For the past 35 years, I’ve worked as an ecologist in the Amazon, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region on an array of environmental issues, mostly revolving around tropical forests, biodiversity, and the drivers of land use and climate change.

I’ve seen many things – some good, some amazing, some heart-rending. But I’ve never seen a nation have such an overwhelming impact on the earth as China does now.

Across the globe, on nearly every continent, China is involved in a dizzying variety of resource extraction, energy, agricultural, and infrastructure projects – roads, railroads, hydropower dams, mines – that are wreaking unprecedented damage to ecosystems and biodiversity.

This onslaught will likely be made easier by the Trump administration’s anti-environmental tack and growing disengagement internationally.

To be fair, China is also engaged in green activities, such as investing heavily in solar and wind energy, cracking down on its notorious air pollution, and replanting millions of acres of its denuded lands. And it’s in the process of banning the domestic sale of ivory, which should slow the epic slaughter of Africa and Asia’s elephants.

But China’s burnishing of its green credentials is in many ways being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of environmental degradation that its policies and corporations are causing worldwide.

Going global … and they meant it

The country’s international resource push began in earnest in 1999, when China’s ‘Going Global Strategy‘ liberalized investment policies and provided financial incentives to encourage overseas investments and contracts. Bulging with foreign reserves and with Chairman Deng Xiaoping’s official blessing that “to become rich is glorious”, China’s international investments – and their impact on the natural world – exploded.

China’s most profound environmental impacts revolve around its drive to acquire minerals, fossil fuels, agricultural commodities, and timber from other nations. This often involves deals to build large-scale roads, railways, and other infrastructure to move natural resources from interior areas to coastal ports for export.

The rapid pace of such activities continues despite a recent slowdown in the Chinese economy, with major projects now being planned in the developing world.

From 2004 to 2014, the China Export-Import Bank played a leading role in funding $10 billion in East African railway projects, many of which were constructed by Chinese corporations. The Chinese are now helping fund and build major rail networks in Kenya and Uganda, one leg of which is planned to pass through Nairobi National Park.

Even in the remote interior of the Congo Basin, Chinese companies are heavily involved in road-construction, mining, and logging projects, as I recently observed in Cameroon and the Republic of Congo.

Thinking big

China also is proposing a 3,000-mile railway that would slice completely across South America, cutting through remote forests and savannas to transport soy, timber, and other goods to the Pacific coast, where they can be shipped to China. The $60 billion price tag has given Peru pause, but the project is still under discussion.

China is the world’s biggest financer and builder of hydroelectric dams, many of which are being constructed in biologically diverse regions where the dams and their associated roads and power lines will open up new lands for exploitation.

China is involved in the planning, financing, or construction of major dams in Africa, including the massive Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, now nearing completion. A consortium of Chinese companies is bidding to help construct the Grand Inga dam project on the Congo River, a series of dams that could become the largest hydroelectric project in the world.

Although construction could begin later this year, the Democratic Republic of Congo has so far done no environmental impact studies.

The scale of China’s international ambitions is stunning, as evidenced by the country’s ‘Belt and Road‘ and ‘21st Century Maritime Silk Road’ schemes. These two initiatives would involve the creation of a massive network of transportation and other infrastructure projects designed to accelerate development and advance China’s economic and political interests.

They will stretch across Asia to Europe and Africa, providing access to 64% of the world’s population and 30% of its gross domestic product.

Developing nations clearly need better infrastructure, and Chinese investments are yielding sizeable benefits in some countries, such as the recently opened passenger line between the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa and the port of Djibouti on the Gulf of Aden.

Equitable, sustainable development? Forget it

Unfortunately, Chinese companies and investors rarely advance the type of equitable economic and social development, improved governance, and environmental sustainability that would promote stable, long-term growth in developing economies.

An in-depth report by the Global Canopy Program, a UK scientific group, concluded that Chinese companies and financial organizations are among the worst enterprises in the world in terms of driving tropical deforestation.

China has long been a black hole for the illegal wildlife trade, the biggest global consumer of everything from pangolins, to tiger parts, to shark fins and rhino horn. The promised ban on public trading of ivory in China is a good sign, but it’s only one facet of a thriving illegal wildlife trade that drives intense levels of poaching internationally.

And China is a heavy consumer of illegal timber, despite belatedly taking steps to staunch the flow into its markets. In western Africa, rosewood forests are being illegally denuded, almost exclusively to feed high demand in China. The impacts are even heavier across the Asia-Pacific region, where native forests from Siberia to the Solomon Islands are being overexploited to feed Chinese timber markets.

Fueled by demand for tiger parts in China, where the endangered animal’s bones and skins are regarded as exotic luxury items, poaching of tigers is on the rise in India. More generally, there is little demand in China for eco-certified palm oil, timber, beef, seafood, and agricultural products, weakening global efforts to manage these resources more sustainably.

And although China is one of the world’s biggest importers of palm oil – a major driver of tropical deforestation – the Chinese government charges import tariffs on environmentally certified palm oil, further undercutting domestic demand for its use.

Not that Europe and the US have anything to crow about …

Of course, China is not alone in promoting its own economic interests over those of other countries and their environmental health.

This is a story that goes back to the colonial era and beyond, when European nations ruthlessly exploited resources and local populations from Africa, to South America, to India. More recently, Western corporations – such as Shell Oil in Nigeria, Union Carbide in India, and Texaco in Ecuador – have caused numerous environmental crises.

The difference with China is one of scale. With nearly one-fifth of the world’s population (1.35 billion people), a highly competitive business culture, little tolerance of criticism, and a stunning capacity to make decisive shifts in course, China is unmatched as a global force.

No nation has ever changed the planet so rapidly, on such a large scale, and with such single-minded determination. It is difficult to find a corner of the developing world where China is not having a significant environmental impact.

The factors that might restrain a US or European country in foreign resource-development projects – intense press criticism, or laws governing foreign business practices – are largely lacking in today’s China.

For example, while US companies are bound by the anti-bribery laws in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, there is no comparable legislation governing the conduct of Chinese business people and corporations. Europeans in Africa frequently complain about the scale of Chinese graft.

“They go straight to the top officials and bribe them lavishly, and then nobody can stop them”, a Dutch forester in the Republic of Congo told me. “We used to offer small ‘gifts’ to many people, but now the money is all concentrated at the top and corruption is out of control.”

Lax controls and ‘streamlined safeguards’

According to a major World Bank analysis of nearly 3,000 projects, Chinese foreign investors and companies often predominate in poorer nations with weak environmental regulations and controls, causing those nations to become “pollution havens” for Chinese enterprises.

The magnitude of China’s international resource exploitation is only likely to increase. The Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is heavily capitalized and is moving rapidly to fund overseas projects with ‘streamlined’ environmental and social safeguards.

