the Forest Service, Randal O’Toole predicted that board foot sales from national forests would decline 30% as long as the USFS reports cubic feet while making the bogus sustainable yield justification. Of course, the market for chips has increased all the while. Drawing a flawed comparison using cubic feet ignores both the longer-term economic and ecosystem benefits of an older, biodiverse stand over a young plantation. When an agency changes the unit of measurement it uses, one can no longer validly compare its harvest data before and after the change.

Moreover, existing state plans are complex, involving multiple levels of government and stakeholders and took years to create. Will the EPA force any state to revise its forest management plan when it was partly written and claimed to be “sustainable” by scientists at the state’s leading agriculture university (e.g. Oregon State University)? States without existing plans can simply “encourage participation in sustainable forest management programs developed by third-party forestry and/or environmental entities,” the EPA recognizes. However, the way the system works currently, forest certifiers have a financial incentive to certify, and certified forests are not independently and credibly monitored, according to Keene. There are no common minimum sustainability standards among certifying bodies, which focus on process, not on outcomes. Consumers do not have adequate information. University of Alberta policy analysts have recognized such market failures of certification and that, “given the drawbacks associated with certification, there may be more appropriate alternatives” for “the elusive goal of sustainable forest management.”

The “environmental entities” may be logging selectively instead of clearcutting but are logging a much larger area and destroying the soil using a mechanized approach rather than creating jobs and are not independently monitored. There is little to no citizen involvement or oversight of either forest certification schemes or logging operations contracted by or consented to by environmental groups.  If “sustainable forest management” is so “sustainable,” why the lack of transparency and accountability?

The timber and bioenergy industries and their politicians, leading proponents of the EPA’s biogenic carbon loophole, also promise that more logging and burning will yield more jobs and revenue. However, based on Oregon State Employment Department and U.S. Forest Service data, dramatic increases in the timber harvest volume from the end of the 2009 recession and 2013 are not accompanied by proportional increases in jobs or revenue. Keene argues that cutting and burning more of the public’s carbon-storing forested watersheds at a time when chip and pellet exports to fuel facilities in Europe and Asia are at an all time high is making the U.S. a resource colony. If Obama and Congress want to increase jobs and bolster rural economies, why don’t they stop the rising export of raw logs and chips from public forests and tax private exports?

At least half of the harvest volume from privately owned forests in Oregon is already exported to Asia in one form or another, untaxed. The southeastern U.S. has been the leading export region of forest biomass to European countries that similarly do not count carbon dioxide emitted from biomass energy facilities. In early November, citizens in Chesapeake, VA, protested the climate impact and degradation to their own environment from biomass export.

“We’re alarmed that the Obama Administration’s climate action in the form of this EPA decision will actually worsen climate change, further drain local economies and disproportionately impact the poorest Americans,” said Chirillo, M.S., M.P.A., Steering Committee member of the Anti-Biomass Incineration Campaign.

Chirillo explains that the timing of the EPA’s decision is not surprising, as the Subcommittee on International Trade, chaired by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, and others in Congress put the finishing touches on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the newest NAFTA-derived trade deal. “This trade deal, combined with the EPA’s legitimizing burning forests for energy essentially greases the skids for more of the public’s forest resources and jobs to be shipped overseas, contributing to climate change while degrading public health and food security at home. Hardly sustainable.”

Although U.S. Senator Wyden’s O&C bill to increase logging on public forests in Oregon ultimately stalled, the EPA decision gives similar or even more destructive logging legislation by Republican majorities in both houses new political cover.

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“This kind of legislation is de facto privatization. It allows more industry manipulation with even less public involvement, basic accounting, or scrutiny of forest practices that contribute to climate change. The water that flows out of the forest irrigates farms. More logging and biomass extraction will exacerbate the drying effects of climate change,” forester Keene warns.

Forest legislation in Congress generally does not consider already degraded watersheds and does not account for the economic effects on agricultural irrigation or domestic water supply. In 2014, the National Weather Service rated drought in Oregon as “severe” and neighboring California, a top food-producing state, as “extreme.” Currently, most states do not require that new bioenergy facility owners show they can continuously source enough biomass to keep producing energy, let alone leave water supplies intact, before state agencies under the authority of the EPA hand out pollution permits. How can states or the EPA claim "sustainable forest management" without supply assessment?

