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Here’s What Green Activists Think About Hillary Clinton

by AbelSVBXuzcfe Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared in Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Notwithstanding the Washington Post‘s inevitable jokes about “fedoras, flannel shirts and beards” outside Hillary Clinton’s campaign office “in the midst of hipster-cool downtown Brooklyn,” there actually is no such thing as “hipster-cool downtown Brooklyn.” Downtown Brooklyn is a warren of architecturally undistinguished office buildings and sterile windswept plazas. And so it was on a charmless little patch of sidewalk near the new campaign headquarters that a group of about 20 activists with 350 Action, an affiliate of 350.org, held signs and chanted on Monday afternoon urging Clinton to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline. The signs played on a slogan used by Clinton’s supporters—”I’m ready for Hillary”—by tacking an extra phrase onto the end—”to say NO KXL.”

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In a comment that cut to the heart of the contradiction embedded in Clinton’s record—embracing both cuts to carbon emissions and increases in fossil fuel production—Duncan Meisel, an organizer with 350, said, “If you want to stop carbon pollution, keep carbon in the ground!”

Reporters in attendance strained to hear the unamplified speakers over the steady hum of idling buses across the street. What the event lacked in grandeur, though, it made up for in topical importance. Clinton herself has called climate change “the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face.”

And yet climate activists have good reason to be worried about Clinton’s Keystone stance. In recent years, she has refused to take any position on the pipeline, but in 2010, when she was secretary of state, she said, “we are inclined to” approve it. Says Ben Schreiber, Friends of the Earth’s climate and energy program director, “It was inappropriate for her to make comments about the merits of the proposal when there wasn’t even an environmental impact statement.”

And that’s just one of the many reservations some environmental activists have about Clinton’s past record and current positions. In interviews, they also complain that she promoted fracking abroad as secretary of state, she has ties to Big Oil, and she favors pro-corporate trade agreements. Several of these issues have been gathering steam. Recent reports on large donations to the Clinton Foundation from oil companies have led to criticism from green groups. “This cash connection between the Clintons with natural gas and Big Oil is sincerely troubling,” says Bill Snape, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity. Last week, a coalition of more than 100 environmental and local anti-fracking groups sent a letter to Clinton calling on her to “acknowledge the inherent dangers in shale development and stand with us.”

None of the biggest national environmental organizations—such as the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and League of Conservation Voters (LCV)—signed the letter to Clinton, nor did those three groups respond to queries for this story. “National green groups have their own dance to do with Democratic candidates,” says one environmentalist who asked not to be named discussing other organizations. Withholding criticism allows for friendlier relations with—and, they hope, better access to—Clinton, and more influence over policy development in her campaign and in a future White House. The big groups might believe that this will ultimately mean better outcomes for climate policy than public confrontation. After all, if the Democratic frontrunner tells environmentalists to take a hike and wins without them, then they’re really doomed.

Whatever the reason, Clinton was warmly received when she spoke at an LCV dinner in New York last fall. Upon Clinton’s campaign announcement on Sunday, LCV issued a cautiously optimistic statement that listed her climate bona fides from her time in the Senate and State Department while noting that she must lay out specific climate action plans in her campaign platform. The group praised Clinton for having supported cap-and-trade and an international climate accord, but one could detect a hint of uncertainty from LCV as to how much Clinton will emphasize climate. “We welcome Secretary Clinton to the Presidential race, and encourage her to build on her long record of environmental leadership by making climate change a top priority of her campaign,” said LCV President Gene Karpinski.

He should have been pleased to see what Clinton campaign chair John Podesta tweeted on Sunday:

As ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum noted, to make climate and clean energy one of the campaign’s top three issues would be unprecedented for any major party nominee. “The Podesta tweet is a sea change, that would not have happened in 2008,” says Karthik Ganapathy, a spokesperson for 350.