Alarmingly, last year the World Bank announced that it was softening its own environmental and social safeguards, in a move that was widely seen as an effort to remain competitive with the AIIB.

As I argued recently, the AIIB and other Chinese development banks could force a ‘race to the bottom’ among multilateral lenders – with potentially grave consequences for the global environment.

Over the last decade Chinese government ministries have released a series of ‘green papers’ outlining lofty environmental and social guidelines for China’s overseas ventures and corporations.

The Chinese government readily admits that compliance with its guidelines is poor, but accepts no blame for this. Instead, it insists that it has little control over its corporations and blames the host nations themselves for not controlling Chinese corporations more carefully.

The truth is that while China’s private firms enjoy significant autonomy from the Central Communist Party, China is among the most centrally controlled societies in the world. If China really wanted to reign in its freewheeling corporations, it could easily do so by making some strong official statements and visibly punishing a few extravagant sinners.

It hasn’t done this for one simple reason: Despite their often-egregious environmental activities, China’s corporations operating overseas are enormously profitable.

China’s own environment also suffering massive degradation

Domestically, China’s environmental impact is also profound. In terms of climate change, for instance, in recent years China has blown past the United State as the world’s biggest carbon polluter – and now produces twice the greenhouse gas emissions of the US, as well as larger amounts of dangerous air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.

Yes, China is investing in new wind and solar technologies, but it is plowing far more cash into big hydropower, coal, and nuclear energy projects.

In addition to its monolithic Three Gorges Dam, the world’s biggest hydropower project, China is building or planning to build 20 mega-dams along its stretch of the Mekong River, which could have serious impacts on biodiversity, fisheries, and water users in downstream nations, such as Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Many have lauded China’s incredible tree-planting spree, which began in 1978 and has reforested roughly 100,000 square miles, mostly in western China. Yes, those trees are storing carbon, helping to stabilize soils and reduce sediment runoff into streams, and producing wood for China’s domestic sawmills.

But nearly all of the planted trees are monocultures of exotic species such as eucalyptus and aspen, which have little value as habitat for native wildlife. Further, in southern China, large expanses of biologically rich rainforests have been cleared for exotic rubber plantations.

China is paying increasing attention to its air, water, and soil pollution, which is among the worst in the world, especially in scores of cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Xingtai. But progress has been limited and large expanses of eastern and central China have become unhealthy places for people and biodiversity alike. China’s leaders and scientists acknowledge that its impressive biodiversity has suffered greatly.

Is China leading the world to ecological suicide?

As China’s environmental impact continues to grow domestically and internationally, the Trump administration – with its anti-environmental agenda and nationalist, inward-looking nature – has already pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. China and its overseas investment banks are leaping into the Pacific vacuum.

The Trump Administration seems barely cognizant of these pressing realities. And that leaves conservationists in a very tough bind. We never expected Trump to get elected, much less to support our views. But the weaknesses of the Trump administration could be leading to a broader US decline that will hasten environmental degradation worldwide.

For me, the worst-case scenario plays out something like this: Two years ago, I was discussing with a researcher from the Wildlife Conservation Society in Cambodia whether the society should advise a German development bank on how to build a paved road through the heart of the Seima Forest, a haven for rare wildlife.

He hated to do it, but he didn’t see much choice. “If we don’t help the Germans”, the scientist said, “a Chinese corporation will just come in and blast the road through anyway – and that would be an ecological disaster.”

William Laurance is a Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, and also holds the Prince Bernhard Chair in International Nature Conservation at Utrecht University, Netherlands. He received the Heineken Environment Prize and BBVA Frontiers in Ecology and Conservation Biology Award for his efforts to promote tropical nature conservation.

This article was originally published by Yale Environment 360 by kind permission of the author and e360.

El Salvador made history last week by becoming the first country ever to ban metal mining.

The success of this decades long struggle is proof that people can take on corporate interests and win.

This is the story of how the people of El Salvador took on mining giants.

Mining has a dark history in El Salvador. Years of unregulated, pro-investor policies coupled with rapid industrialization has led to the widespread contamination of rivers and surface water, poisoning people and destroying farm lands.

Even boiling or filtering the water does not always make it safe to drink. An environmental study showed that the proposed Pacific Rim mine would use 10.4 liters per second, enough to provide water for thousands people.

The dream that failed: mining-led development

Mining was imposed on the Salvadoran people as a dream industry that would aid development, create jobs and taxes to pay for much needed school and hospitals.

The government developed a range of mining friendly policies together with the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) between Central American countries and the US. Signed by El Salvador in 2004, the agreement allowed transnational corporations such as Holcim, Monsanto and Pacific Rim to intensify their operations in the country.

Supported by local ruling elites, these companies began extracting El Salvador’s natural resources for export. Foreign investment increased from US$30 million in 1992 to US$5.9 billion in 2008. Much of this investment was in mining, despite fierce opposition from communities.

El Salvador is a small and densely populated country. Yet by 2012 the government had 22 requests for gold exploration, allowing gold mines to monopolize 4.23% of the land. The appropriation of land for mining often takes the form of land grabbing, with no proper consultation or compensation.

From the start local communities resisted through protests, court cases, meetings and land occupation. A number of communities marched across the country to the presidential palace to demand their rights.

Friends of the Earth El Salvador / CESTA supported community resistance. In 2008 alone, 60 community leaders learned about the impacts of mining and strategies for resistance at CESTA’s Political Ecology School. People started challenging corporate power.

The mining companies respond with violence and murder

Tragically companies responded with violence. The President of Friends of San Isidro Cabañas (ASIC), a hub of anti mining resistance, was murdered, followed by 3 more anti-mining activists, and many more were threatened and harassed. Their families are still demanding justice today.

‘Water is more precious than gold’ became a powerful unifying slogan as the struggle continued. Grassroots coalitions such as the Movement of People affected by Climate Change and Corporations (MOVIAC) and the National Roundtable Against Metallic Mining raised the issue of mining to a national level.

Solidarity and shared learnings from movements in Costa Rica, Argentina and Colombia, where partial mining bans have been implemented, were crucial. Friends of the Earth took the El Salvador mining case to the United Nations, in the call for an international treaty on corporations and human rights.

In 2008 the president, Antonio Saca, rejected the Pacific Rim mining project. The project would have led to the use of toxic chemicals including cyanide within 65km of the capital.

Pacific Rim’s response was to sue the government of El Salvador US$301m in a secret trade tribunal. The Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism enabled Pacific Rim to do this, on the basis that they felt their profits were negatively affected by the rejection of their mining application.

Victory is possible!

Yet in this instance, corporate bullying backfired. It garnered wide support against the mining industry. Even politicians with little environmental interest were outraged by this extortionate figure in a country struggling with poverty. El Salvador received a favorable judgment in the case, yet it still had to pay millions in legal fees.