- by Edward Dodge, December 10, 2014, Breaking Energy

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The EPA has long promoted cellulosic ethanol as the future of biofuels, but technical challenges have kept production far below targets. A recent rule change allows RNG, renewable natural gas, to qualify as cellulosic biofuel even though RNG is not cellulosic, but this helps EPA appear to be meeting their goals.

RNG growth has been dramatic and is the lowest carbon vehicle fuel available today. Perhaps the EPA should be promoting a Renewable Gas Standard instead of a Renewable Fuel Standard.

In 2013, production of cellulosic ethanol was effectively zero, even though the legislated target volume for for 2013 was 1 billion gallons. In August 2013, EPA reduced the target to 6 million gallons, and again reduced the target retroactively to 810,185 gallons, less than 1 million. By all accounts this represents a complete failure of the cellulosic ethanol program. In July 2014 the EPA revised the cellulosic biofuel rules to allow RNG to be categorized as cellulosic.

 (Graphic: Indiana Joel)

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We’re all familiar with climate change deniers, cheerfully and/or willfully ignorant folk who refuse to accept that human-caused carbon emissions are responsible for the climate crisis — or that there even is a climate crisis. Those of us who value science and common sense typically have as much patience for these twenty-three percent of Americans as we do for anyone who believes that maggots arise spontaneously from rotting meat, witches cause disease, or the Earth is the center of the universe.  

Recently, a subtler breed of climate change denier has emerged, spreading their propaganda and even infiltrating aspects of the environmental movement: biomass boosters. These advocates for the biomass energy industry often avoid detection by professing concern with carbon emissions. Yet, while cursing fossil fuels out of one side of their mouths, out of the other they bless the burning of one of the world’s greatest buffers against runaway climate chaos — our forests — for energy.

If the climate movement wants to win over the American people and influence policy, it needs to have credibility, which only comes through consistency, and that means distancing itself from the climate change deniers in our midst.

Forests = Carbon

Forests store and sequester mind-boggling amounts of carbon and are one of our last best hopes in fighting climate change. Cutting forests and burning them for energy in polluting biomass incinerators is perhaps the worst thing we can do when it comes to the climate threat.

Biomass incinerators emit higher levels of carbon dioxide per unit of energy than most coal-fired plants, the dirtiest fossil fuel, with some studies demonstrating up to a centuries-long time frame for the reabsorption of this carbon by future forests, and others showing a permanent increase in atmospheric CO2. Some of the more optimistic (and flawed) studies show it will still take decades for the carbon to be reabsorbed by forests cut for biomass energy. Yet, this assumes a forest cut for biomass will be protected and not logged again (a highly unlikely scenario), and will maintain the same rate of growth despite soil compaction, nutrient depletion, and erosion from past logging and impacts from climate change, including drought.

Even if that best case scenario were true, it’s irrelevant. Climate scientists insist the only way to reverse runaway climate change is to drastically cut our emissions now, not at some undetermined point in the future after emitting a massive pulse of carbon out the smokestacks of biomass incinerators.

Only when you bring up this point to biomass boosters do they reveal their true colors, proving that, despite pretensions, they really aren’t taking climate change that seriously at all.

Magic Tree Carbon

When pressed on the reality of curbing emissions today rather than in the year 2114, biomass advocates typically admit that carbon emissions from biomass incineration don’t count because they don’t come from the bad kind of fossil fuel carbon, but the good kind of “biogenic” carbon. In other words, you can cut and burn all the trees you want for energy, because the carbon they emit is harmless, basically a kind of magic tree carbon.

Of course, an eighth grade grasp of Earth science proves that the atmosphere doesn’t give a fig whether the carbon comes from trees, fossil fuels, or unicorn poop, because carbon is carbon is carbon.  

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been spending the last few years deciding how to measure carbon emissions from biomass energy (even though the only honest way to account for it is to tabulate what comes out of the smokestack), with vague plans to come out with its accounting framework for “biogenic” carbon by the end of 2014. The agency’s willingness to even entertain industry’s notion of magic tree carbon exposes the EPA for what it truly is: a political, rather than scientific body. The Obama administration has come out in support of biomass energy, chopping down the low-hanging fruit of “green” energy to make it seem like it’s actually doing something about the climate crisis.

One final point to bring up if you’re ever in a conversation with a biomass booster and really want to watch them squirm. Remind them that the supposedly “biogenic” carbon stored in any given tree actually includes some carbon sequestered from hundreds of years of burning fossil fuels, and when that tree is burned for energy, that carbon too is released back into the atmosphere. If they have a response to this, please contact me and let me know what it is, because I’ve yet to hear one.