Still, 350 and other aggressive green groups are openly ambivalent about Clinton. Friends of the Earth and the Center for Biological Diversity both signed the anti-fracking letter to Clinton. “Our concerns about Clinton are some of the same concerns we have with President Obama as well,” says Schreiber. “We’re quite concerned about fracking, and the fact that she was actually advocating for other countries to frack as part of her role at State.” Another aspect of her State Department tenure that worries greens is her support for free trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would allow transnational corporations to challenge environmental regulations in signatory nations.

Climate hawks won’t all be such cheap dates any more. Some of them are demanding not only that Clinton say she will limit emissions and promote renewables, but that she commit to keeping fossil fuels in the ground.

Says Kelly Mitchell, Greenpeace’s climate and energy campaign director, “Hillary Clinton needs to show that she would meet this challenge with the leadership required of our next president—that means standing up to the fossil fuel lobbyists, taking serious steps to keep coal, oil, and gas in the ground, and putting the United States on a path to 100 percent renewable energy.”

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Here’s What Green Activists Think About Hillary Clinton

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The World’s Worst Climate Villain Just Showed Us Exactly How to Stop Global Warming

by EzekielStolp Posted on March 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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There was a somewhat surprising announcement this week from a country with one of the world’s worst climate reputations: Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s office declared that his government is committed to signing on to the next major international climate accord, set to be hammered out in Paris later this year.

In a statement, the PM’s office said that “a strong and effective global agreement, that addresses carbon leakage and delivers environmental benefit, is in Australia’s national interest.”

I have no idea what “carbon leakage” is. Presumably it’s something similar to carbon dioxide emissions, which are the leading cause of global warming. Regardless, the announcement is a welcome sign from an administration that was recently ranked as the “worst industrial country in the world” on climate action.

The Paris summit is meant to elicit strong commitments to reduce carbon pollution from all of the world’s leading economies, so it’s a good thing Australia is willing to play ball. The country gets 74 percent of its power from coal (that’s nearly twice coal’s share of US energy generation). Australia has the second-largest carbon footprint per capita of the G20 nations (following Saudi Arabia), according to US government statistics.

But let’s not get too excited. Although Abbott hasn’t yet specified exactly what kind of climate promises he’ll bring to the table in Paris, there’s good reason to be skeptical. Here’s why: In the run-up to the talks, developed countries are keeping a close eye on each others’ domestic climate policies as a guage of how serious they each are about confronting the problem. It’s a process of collectively raising the bar: If major polluters like the United States show they mean business in the fight against climate change, other countries will be more inclined to follow suit. Of course, the reverse is also true—for example, the revelation that Japan is using climate-designated dollars to finance coal-fired power plants weakens the whole negotiating process. That’s one reason why President Barack Obama has been so proactive about initiating major climate policies from within the White House rather than waiting for the GOP-controlled Congress to step up.

So, on that metric, how are Australia’s climate policies shaping up? It looks like they’re going straight down the gurgler.

Almost a year ago, Australia made a very different kind of climate announcement: It became the world’s first country to repeal a price on carbon. Back in 2012, after several years of heated political debate, Australia’s parliament had voted to impose a fixed tax on carbon pollution for the country’s several hundred worst polluters. The basic idea—as with all carbon-pricing systems, from California to the European Union—is that putting a price on carbon emissions encourages power plants, factories, and other major sources to clean up. Most environmental economists agree that a carbon price would be the fastest way to dramatically slash emissions, and that hypothesis is supported by a number of case studies from around the world—British Columbia is a classic success story. (President Obama backed a national carbon price for the US—in the form of a cap-and-trade system—in 2009, but it was quashed in the Senate.)

In Australia, the carbon tax quickly became unpopular with most voters, who blamed it for high energy prices and the country’s sluggish recovery from the 2008 global recession. Abbott rose to power in part based on his pledge to get rid of the law. In July 2014 he succeeded in repealing it.

Now, new data from the Australian Department of the Environment reveal that whether or not you liked the carbon tax, it absolutely worked to slash carbon emissions. And in the first quarter without the tax, emissions jumped for the first time since prior to the global financial crisis.