The Catholic Church, an important institution in El Salvador, began actively advocating for a ban on mining. At Sunday masses across the country priests preached the need to protect the natural world and collected signatures petitioning the government.

When the vote came to parliament last week, except for a few abstentions the vote was unanimous: El Salvador voted for a total ban metal mining to protect its people and environment.

As El Salvador celebrates, the fight for a more just and sustainable world is not over. But we can move forwards with hope, in the knowledge that ordinary people working together can change the world.

Ricardo Navarro is a Goldman prize winner from Friends of the Earth El Salvador/CESTA.

Sam Cossar is a coordinator of Friends of the Earth International Economic Justice-Resisting Neoliberal program.

National forests across the West are facing dire threats from politicians, the timber industry and the Forest Service.

The public is currently being misled into thinking that our forests are ‘unhealthy’, and that they need to be ‘restored’ due to ‘beetle infestations’ and ‘insects and disease’.

All of this is a euphemism to drastically ramp up logging on the forests.

America’s national forests are not unhealthy. Some people may want forests to look a certain way, but that desire or perception ignores scientific research, which suggests that fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are key components of forest function and resiliency. If you want a healthy forest, these natural processes must be allowed to play out.

Efforts to ‘thin the threat’ and use thinning for ‘fire hazard reduction’ across Western landscapes is largely unsubstantiated in scientific literature.

Recent studies suggest forests with stands of ‘dead trees’ are at no more risk of burning – and possibly less – than thinned forests. Dead trees generally burn slower because they do not have oil-rich needles or resins.

To the contrary, thinning ‘live trees’ places fine fuels like needles and cones on the ground, and opens the forest canopy to greater solar penetration and wind, resulting in overall drier forest conditions and flammability.

How did the forests ever survive without logging?

The Forest Service is currently identifying ‘priority areas’ on the national forests that need to be treated (read logged). A provision of the 2014 Farm Bill gives the agency the ability to expedite logging projects, including in roadless areas, designed to reduce fuels and prevent the chance of “uncontrollable wildfires”.

Public involvement is simultaneously being minimized, and robust environmental analysis is unfortunately being short-changed.

Fire frequency and intensity in the West are predominantly climate and weather driven. An overwhelming amount of scientific evidence shows that drought, warm temperatures, low humidity and windy conditions drive wildfire intensity. Tree-density and beetle infestation does not drive fire intensity and behavior.

The predominantly mixed conifer forests of the West have evolved with fire. Wildfires are not ‘catastrophic’ but rather necessary for nutrient cycling, soil productivity and providing habitat for insects, birds and mammals. Wildfire is a natural disturbance event critical to forest function and resiliency. A more accurate term for Western landscapes is ‘fire-scapes’.

Building roads and logging in post-fire landscapes is also unnecessary and harmful. ‘Salvage logging’ impedes forest succession, can increase soil erosion, and impair streams, fish habitat and water quality. Scientists are discovering that ‘snag forests’ are one of the most biologically rich and diverse habitat types, rivaled only by old growth.

The Forest Service’s age-old war on forests

Politicians and the timber industry are assaulting America’s National Forests.

Managed forests are neither healthier, nor more resilient to wildfire. Beetle infestation and fire intensity are mainly climate and weather driven. Fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are natural processes important for forest function and resiliency.

The real catastrophe is the Forest Service continues to lead its century-old war on wildfire by supporting commercial logging and fire suppression to the detriment of American taxpayers and forest ecosystems.

Brett Haverstick is education and outreach director for Friends of the Clearwater, a grassroots advocacy group that works to protect the public wildlands, wildlife, and waters in the Clearwater basin of beautiful north-central Idaho.

The Wild Clearwater Country is the northern half of the Big Wild, which contains the largest remaining roadless, and undeveloped stretch of wildlands left in the lower 48 states. Only Alaska has more ecologically intact and wild country.

The Clearwater is a place of dense, moist forests of ancient fir and cedar, parted by crisp, cool streams. It’s a special place where you can listen to swift water flowing through intimate, deeply-cut canyons, and you can smell aromatic, spacious stands of ponderosa pine climbing the ridges above.

It’s a landscape where grey wolves, wolverines, lynx, bears, and mountain goats roam far-reaching ridgetops and lush, river-bottom valleys. Unlike many other places, the Clearwater still allows individuals to immerse themselves in solitude and inhale the soft breath of untrammeled wildness.

This irreplaceable landscape lies between the forests of the St. Joe River to the north, and the rapids of the Salmon River to the south, with the spine of the Bitterroot Divide to the east. Learn more.

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

On 13th April, Drax Plc, operator of Drax Power Station, will be holding its AGM in York, sparking protests both locally and in London where its major investors have their offices.

Campaigners will be highlighting Drax’s involvement in dirty energy, its links with climate change and deforestation, and its continued reliance on government subsidies – which could instead be going to support genuinely renewable energy – to keep afloat.

While Drax describes itself as “Europe’s largest decarbonisation project”, its portfolio now covers three forms of dirty energy: coal, biomass, and, since 2016, gas: Drax has acquired four yet-to-be-built gas fired power stations, and Opus Energy.

Drax opened in 1974 as a coal-fired power station, and in 2012 it began the process of converting three of its six generators to run on biomass in the form of imported wood pellets. This conversion is now complete, with 65% of the electricity Drax generated in 2016 coming from biomass.

Despite its claims to be “preparing for a post coal future”, Drax remains among the UK’s largest burners of coal, importing it from places such as Colombia – where the coal industry is responsible for air and water pollution and land grabs resulting in the disposession of indigenous communities from their land, and the impoverishment, ill health and growing malnutrition among those not evicted outright.

In spite of which, Drax is still the UK’s biggest CO2 emitter

Drax remains the UK’s single largest emitter of CO₂, and is now also the world’s largest biomass power station, burning the equivalent of more than the UK’s total annual wood production each year. In 2016 Drax burnt pellets made from approximately 13 million tonnes of wood, while the UK’s annual production is around 11 million tonnes.

Biomass is considered by industry and government calculations to be lower carbon than coal because it is assumed that the carbon emitted will be reabsorbed by new trees planted to replace those that were burnt. However, burning trees today releases carbon into the atmosphere today, and any new trees planted won’t reach maturity and absorb the same amount of carbon for decades.

At a time when we need to be rapidly reducing our carbon emissions, it makes no sense to create such a ‘carbon debt’. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether CO₂ in it comes from burning biomass or coal.

If trees are left standing, they will continue to absorb carbon, contribute to ecosystems and provide habitat and food for other species. If they are cut down, this is lost and can’t be replaced quickly, if ever. A forest ecosystem takes decades to mature, and to reduce the trees’ importance to their carbon sequestration capacity is a massive oversight and an incomplete way of looking at a forest.

The clear-cut forests of America

Just over half of the wood burnt at Drax comes from the United States, and most of this is supplied by the pellet company Enviva.