Of course, chances are, no matter how much you question biomass boosters on carbon emissions, you won’t get any good answers out of them. Maybe that’s because most of them secretly believe — though they’ll never admit it, perhaps not even to themselves — that climate change simply isn’t that big of a deal.   

- by Kevin Bundy, August 22, 2014, Center for Biological Diversity

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"139","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 200px; height: 199px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit today challenging a Clean Air Act permit issued by the Environmental Protection Agency for a massive, 31-megawatt biomass power plant proposed by Sierra Pacific Industries in Anderson, Calif. The challenge, filed directly in the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, charges the EPA with failing to control climate-warming carbon dioxide pollution from the plant.

“Tree-burning power plants foul the air, damage the climate, and threaten our forests,” said Kevin Bundy, a senior attorney with the Center’s Climate Law Institute. “For too long the EPA has acted as if carbon pollution from biomass doesn’t exist. But you can’t fool the atmosphere. Carbon from burning trees still warms the climate.”

The Clean Air Act requires the “best available control technology” for carbon pollution from large facilities like the Anderson plant. The EPA’s permit, however, treated biomass combustion itself as a “control technology” — even though the facility is primarily designed to burn biomass.

“The EPA’s decision makes no sense,” Bundy said. “You can’t control the pollution from burning trees by burning trees, any more than you can control the pollution from burning coal by burning coal.”

- by Erin Voegele, June 24, 2014, Biomass Magazine

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"139","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 222px; height: 221px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;"}}]]On June 23, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision on the U.S. EPA’s Tailoring Rule. While the court invalidated a portion of the rule, it essentially held up EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for certain facilities, specifically those required to obtain a Prevention of Significant Deterioration permit due to the emission of other regulated pollutants. The court’s ruling, however, did nothing to address the uncertainty faced by those in the biomass industry with regard to the EPA’s treatment of biogenic emissions.  

In its decision, the Supreme Court indicated that the EPA exceeded its statutory authority when it interpreted the Clean Air Act to require PSD and Title V permitting for stationary sources based on their GHG emissions. “Specifically, the agency may not [GHGs] as a pollutant for purposes of defining a ‘major emitting facility’ (or a ‘modification’ thereof) in the PSD context or a ‘major source’ in the Title V context. To the extent its regulations purport to do so, they are invalid. EPA may, however, continue to treat [GHGs] as a ‘pollutant subject to regulation under this chapter’ for purposes of requiring [best available control technology (BACT)] for ‘anyway’ sources,” wrote the Supreme Court in its decision.

[Contact the EPA at cleanenergy@epa.gov by May 30 and urge them NOT to include biomass energy in their plans. -Ed.] 

- Erin Voegele, May 8, 2014, Source: Biomass Magazine

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"189","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 299px; margin: 5px 10px; float: left; height: 211px;"}}]]The U.S. EPA is seeking public comments on its new draft action plant for the RE-Powering America’s Land Initiative. The program promotes renewable energy development on current and formerly contaminated lands, landfills and mine sites.

In August 2013, the EPA announced an update of its RE-Powering Mapping and Screening Tool. The updated tool showed vast potential for the development of bioenergy projects on contaminated lands, landfills and mine sites. According to the EPA, the updated tool identified 9,591 sites as potential locations for biorefinery facilities, 9,666 sites for potential biopower development and 1,947 sites as potential locations for landfill gas energy projects. To date, however, most projects developed through the initiative focus on wind or solar power generation. Of the 110 installations developed so far, only one is a biomass project. That project, the 20 MW Savannah River’s Biomass Steam Plant, is located on a Superfund site in Aiken, S.C.

- by Andrew Childers, March 28, 2014. Source: Environment Reporter

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"139","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"346","style":"height: 380px; float: left; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; width: 347px;","width":"347"}}]]The Environmental Appeals Board partially remanded an air pollution permit for a waste-to-energy facility in Puerto Rico after it failed to account for greenhouse gas emissions from biomass.

The Energy Answers Arecibo LLC permit is one of the first to address emissions from biomass in the wake of a 2013 federal appeals court decision vacating an Environmental Protection Agency rule that exempted biogenic greenhouse gases from the Clean Air Act's prevention of significant deterioration (PSD) and Title V permitting requirements, attorneys and forestry representatives said.

The EPA has yet to respond to the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and forestry advocates said that is increasing uncertainty in an industry now subject to the permitting requirements.