The new data quantified greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector (which accounts for about a third of total emissions, the largest single share) in the quarter from July to September 2014. As the chart below shows, emissions in that same quarter dropped by about 7.5 percent after the carbon tax was imposed, and jumped 4.7 percent after it was repealed:

Tim McDonnell

It’s especially important to note that the jump came in the context of an overall decline in electricity consumption, as Australian climate economist Frank Jotzo explained to the Sydney Morning Herald:

Frank Jotzo, an associate professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School, said electricity demand was falling in the economy, so any rise in emissions from the sector showed how supply was reverting to dirtier energy sources.

“You had a step down in the emission intensity in power stations from the carbon price—and now you have a step back up,” Professor Jotzo said.

…Jotzo estimated fossil fuel power plants with 4.4 gigawatts of capacity were been taken offline during the carbon tax years. About one third of that total, or 1.5 gigawatts, had since been switched back on.

In other words, we have here a unique case study of what happens when a country bails on climate action. The next question will what all this will mean for the negotiations in Paris.

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The World’s Worst Climate Villain Just Showed Us Exactly How to Stop Global Warming

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Obama Is Ordering the Federal Government to Slash Its Greenhouse Emissions

by BetseyButtensha Posted on March 19, 2015

Mother Jones

President Barack Obama will once again use his executive authority to mandate action on climate change, the White House announced this morning. Later today, Obama plans to sign an executive order directing the federal government to reduce its carbon footprint by 40 percent below 2008 levels within a decade. The White House announcement also includes carbon-reduction commitments from a number of large government contractors, including GE and IBM.

From the Associated Press:

All told, the government pollution cuts along with industry contributions will have the effect of keeping 26 million metric tons of greenhouse gases out of the air by 2025, or the equivalent of what about 5.5 million cars would pump out through their tailpipes in an average year, the White House said. Yet it was unclear exactly how either the government or private companies planned to meet those targets.

In other words, it will take until 2025 to for the cuts to reach 26 million metric tons per year. And even that is a pretty small fraction of the nation’s total carbon footprint, which was nearly 7 billion metric tons in 2013. But the announcement garnered praise from environmental groups as a sign of Obama’s leadership on climate. In a statement, Natural Resources Defense Council president Rhea Suh called the announcement “a powerful reminder of how much progress we can make simply through energy efficiency and greater reliance on clean, renewable sources of energy.”

The executive order will be the latest step the president has taken to confront climate change that won’t require him to push legislation through a recalcitrant, GOP-controlled Congress. In the last couple years his administration has imposed tight limits on vehicle emissions and has put forward a flagship set of new rules under the Clean Air Act to slash carbon pollution from power plants. Obama also negotiated a bilateral deal with China that featured a suite of new climate promises from both countries. And sometime this spring, the president will announce what kind of commitments his administration will bring to the table for a high-stakes round of UN-led negotiations that are meant to produce a new international climate accord.

According to the White House, today’s executive order directs federal agencies to:

Procure a quarter of their total energy from clean sources by 2025;
Cut energy use in federal buildings 2.5 percent per year over the next decade;
Purchase more plug-in hybrid vehicles for federal fleets and reduce per-mile greenhouse gas emissions overall by 30 percent by 2025;
Reduce water use in federal buildings 2 percent per year through 2025.

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Obama Is Ordering the Federal Government to Slash Its Greenhouse Emissions

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California Is Pumping Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

by Myrna Posted on March 18, 2015

And it’s not going to be replaced any time soon. Irrigating rice fields in Richvale, Calif. Jae C. Hong/AP By now, the impacts of California’s unchecked groundwater pumping are well-known: the dropping water levels, dried-up wells and slowly sinking farmland in parts of the Central Valley. But another consequence gets less attention, one measured not by acre-feet or gallons-per-minute but the long march of time. As California farms and cities drill deeper for groundwater in an era of drought and climate change, they no longer are tapping reserves that percolated into the soil over recent centuries. They are pumping water that fell to Earth during a much wetter climatic regime—the ice age. Such water is not just old. It’s prehistoric. It is older than the earliest pyramids on the Nile, older than the world’s oldest tree, the bristlecone pine. It was swirling down rivers and streams 15,000 to 20,000 years ago when humans were crossing the Bering Strait from Asia. Read the rest at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. More: California Is Pumping Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

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California Is Pumping Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

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Climate Change Is Baking Alaska

by SherrylKilburn Posted on March 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Earlier this winter, Monica Zappa packed up her crew of Alaskan sled dogs and headed south, in search of snow. “We haven’t been able to train where we live for two months,” she told me.

Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, which Zappa calls home, has been practically tropical this winter. Rick Thoman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Alaska, has been dumbfounded. “Homer, Alaska, keeps setting record after record, and I keep looking at the data like, Has the temperature sensor gone out or something?“

Something does seem to be going on in Alaska. Last fall, a skipjack tuna, which is more likely to be found in the Galápagos than near a glacier, was caught about 150 miles southeast of Anchorage, not far from the Kenai. This past weekend, race organizers had to truck in snow to the ceremonial Iditarod start line in Anchorage. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska tweeted a photo of one of the piles of snow with the hashtag #wemakeitwork.

Read: Freak floods flattened Eagle, Alaska. One man’s race against the water.

But it’s unclear how long that will be possible. Alaska is heating up at twice the rate of the rest of the country—a canary in our climate coal mine. A new report shows that warming in Alaska, along with the rest of the Arctic, is accelerating as the loss of snow and ice cover begins to set off a feedback loop of further warming. Warming in wintertime has been the most dramatic—more than 6 degrees in the past 50 years. And this is just a fraction of the warming that’s expected to come over just the next few decades.

Of course, it’s not just Alaska. Last month was the most extreme February on record in the Lower 48, and it marked the first time that two large sections of territory (more than 30 percent of the country each) experienced both exceptional cold and exceptional warmth in the same month, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. All-time records were set for the coldest month in dozens of Eastern cities, with Boston racking up more snow than the peaks of California’s Sierra Nevada. A single January snowstorm in Boston produced more snow than Anchorage has seen all winter. The discrepancy set off some friendly banter recently between the Anchorage, Boston, and San Francisco offices of the National Weather Service.

The terminus of Bear Glacier in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park in 2002 (above) and 2007 (below). USGS

USGS

Alaska is at the front lines of climate change. This year’s Iditarod has been rerouted—twice—due to the warm weather. The race traditionally starts in Anchorage, which has had near-record low snowfall so far this winter. The city was without a single significant snowstorm between October and late January, so race organizers decided to move the start from the Anchorage area 360 miles north to Fairbanks. But when the Chena River, which was supposed to be part of the new route’s first few miles, failed to sufficiently freeze, the starting point had to move again, to another location in Fairbanks.

On Monday, Zappa and her dogs set out on the 1,000-mile race across Alaska as one of 78 mushers in this year’s Iditarod. A burst of cold and snow are in the forecast this week, but for most of the winter, the weather across the interior of the state has also been abnormally warm. To train, many teams of dogs and their owners had to travel, often “outside”—away from Alaska. Zappa ended up going to the mountains of Wyoming.

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Climate Change Is Baking Alaska

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2014 Was the Biggest Year For Solar Power Ever

by SherryMartino Posted on March 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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We’ve noted here before the many ways in which solar power is blowing up in the United States: Adding tons of jobs, driving progressive policies, and attracting millions of dollars in investment from major corporations. It’s not slowing down anytime soon: New data from market analysis firm GTM Research finds that 2014 was solar’s biggest year ever, with 30 percent more photovoltaic installations installed than in 2013. Check it out:

GTM

Those numbers are even more impressive when you compare them to other types of energy sources. Even though solar still accounts for a small share of US electricity generation (less than 1 percent), last year it added nearly as many new megawatts to the grid as natural gas, which is quickly catching up on coal as the country’s primary energy source. (Coal, you can see, added almost nothing new in 2014.)