Enviva sources wood from clearcut wetland forests, important ecosystems which are home to a wide variety of animal and plant species and have been classified as global biodiversity hotspots by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which also considers them “some of the most biologically important habitats in North America“.

Many of the species who live in these forests are now threatened by habitat fragmentation from logging and land conversion. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), it is difficult to restore these forests after logging because they take a long time to mature and being logged once can alter flooding patterns, reducing the diversity of plant and tree species when the forest does eventually regenerate.

Supplying biomass to UK and European power stations is a major driver of forest destruction. A local resident says: “When I see wood pellet ships leave our port, I don’t see the vessel. I see the miles of clearcuts I know happened. It’s a feeling of loss.”

Drax also sources some pellets from plantations, which have taken the place of forests in some areas of the southern United States. The biomass industry points to these plantations as evidence that its activities are not reducing forest cover, but a monoculture plantation does not support as many other species as a forest does, is more likely to deplete the soil and water and may rely on spraying with agrochemicals.

Promoting bioenergy

As the only currently operating coal-fired power station in the UK to have converted to biomass, Drax is playing an important role in pushing bioenergy as a replacement for coal and making it appear to be a ‘sustainable’ option.

Two other biomass power stations currently being built, Lynemouth (another converted coal power station) and MGT Tees (a purpose-built biomass power station), plan to source their pellets from Enviva.

Drax’s research and development of necessary infrastructure, including specially adapted railway carriages and storage domes for biomass pellets, will be important if large scale import-reliant biomass is expanded further in the UK. Drax also owns a pellet retail business and is in the process of expanding its pellet mills in the US.

Through engagement with the community using local media and Corporate Social Responsibility activities Drax is making further attempts at equating biomass with sustainability in people’s minds. For lobbying the government and EU, Drax has hired the PR company Edelman, whose other clients have included E.On, Shell, Walmart and Burger King.

Drax’s CEO Dorothy Thompson chairs the Sustainable Biomass Partnership (SBP), a biomass certification scheme set up and administered entirely by energy companies. Unsurprisingly, the SBP has concluded that Drax’s biomass is sustainable – based largely on reports written by Drax itself. Environmental NGOs have described this certification scheme as “little more than industry greenwash“.

The recent appointment of a senior Drax official – Dr Rebecca Heaton – to the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, a body set up to advise the UK government on reducing its carbon emissions, provides Drax with another opportunity to influence government and popular opinion about the feasibility and sustainability of biomass.

£1.5 million subsidies – at our expense!

Drax has been receiving renewable energy subsidies since the start of its conversion to biomass. In December 2016, Drax started receiving another more lucrative subsidy, called a Contract for Difference (CfD), bringing Drax’s total subsidies for the year up to £541 million, or nearly £1.5 million a day, a figure which will rise further in 2017 thanks to the CfD.

These subsidies are paid out of a surcharge on your electricity bill. At a time when 6.59 million households in the UK are considered to be ‘fuel poor’ (having to spend more than 10% of household income on heating), these subsidies are very badly misplaced.

Imagine what we could achieve if rather than subsidising forest destruction, we invested this amount of money into energy saving, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, or generating genuinely renewable energy.

Reliance on dirty energy is not acceptable, whichever way you spin it. Biomass is a dangerous false solution to climate change and subsidising it is a waste of bill payers’ money.

We will be telling Drax and its investors at the company’s AGM that instead of paying for forest destruction and increased carbon emissions with our electricity bills, we want to reduce our energy demand, protect forests and build more democratic energy systems.

Communities around the world want to address the consequences of climate change, and companies like Drax are getting in the way.

Frances Howe is a bioenergy campaigner with Biofuelwatch.

Photos courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

More information

• AxeDrax AGM 2017.
• Recently updated campaign info about Drax.
• Facebook event for the London demo.
• Facebook event for the York demo.

National forests across the West are facing dire threats from politicians, the timber industry and the Forest Service.

The public is currently being misled into thinking that our forests are ‘unhealthy’, and that they need to be ‘restored’ due to ‘beetle infestations’ and ‘insects and disease’.

All of this is a euphemism to drastically ramp up logging on the forests.

America’s national forests are not unhealthy. Some people may want forests to look a certain way, but that desire or perception ignores scientific research, which suggests that fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are key components of forest function and resiliency. If you want a healthy forest, these natural processes must be allowed to play out.

Efforts to ‘thin the threat’ and use thinning for ‘fire hazard reduction’ across Western landscapes is largely unsubstantiated in scientific literature.

Recent studies suggest forests with stands of ‘dead trees’ are at no more risk of burning – and possibly less – than thinned forests. Dead trees generally burn slower because they do not have oil-rich needles or resins.

To the contrary, thinning ‘live trees’ places fine fuels like needles and cones on the ground, and opens the forest canopy to greater solar penetration and wind, resulting in overall drier forest conditions and flammability.

How did the forests ever survive without logging?

The Forest Service is currently identifying ‘priority areas’ on the national forests that need to be treated (read logged). A provision of the 2014 Farm Bill gives the agency the ability to expedite logging projects, including in roadless areas, designed to reduce fuels and prevent the chance of “uncontrollable wildfires”.

Public involvement is simultaneously being minimized, and robust environmental analysis is unfortunately being short-changed.

Fire frequency and intensity in the West are predominantly climate and weather driven. An overwhelming amount of scientific evidence shows that drought, warm temperatures, low humidity and windy conditions drive wildfire intensity. Tree-density and beetle infestation does not drive fire intensity and behavior.

The predominantly mixed conifer forests of the West have evolved with fire. Wildfires are not ‘catastrophic’ but rather necessary for nutrient cycling, soil productivity and providing habitat for insects, birds and mammals. Wildfire is a natural disturbance event critical to forest function and resiliency. A more accurate term for Western landscapes is ‘fire-scapes’.

Building roads and logging in post-fire landscapes is also unnecessary and harmful. ‘Salvage logging’ impedes forest succession, can increase soil erosion, and impair streams, fish habitat and water quality. Scientists are discovering that ‘snag forests’ are one of the most biologically rich and diverse habitat types, rivaled only by old growth.

The Forest Service’s age-old war on forests

Politicians and the timber industry are assaulting America’s National Forests.

Managed forests are neither healthier, nor more resilient to wildfire. Beetle infestation and fire intensity are mainly climate and weather driven. Fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are natural processes important for forest function and resiliency.

The real catastrophe is the Forest Service continues to lead its century-old war on wildfire by supporting commercial logging and fire suppression to the detriment of American taxpayers and forest ecosystems.

Brett Haverstick is education and outreach director for Friends of the Clearwater, a grassroots advocacy group that works to protect the public wildlands, wildlife, and waters in the Clearwater basin of beautiful north-central Idaho.

