Today, Dogwood Alliance, an organization focused on protecting Southern forests, called on utility companies, investors, and federal, state, and local governments to halt the further expansion of large-scale bioenergy projects, including burning whole trees in existing coal-fired power plants while the EPA studies the environmental impacts. This comes in response to the agency’s recently announced decision to allow biomass-burning facilities to avoid regulation of carbon emissions for the next three years. Citing the absence of CO2 and forest management regulation as well as insufficient smokestack pollution controls, the organization is concerned that the government has just opened the floodgates on yet another environmentally destructive, unregulated, and unaccountable industry all in the name of clean, renewable energy.
“While there is a real and urgent need to reduce our dependence on coal and foreign oil, burning forests is not the answer,” said Danna Smith, Executive Director of Dogwood Alliance. “Allowing this industry to run rampant while mounting science is documenting that industrial-scale burning of bioenergy for electricity will accelerate carbon emissions, threaten human health, and destroy forests, is a major mistake.”