GTM

The report points to three chief reasons for the boom. First, costs are falling, not just for the panels themselves but for ancillary expenses like installation and financing, such that overall prices fell by 10 percent compared to 2013. Second, falling costs have allowed both large utility companies and small third-party solar installers to pursue new ways to bring solar to customers, including leasing panels and improved on-site energy storage. Third, federal incentives and regulations have been relatively stable in the last few years, while state incentives are generally improving, particularly in states like California and Nevada that have been leading the charge.

One more chart worth pointing out: Rooftop solar tends to get the most press because that’s where homeowners and solar companies get into tussles with big incumbent power companies and the state regulators that often side with them. And it’s true that a new home gets solar more often than a giant solar farm gets constructed. But on a sheer megawatt basis, utility-scale solar is still far and away the leading source, with a few notable projects coming online in 2014, like the Topaz Solar project in the California desert, the largest solar installation in the world.

GTM

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2014 Was the Biggest Year For Solar Power Ever

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Yet Another Oil Train Disaster

by BridgetYGFX Posted on March 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Another day, another oil train derailment. Early Saturday morning, a Canadian National Railway train carrying Alberta crude derailed outside the tiny town of Gogama in northern Ontario. Thirty-eight cars came off the tracks, and five of them splashed into the Mattagami River system. The accident caused a massive fire and leaked oil into waterways used by locals—including a nearby indigenous community—for drinking and fishing. No one was injured, but according to CN Railway’s Twitter feed, fire fighters were still suppressing fires earlier today. People in the area, including members of the Mattagami First Nation, have been complaining of respiratory issues from the smoke.

This oil train derailment was the second in three days in Canada and the fifth in three weeks in North America. An oil train derailed last week near Galena, Illinois. The oil boom in Canada and the United States has resulted in a dramatic increase in the use of these trains, and derailments now appear to be the new normal.

After the 2013 derailment and explosion of an oil train killed 47 people in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, many pointed to old, unsafe DOT-111 tanker models as a main reason for the disaster and others like it. But at least four of the five recent incidents have involved newer, and theoretically safer, CPC-1232 models.

Environmental and safety advocates say oil-by-rail needs even more stringent safety measures, but they have been slow coming. The US government reportedly balked at creating national standards to limit the amount of potentially explosive gas in tankers carrying oil from North Dakota. And the White House Office of Management and Budget has said it will need until May to finalize rules proposed by the Department of Transportation last summer that would slow down crude-by-rail deliveries and require tankers to have insulated steel shells. The CPC-1232 tankers that derailed in Galena did not have these shells. I asked the Canadian National Railway Company if the tankers involved in Saturday’s derailment had these shells. The company didn’t directly answer that question. In an email, it stated: “The tank cars involved were CPC 1232 tank cars. The exact specifications will be information gathered as part of the ongoing investigation.”

Below are Twitter pictures of Saturday’s derailment in northern Ontario.

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Yet Another Oil Train Disaster

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New York City Is About to Get a Lot Hotter

by MackenzI22 Posted on February 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in CityLab and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The New York City Panel on Climate Change has released its latest report, and it’s just the kind of reading to warm those frigid winter bones. By the 2080s there could be an 8.8-degree rise in temperature as well as six heat waves a year, sweltering conditions that scientists say will “increase the number of heat-related deaths that occur in Manhattan.”

Compare those predictions to what’s already occurred and it’s easy to be worried. Mean temperatures in New York rose 3.4 degrees from 1900 to 2013, a slug’s crawl compared to the rate of fossil-fueled scorching predicted for the rest of the century. There were an annual average of two heat waves in the 1980s; dealing with half-a-dozen every year sounds like hell.

And because it’s never too soon to dream of the warm season, the report drops this bomb: “It is more likely than not that the number of the most intense hurricanes will increase in the North Atlantic Basin, along with extreme winds associated with these storms.” (The changing climate’s effects on wintry nor’easters is uncertain, it adds.)