The Wild Clearwater Country is the northern half of the Big Wild, which contains the largest remaining roadless, and undeveloped stretch of wildlands left in the lower 48 states. Only Alaska has more ecologically intact and wild country.

The Clearwater is a place of dense, moist forests of ancient fir and cedar, parted by crisp, cool streams. It’s a special place where you can listen to swift water flowing through intimate, deeply-cut canyons, and you can smell aromatic, spacious stands of ponderosa pine climbing the ridges above.

It’s a landscape where grey wolves, wolverines, lynx, bears, and mountain goats roam far-reaching ridgetops and lush, river-bottom valleys. Unlike many other places, the Clearwater still allows individuals to immerse themselves in solitude and inhale the soft breath of untrammeled wildness.

This irreplaceable landscape lies between the forests of the St. Joe River to the north, and the rapids of the Salmon River to the south, with the spine of the Bitterroot Divide to the east. Learn more.

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

On 13th April, Drax Plc, operator of Drax Power Station, will be holding its AGM in York, sparking protests both locally and in London where its major investors have their offices.

Campaigners will be highlighting Drax’s involvement in dirty energy, its links with climate change and deforestation, and its continued reliance on government subsidies – which could instead be going to support genuinely renewable energy – to keep afloat.

While Drax describes itself as “Europe’s largest decarbonisation project”, its portfolio now covers three forms of dirty energy: coal, biomass, and, since 2016, gas: Drax has acquired four yet-to-be-built gas fired power stations, and Opus Energy.

Drax opened in 1974 as a coal-fired power station, and in 2012 it began the process of converting three of its six generators to run on biomass in the form of imported wood pellets. This conversion is now complete, with 65% of the electricity Drax generated in 2016 coming from biomass.

Despite its claims to be “preparing for a post coal future”, Drax remains among the UK’s largest burners of coal, importing it from places such as Colombia – where the coal industry is responsible for air and water pollution and land grabs resulting in the disposession of indigenous communities from their land, and the impoverishment, ill health and growing malnutrition among those not evicted outright.

In spite of which, Drax is still the UK’s biggest CO2 emitter

Drax remains the UK’s single largest emitter of CO₂, and is now also the world’s largest biomass power station, burning the equivalent of more than the UK’s total annual wood production each year. In 2016 Drax burnt pellets made from approximately 13 million tonnes of wood, while the UK’s annual production is around 11 million tonnes.

Biomass is considered by industry and government calculations to be lower carbon than coal because it is assumed that the carbon emitted will be reabsorbed by new trees planted to replace those that were burnt. However, burning trees today releases carbon into the atmosphere today, and any new trees planted won’t reach maturity and absorb the same amount of carbon for decades.

At a time when we need to be rapidly reducing our carbon emissions, it makes no sense to create such a ‘carbon debt’. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether CO₂ in it comes from burning biomass or coal.

If trees are left standing, they will continue to absorb carbon, contribute to ecosystems and provide habitat and food for other species. If they are cut down, this is lost and can’t be replaced quickly, if ever. A forest ecosystem takes decades to mature, and to reduce the trees’ importance to their carbon sequestration capacity is a massive oversight and an incomplete way of looking at a forest.

The clear-cut forests of America

Just over half of the wood burnt at Drax comes from the United States, and most of this is supplied by the pellet company Enviva.

Enviva sources wood from clearcut wetland forests, important ecosystems which are home to a wide variety of animal and plant species and have been classified as global biodiversity hotspots by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which also considers them “some of the most biologically important habitats in North America“.

Many of the species who live in these forests are now threatened by habitat fragmentation from logging and land conversion. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), it is difficult to restore these forests after logging because they take a long time to mature and being logged once can alter flooding patterns, reducing the diversity of plant and tree species when the forest does eventually regenerate.

Supplying biomass to UK and European power stations is a major driver of forest destruction. A local resident says: “When I see wood pellet ships leave our port, I don’t see the vessel. I see the miles of clearcuts I know happened. It’s a feeling of loss.”

Drax also sources some pellets from plantations, which have taken the place of forests in some areas of the southern United States. The biomass industry points to these plantations as evidence that its activities are not reducing forest cover, but a monoculture plantation does not support as many other species as a forest does, is more likely to deplete the soil and water and may rely on spraying with agrochemicals.

Promoting bioenergy

As the only currently operating coal-fired power station in the UK to have converted to biomass, Drax is playing an important role in pushing bioenergy as a replacement for coal and making it appear to be a ‘sustainable’ option.

Two other biomass power stations currently being built, Lynemouth (another converted coal power station) and MGT Tees (a purpose-built biomass power station), plan to source their pellets from Enviva.

Drax’s research and development of necessary infrastructure, including specially adapted railway carriages and storage domes for biomass pellets, will be important if large scale import-reliant biomass is expanded further in the UK. Drax also owns a pellet retail business and is in the process of expanding its pellet mills in the US.

Through engagement with the community using local media and Corporate Social Responsibility activities Drax is making further attempts at equating biomass with sustainability in people’s minds. For lobbying the government and EU, Drax has hired the PR company Edelman, whose other clients have included E.On, Shell, Walmart and Burger King.

Drax’s CEO Dorothy Thompson chairs the Sustainable Biomass Partnership (SBP), a biomass certification scheme set up and administered entirely by energy companies. Unsurprisingly, the SBP has concluded that Drax’s biomass is sustainable – based largely on reports written by Drax itself. Environmental NGOs have described this certification scheme as “little more than industry greenwash“.

The recent appointment of a senior Drax official – Dr Rebecca Heaton – to the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, a body set up to advise the UK government on reducing its carbon emissions, provides Drax with another opportunity to influence government and popular opinion about the feasibility and sustainability of biomass.

£1.5 million subsidies – at our expense!

Drax has been receiving renewable energy subsidies since the start of its conversion to biomass. In December 2016, Drax started receiving another more lucrative subsidy, called a Contract for Difference (CfD), bringing Drax’s total subsidies for the year up to £541 million, or nearly £1.5 million a day, a figure which will rise further in 2017 thanks to the CfD.

These subsidies are paid out of a surcharge on your electricity bill. At a time when 6.59 million households in the UK are considered to be ‘fuel poor’ (having to spend more than 10% of household income on heating), these subsidies are very badly misplaced.

Imagine what we could achieve if rather than subsidising forest destruction, we invested this amount of money into energy saving, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, or generating genuinely renewable energy.

Reliance on dirty energy is not acceptable, whichever way you spin it. Biomass is a dangerous false solution to climate change and subsidising it is a waste of bill payers’ money.

We will be telling Drax and its investors at the company’s AGM that instead of paying for forest destruction and increased carbon emissions with our electricity bills, we want to reduce our energy demand, protect forests and build more democratic energy systems.

Communities around the world want to address the consequences of climate change, and companies like Drax are getting in the way.

Frances Howe is a bioenergy campaigner with Biofuelwatch.

Photos courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

More information

• AxeDrax AGM 2017.
• Recently updated campaign info about Drax.
• Facebook event for the London demo.
• Facebook event for the York demo.

National forests across the West are facing dire threats from politicians, the timber industry and the Forest Service.

The public is currently being misled into thinking that our forests are ‘unhealthy’, and that they need to be ‘restored’ due to ‘beetle infestations’ and ‘insects and disease’.

All of this is a euphemism to drastically ramp up logging on the forests.

America’s national forests are not unhealthy. Some people may want forests to look a certain way, but that desire or perception ignores scientific research, which suggests that fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are key components of forest function and resiliency. If you want a healthy forest, these natural processes must be allowed to play out.

Efforts to ‘thin the threat’ and use thinning for ‘fire hazard reduction’ across Western landscapes is largely unsubstantiated in scientific literature.

Recent studies suggest forests with stands of ‘dead trees’ are at no more risk of burning – and possibly less – than thinned forests. Dead trees generally burn slower because they do not have oil-rich needles or resins.

To the contrary, thinning ‘live trees’ places fine fuels like needles and cones on the ground, and opens the forest canopy to greater solar penetration and wind, resulting in overall drier forest conditions and flammability.

How did the forests ever survive without logging?

The Forest Service is currently identifying ‘priority areas’ on the national forests that need to be treated (read logged). A provision of the 2014 Farm Bill gives the agency the ability to expedite logging projects, including in roadless areas, designed to reduce fuels and prevent the chance of “uncontrollable wildfires”.

Public involvement is simultaneously being minimized, and robust environmental analysis is unfortunately being short-changed.

Fire frequency and intensity in the West are predominantly climate and weather driven. An overwhelming amount of scientific evidence shows that drought, warm temperatures, low humidity and windy conditions drive wildfire intensity. Tree-density and beetle infestation does not drive fire intensity and behavior.

The predominantly mixed conifer forests of the West have evolved with fire. Wildfires are not ‘catastrophic’ but rather necessary for nutrient cycling, soil productivity and providing habitat for insects, birds and mammals. Wildfire is a natural disturbance event critical to forest function and resiliency. A more accurate term for Western landscapes is ‘fire-scapes’.

Building roads and logging in post-fire landscapes is also unnecessary and harmful. ‘Salvage logging’ impedes forest succession, can increase soil erosion, and impair streams, fish habitat and water quality. Scientists are discovering that ‘snag forests’ are one of the most biologically rich and diverse habitat types, rivaled only by old growth.

The Forest Service’s age-old war on forests

Politicians and the timber industry are assaulting America’s National Forests.

Managed forests are neither healthier, nor more resilient to wildfire. Beetle infestation and fire intensity are mainly climate and weather driven. Fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are natural processes important for forest function and resiliency.

The real catastrophe is the Forest Service continues to lead its century-old war on wildfire by supporting commercial logging and fire suppression to the detriment of American taxpayers and forest ecosystems.

Brett Haverstick is education and outreach director for Friends of the Clearwater, a grassroots advocacy group that works to protect the public wildlands, wildlife, and waters in the Clearwater basin of beautiful north-central Idaho.

The Wild Clearwater Country is the northern half of the Big Wild, which contains the largest remaining roadless, and undeveloped stretch of wildlands left in the lower 48 states. Only Alaska has more ecologically intact and wild country.

The Clearwater is a place of dense, moist forests of ancient fir and cedar, parted by crisp, cool streams. It’s a special place where you can listen to swift water flowing through intimate, deeply-cut canyons, and you can smell aromatic, spacious stands of ponderosa pine climbing the ridges above.

It’s a landscape where grey wolves, wolverines, lynx, bears, and mountain goats roam far-reaching ridgetops and lush, river-bottom valleys. Unlike many other places, the Clearwater still allows individuals to immerse themselves in solitude and inhale the soft breath of untrammeled wildness.

This irreplaceable landscape lies between the forests of the St. Joe River to the north, and the rapids of the Salmon River to the south, with the spine of the Bitterroot Divide to the east. Learn more.

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

On 13th April, Drax Plc, operator of Drax Power Station, will be holding its AGM in York, sparking protests both locally and in London where its major investors have their offices.

Campaigners will be highlighting Drax’s involvement in dirty energy, its links with climate change and deforestation, and its continued reliance on government subsidies – which could instead be going to support genuinely renewable energy – to keep afloat.

While Drax describes itself as “Europe’s largest decarbonisation project”, its portfolio now covers three forms of dirty energy: coal, biomass, and, since 2016, gas: Drax has acquired four yet-to-be-built gas fired power stations, and Opus Energy.

Drax opened in 1974 as a coal-fired power station, and in 2012 it began the process of converting three of its six generators to run on biomass in the form of imported wood pellets. This conversion is now complete, with 65% of the electricity Drax generated in 2016 coming from biomass.

Despite its claims to be “preparing for a post coal future”, Drax remains among the UK’s largest burners of coal, importing it from places such as Colombia – where the coal industry is responsible for air and water pollution and land grabs resulting in the disposession of indigenous communities from their land, and the impoverishment, ill health and growing malnutrition among those not evicted outright.

In spite of which, Drax is still the UK’s biggest CO2 emitter

Drax remains the UK’s single largest emitter of CO₂, and is now also the world’s largest biomass power station, burning the equivalent of more than the UK’s total annual wood production each year. In 2016 Drax burnt pellets made from approximately 13 million tonnes of wood, while the UK’s annual production is around 11 million tonnes.

Biomass is considered by industry and government calculations to be lower carbon than coal because it is assumed that the carbon emitted will be reabsorbed by new trees planted to replace those that were burnt. However, burning trees today releases carbon into the atmosphere today, and any new trees planted won’t reach maturity and absorb the same amount of carbon for decades.

At a time when we need to be rapidly reducing our carbon emissions, it makes no sense to create such a ‘carbon debt’. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether CO₂ in it comes from burning biomass or coal.

If trees are left standing, they will continue to absorb carbon, contribute to ecosystems and provide habitat and food for other species. If they are cut down, this is lost and can’t be replaced quickly, if ever. A forest ecosystem takes decades to mature, and to reduce the trees’ importance to their carbon sequestration capacity is a massive oversight and an incomplete way of looking at a forest.

The clear-cut forests of America

Just over half of the wood burnt at Drax comes from the United States, and most of this is supplied by the pellet company Enviva.

Enviva sources wood from clearcut wetland forests, important ecosystems which are home to a wide variety of animal and plant species and have been classified as global biodiversity hotspots by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which also considers them “some of the most biologically important habitats in North America“.