There are plenty of other alarming things to parse in the panel’s report, put together by policymakers and NASA. The space agency has picked out these notes and projections:

“Mean annual precipitation has increased by a total of 8 inches from 1900 to 2013. Future mean annual precipitation is projected to increase 4 to 11 percent by the 2050s and 5 to 13 percent by the 2080s, relative to the 1980s base period.”
“Future mean annual temperatures are projected to increase 4.1 to 5.7 degrees F by the 2050s and 5.3 to 8.8 degrees F by the 2080s, relative to the 1980s base period.”
“Sea levels have risen in New York City 1.1 feet since 1900. That is almost twice the observed global rate of 0.5 to 0.7 inches per decade over a similar time period. Projections for sea level rise in New York City increase from 11 inches to 21 inches by the 2050s, 18 inches to 39 inches by the 2080s, and, 22 inches to 50 inches, with the worst case of up to six feet, by 2100.”

It is “virtually certain” swollen seas will ratchet up the frequency and ferocity of coastal flooding, warns the panel. The New York of 2100 could have double the amount of land vulnerable to historic floods than currently outlined in FEMA’s proposed flood-insurance rate maps. (By 2016, people living within the FEMA zones will be required to buy flood insurance if holding mortgages from government-backed lenders.)

Queens faces the biggest threat from the encroaching seas, and next it’s Brooklyn, Staten Island, the Bronx, and Manhattan. To see if your neighborhood could be gentrified by carp, consult this map showing how far historic (aka 100-year) floods could travel in a high-emissions scenario:

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New York City Is About to Get a Lot Hotter

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Trains Hauling Crude Oil Across North America Just Keep Exploding.

by LouellaNewcomer Posted on February 17, 2015

Mother Jones

A train hauling more than 100 tankers from North Dakota’s booming oil fields derailed during a snowstorm on Monday in West Virginia. The accident sparked massive explosions that prompted the evacuation of two nearby towns, and an oil spill that threatened the water supply of thousands of local residents. The train was heading to Yorktown, Virginia, and came off its tracks 33 miles southeast of Charleston, West Virginia. A state of emergency was declared.

Oil spilled into the Kanawha River, and one home was destroyed during the inferno that continued for 10 hours after the derailment, according to CNN. One person was injured. Dramatic footage shows fire and smoke billowing through the snowy sky:

Bakken crude is regarded as potentially more flammable than traditional crude, thus posing an increased hazard. And since the derailment of a train hauling Bakken crude killed 47 people in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in July 2013, the type of tankers involved in these accidents has become the subject of intense scrutiny. Both Canada and the United States have called for tougher safety standards, including upgrading the tankers. In mid-January, Canada announced it would take older tankers, known as the “DOT-111”, off the network years sooner than the United States will, putting the two countries at odds over increased safety measures on the deeply integrated system.

Here’s a diagram of the weaknesses in the older DOT-111 model tanker, which is still in operation across the network:

Chris Philpot

You can read an in-depth Mother Jones report about the DOT-111 tankers here.

The train operator, CSX, has said that the train was not pulling DOT-111 tankers. Instead, the company says it was using a tougher, newer model, the “CPC 1232”, according to Reuters.

But even newer cars like these are evidently not invincible: when a 105-car CSX train derailed in Lynchburg, Va., last April, a fiery CPC-1232 tanker careened into the James River and spilled 30,000 gallons of Bakken crude oil. And Washington state regulators are investigating CPC-1232 tankers, after a BNSF train carrying Bakken crude oil across Idaho and Washington in January was found to have leaking cars. The CPC-1232 also doesn’t quite live up to the US regulators’ proposed rules to upgrade the system, according to Bloomberg, which reports that:

The draft rule also would require that new cars be built with steel shells that are 9/16th of an inch thick, people familiar with the plan said. The walls of the current cars, both DOT-111s and the newer CPC-1232 models, are 7/16th of an inch thick.

The West Virginia accident on Monday is the second major derailment in three days across North America’s booming oil-by-rail network. A Canadian National Railway train detailed northern Ontario, Canada, on Saturday night, again resulting in an inferno and an oil spill: 29 railway cars in the 100-car train derailed. Seven caught fire, according to CTV.