Many of the species who live in these forests are now threatened by habitat fragmentation from logging and land conversion. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), it is difficult to restore these forests after logging because they take a long time to mature and being logged once can alter flooding patterns, reducing the diversity of plant and tree species when the forest does eventually regenerate.

Supplying biomass to UK and European power stations is a major driver of forest destruction. A local resident says: “When I see wood pellet ships leave our port, I don’t see the vessel. I see the miles of clearcuts I know happened. It’s a feeling of loss.”

Drax also sources some pellets from plantations, which have taken the place of forests in some areas of the southern United States. The biomass industry points to these plantations as evidence that its activities are not reducing forest cover, but a monoculture plantation does not support as many other species as a forest does, is more likely to deplete the soil and water and may rely on spraying with agrochemicals.

Promoting bioenergy

As the only currently operating coal-fired power station in the UK to have converted to biomass, Drax is playing an important role in pushing bioenergy as a replacement for coal and making it appear to be a ‘sustainable’ option.

Two other biomass power stations currently being built, Lynemouth (another converted coal power station) and MGT Tees (a purpose-built biomass power station), plan to source their pellets from Enviva.

Drax’s research and development of necessary infrastructure, including specially adapted railway carriages and storage domes for biomass pellets, will be important if large scale import-reliant biomass is expanded further in the UK. Drax also owns a pellet retail business and is in the process of expanding its pellet mills in the US.

Through engagement with the community using local media and Corporate Social Responsibility activities Drax is making further attempts at equating biomass with sustainability in people’s minds. For lobbying the government and EU, Drax has hired the PR company Edelman, whose other clients have included E.On, Shell, Walmart and Burger King.

Drax’s CEO Dorothy Thompson chairs the Sustainable Biomass Partnership (SBP), a biomass certification scheme set up and administered entirely by energy companies. Unsurprisingly, the SBP has concluded that Drax’s biomass is sustainable – based largely on reports written by Drax itself. Environmental NGOs have described this certification scheme as “little more than industry greenwash“.

The recent appointment of a senior Drax official – Dr Rebecca Heaton – to the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, a body set up to advise the UK government on reducing its carbon emissions, provides Drax with another opportunity to influence government and popular opinion about the feasibility and sustainability of biomass.

£1.5 million subsidies – at our expense!

Drax has been receiving renewable energy subsidies since the start of its conversion to biomass. In December 2016, Drax started receiving another more lucrative subsidy, called a Contract for Difference (CfD), bringing Drax’s total subsidies for the year up to £541 million, or nearly £1.5 million a day, a figure which will rise further in 2017 thanks to the CfD.

These subsidies are paid out of a surcharge on your electricity bill. At a time when 6.59 million households in the UK are considered to be ‘fuel poor’ (having to spend more than 10% of household income on heating), these subsidies are very badly misplaced.

Imagine what we could achieve if rather than subsidising forest destruction, we invested this amount of money into energy saving, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, or generating genuinely renewable energy.

Reliance on dirty energy is not acceptable, whichever way you spin it. Biomass is a dangerous false solution to climate change and subsidising it is a waste of bill payers’ money.

We will be telling Drax and its investors at the company’s AGM that instead of paying for forest destruction and increased carbon emissions with our electricity bills, we want to reduce our energy demand, protect forests and build more democratic energy systems.

Communities around the world want to address the consequences of climate change, and companies like Drax are getting in the way.

Frances Howe is a bioenergy campaigner with Biofuelwatch.

Photos courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

More information

• AxeDrax AGM 2017.
• Recently updated campaign info about Drax.
• Facebook event for the London demo.
• Facebook event for the York demo.

National forests across the West are facing dire threats from politicians, the timber industry and the Forest Service.

The public is currently being misled into thinking that our forests are ‘unhealthy’, and that they need to be ‘restored’ due to ‘beetle infestations’ and ‘insects and disease’.

All of this is a euphemism to drastically ramp up logging on the forests.

America’s national forests are not unhealthy. Some people may want forests to look a certain way, but that desire or perception ignores scientific research, which suggests that fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are key components of forest function and resiliency. If you want a healthy forest, these natural processes must be allowed to play out.

Efforts to ‘thin the threat’ and use thinning for ‘fire hazard reduction’ across Western landscapes is largely unsubstantiated in scientific literature.

Recent studies suggest forests with stands of ‘dead trees’ are at no more risk of burning – and possibly less – than thinned forests. Dead trees generally burn slower because they do not have oil-rich needles or resins.

To the contrary, thinning ‘live trees’ places fine fuels like needles and cones on the ground, and opens the forest canopy to greater solar penetration and wind, resulting in overall drier forest conditions and flammability.

How did the forests ever survive without logging?

The Forest Service is currently identifying ‘priority areas’ on the national forests that need to be treated (read logged). A provision of the 2014 Farm Bill gives the agency the ability to expedite logging projects, including in roadless areas, designed to reduce fuels and prevent the chance of “uncontrollable wildfires”.

Public involvement is simultaneously being minimized, and robust environmental analysis is unfortunately being short-changed.

Fire frequency and intensity in the West are predominantly climate and weather driven. An overwhelming amount of scientific evidence shows that drought, warm temperatures, low humidity and windy conditions drive wildfire intensity. Tree-density and beetle infestation does not drive fire intensity and behavior.

The predominantly mixed conifer forests of the West have evolved with fire. Wildfires are not ‘catastrophic’ but rather necessary for nutrient cycling, soil productivity and providing habitat for insects, birds and mammals. Wildfire is a natural disturbance event critical to forest function and resiliency. A more accurate term for Western landscapes is ‘fire-scapes’.

Building roads and logging in post-fire landscapes is also unnecessary and harmful. ‘Salvage logging’ impedes forest succession, can increase soil erosion, and impair streams, fish habitat and water quality. Scientists are discovering that ‘snag forests’ are one of the most biologically rich and diverse habitat types, rivaled only by old growth.

The Forest Service’s age-old war on forests

Politicians and the timber industry are assaulting America’s National Forests.

Managed forests are neither healthier, nor more resilient to wildfire. Beetle infestation and fire intensity are mainly climate and weather driven. Fungi, bacteria, insects, disease and wildfire are natural processes important for forest function and resiliency.

The real catastrophe is the Forest Service continues to lead its century-old war on wildfire by supporting commercial logging and fire suppression to the detriment of American taxpayers and forest ecosystems.

Brett Haverstick is education and outreach director for Friends of the Clearwater, a grassroots advocacy group that works to protect the public wildlands, wildlife, and waters in the Clearwater basin of beautiful north-central Idaho.

The Wild Clearwater Country is the northern half of the Big Wild, which contains the largest remaining roadless, and undeveloped stretch of wildlands left in the lower 48 states. Only Alaska has more ecologically intact and wild country.

The Clearwater is a place of dense, moist forests of ancient fir and cedar, parted by crisp, cool streams. It’s a special place where you can listen to swift water flowing through intimate, deeply-cut canyons, and you can smell aromatic, spacious stands of ponderosa pine climbing the ridges above.

It’s a landscape where grey wolves, wolverines, lynx, bears, and mountain goats roam far-reaching ridgetops and lush, river-bottom valleys. Unlike many other places, the Clearwater still allows individuals to immerse themselves in solitude and inhale the soft breath of untrammeled wildness.

This irreplaceable landscape lies between the forests of the St. Joe River to the north, and the rapids of the Salmon River to the south, with the spine of the Bitterroot Divide to the east. Learn more.

This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

On 13th April, Drax Plc, operator of Drax Power Station, will be holding its AGM in York, sparking protests both locally and in London where its major investors have their offices.

Campaigners will be highlighting Drax’s involvement in dirty energy, its links with climate change and deforestation, and its continued reliance on government subsidies – which could instead be going to support genuinely renewable energy – to keep afloat.

While Drax describes itself as “Europe’s largest decarbonisation project”, its portfolio now covers three forms of dirty energy: coal, biomass, and, since 2016, gas: Drax has acquired four yet-to-be-built gas fired power stations, and Opus Energy.

Drax opened in 1974 as a coal-fired power station, and in 2012 it began the process of converting three of its six generators to run on biomass in the form of imported wood pellets. This conversion is now complete, with 65% of the electricity Drax generated in 2016 coming from biomass.

Despite its claims to be “preparing for a post coal future”, Drax remains among the UK’s largest burners of coal, importing it from places such as Colombia – where the coal industry is responsible for air and water pollution and land grabs resulting in the disposession of indigenous communities from their land, and the impoverishment, ill health and growing malnutrition among those not evicted outright.

In spite of which, Drax is still the UK’s biggest CO2 emitter

Drax remains the UK’s single largest emitter of CO₂, and is now also the world’s largest biomass power station, burning the equivalent of more than the UK’s total annual wood production each year. In 2016 Drax burnt pellets made from approximately 13 million tonnes of wood, while the UK’s annual production is around 11 million tonnes.

Biomass is considered by industry and government calculations to be lower carbon than coal because it is assumed that the carbon emitted will be reabsorbed by new trees planted to replace those that were burnt. However, burning trees today releases carbon into the atmosphere today, and any new trees planted won’t reach maturity and absorb the same amount of carbon for decades.

At a time when we need to be rapidly reducing our carbon emissions, it makes no sense to create such a ‘carbon debt’. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether CO₂ in it comes from burning biomass or coal.

If trees are left standing, they will continue to absorb carbon, contribute to ecosystems and provide habitat and food for other species. If they are cut down, this is lost and can’t be replaced quickly, if ever. A forest ecosystem takes decades to mature, and to reduce the trees’ importance to their carbon sequestration capacity is a massive oversight and an incomplete way of looking at a forest.

The clear-cut forests of America

Just over half of the wood burnt at Drax comes from the United States, and most of this is supplied by the pellet company Enviva.

Enviva sources wood from clearcut wetland forests, important ecosystems which are home to a wide variety of animal and plant species and have been classified as global biodiversity hotspots by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which also considers them “some of the most biologically important habitats in North America“.

Many of the species who live in these forests are now threatened by habitat fragmentation from logging and land conversion. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), it is difficult to restore these forests after logging because they take a long time to mature and being logged once can alter flooding patterns, reducing the diversity of plant and tree species when the forest does eventually regenerate.

Supplying biomass to UK and European power stations is a major driver of forest destruction. A local resident says: “When I see wood pellet ships leave our port, I don’t see the vessel. I see the miles of clearcuts I know happened. It’s a feeling of loss.”

Drax also sources some pellets from plantations, which have taken the place of forests in some areas of the southern United States. The biomass industry points to these plantations as evidence that its activities are not reducing forest cover, but a monoculture plantation does not support as many other species as a forest does, is more likely to deplete the soil and water and may rely on spraying with agrochemicals.

Promoting bioenergy

As the only currently operating coal-fired power station in the UK to have converted to biomass, Drax is playing an important role in pushing bioenergy as a replacement for coal and making it appear to be a ‘sustainable’ option.

Two other biomass power stations currently being built, Lynemouth (another converted coal power station) and MGT Tees (a purpose-built biomass power station), plan to source their pellets from Enviva.

Drax’s research and development of necessary infrastructure, including specially adapted railway carriages and storage domes for biomass pellets, will be important if large scale import-reliant biomass is expanded further in the UK. Drax also owns a pellet retail business and is in the process of expanding its pellet mills in the US.

Through engagement with the community using local media and Corporate Social Responsibility activities Drax is making further attempts at equating biomass with sustainability in people’s minds. For lobbying the government and EU, Drax has hired the PR company Edelman, whose other clients have included E.On, Shell, Walmart and Burger King.

Drax’s CEO Dorothy Thompson chairs the Sustainable Biomass Partnership (SBP), a biomass certification scheme set up and administered entirely by energy companies. Unsurprisingly, the SBP has concluded that Drax’s biomass is sustainable – based largely on reports written by Drax itself. Environmental NGOs have described this certification scheme as “little more than industry greenwash“.

The recent appointment of a senior Drax official – Dr Rebecca Heaton – to the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, a body set up to advise the UK government on reducing its carbon emissions, provides Drax with another opportunity to influence government and popular opinion about the feasibility and sustainability of biomass.

£1.5 million subsidies – at our expense!

Drax has been receiving renewable energy subsidies since the start of its conversion to biomass. In December 2016, Drax started receiving another more lucrative subsidy, called a Contract for Difference (CfD), bringing Drax’s total subsidies for the year up to £541 million, or nearly £1.5 million a day, a figure which will rise further in 2017 thanks to the CfD.

These subsidies are paid out of a surcharge on your electricity bill. At a time when 6.59 million households in the UK are considered to be ‘fuel poor’ (having to spend more than 10% of household income on heating), these subsidies are very badly misplaced.

Imagine what we could achieve if rather than subsidising forest destruction, we invested this amount of money into energy saving, retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient, or generating genuinely renewable energy.

Reliance on dirty energy is not acceptable, whichever way you spin it. Biomass is a dangerous false solution to climate change and subsidising it is a waste of bill payers’ money.

We will be telling Drax and its investors at the company’s AGM that instead of paying for forest destruction and increased carbon emissions with our electricity bills, we want to reduce our energy demand, protect forests and build more democratic energy systems.

Communities around the world want to address the consequences of climate change, and companies like Drax are getting in the way.

Frances Howe is a bioenergy campaigner with Biofuelwatch.

Photos courtesy of the Dogwood Alliance.

More information

• AxeDrax AGM 2017.
• Recently updated campaign info about Drax.
• Facebook event for the London demo.
• Facebook event for the York demo.