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Trains Hauling Crude Oil Across North America Just Keep Exploding.

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Scientists: No, We Can’t Fight Climate Change by Burning Trees

by AdrianneFkb Posted on February 14, 2015

Mother Jones

This article originally appeared at the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A group of 78 scientists is criticizing an Environmental Protection Agency memo they say may dramatically undermine President Barack Obama’s directive to cut planet-warming emissions.

In a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, a group that includes climate scientists, engineers, and ecologists criticizes a November 2014 EPA policy memo that discounts emissions generated by burning biomass, including plants, trees, and other wood products known as sources of biogenic carbon dioxide. Critics said they fear the memo shows how biomass might be treated under the EPA’s forthcoming Clean Power Plan, which will set the first regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The EPA is expected to finalize those regulations by summer.

The EPA memo states that using biomass as a source of power is “likely to have minimal or no net atmospheric contributions of biogenic carbon dioxide emissions” as long as the biomass is produced with “sustainable forest or agricultural practices.” It also suggests that states will be able to increase the use of biomass in power plants in order to meet the limits set in the Clean Power Plan. The biogenic energy framework was the subject of a recent article in Politico magazine, which found that the interpretation “could promote the rapid destruction of America’s carbon-storing forests.”

The group of scientists argues that not all types of biomass have the same impact on carbon emissions, and that using more biomass derived from trees will actually increase overall emissions. Treating all biomass the same could lead to cutting down older-growth trees for fuel, and older trees store more carbon. The group cites a statistic from the US Energy Information Agency estimating if woody biomass is treated as carbon-free, an additional 4 percent of electricity in the US could be generated from wood over the next 20 years. The scientists estimate that may boost the US timber harvest by 70 percent.

This would likely lead to cutting even more trees, not only in the US, but around the world, the scientists argue. Even if new trees are grown to replace them, it would take many years for the trees to store as much carbon. Further, they say, burning biomass makes power plants less efficient and increases emissions.

“Including such exemptions for broad categories of biomass fuels in a final rule would not only encourage large-scale harvesting of wood to replace coal and other fossil fuels but also place no limits on the diversion of the world’s agricultural land to energy use, requiring conversions of forests and grasslands to meet food needs,” the group’s letter says.

“They’re going to declare biomass carbon-neutral with the wave of a magic wand,” William Moomaw, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Tufts University, told The Huffington Post. “It’s not carbon-neutral. It’s a rather appalling failure to actually do the math.”

Most states except Massachusetts consider biomass to be carbon-free, said Moomaw, as does the European Union.

William Schlesinger, dean emeritus at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University and one of the scientists involved in writing the letter, said the EPA memo was “disturbing” because it designates all sustainable biomass as having low carbon emissions, and does not adequately define “sustainable.”

“The EPA made a promise several years ago that it would make its decisions based on science, and the best science,” said Schlesinger. “Here, we’ve got a chance to sit down and look at what the science really says.”

A group of Massachusetts environmental groups issued a statement this week expressing concern about biomass under the Clean Power Plan.

EPA spokeswoman Liz Purchia said in an email to the Huffington Post that the Clean Power Plan isn’t final, and that the framework on biogenic carbon dioxide was designed as a “policy-neutral framework for assessing biogenic CO2 emissions from stationary sources—it was not developed as technical guidance.”

“What we have said repeatedly is that the memo is a snapshot of the issues that have been raised in regards to the role of biomass in how states put together their plans to reduce their carbon pollution,” said Purchia. “But we have made no definitive statements on what the role of biomass will be. We expect certain waste products and forest derived waste products might be ok, but that doesn’t mean all forest products…To reiterate, we don’t assume cutting down forests to power power plants is carbon neutral. This would really be a case by case basis that states would need to show detailed analysis that we’d review. We’d issue additional guidance if needed.”

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Scientists: No, We Can’t Fight Climate Change by Burning Trees

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