(folk music) - Now when you all get up there, you're gonna have to be careful and look at where you're walking and stuff.

I mean, it's cold enough I don't think there's any snakes out today but you don't never know.

We have a lot of snakes out here.

It's amazing how quick they can cut something like this.

I mean, they cut this probably less than two weeks.

Every time I come out here you'll here (hums) sound and it's logging.

(machinery running) (trees falling) (folk music) - When policies were created that incentivize the biomass as a quote, unquote carbon-free source of energy, that was when we started to see popping up all over the country more free standing biomass power plants that are burning wood for electricity and also these enormous pellet plants that are making fuel that then get shipped to Europe.

(folk music) - The bottomland wetland forest along the rivers and in the swamps represents the last remnants of what we could call natural ecosystems across the south.

And they also happen to be the most critical in terms of ecosystem services, clean water, flood control, not to mention that these forests are also incredibly diverse.

And we're tearing them down at an alarming rate and burning them in power stations.

(folk music) - We started getting reports from eastern North Carolina, in particular that vast areas of wetland forests are being cut to supply wood pellets to Europe.

We learned that contrary to the representations by the companies that they were using saw dust and other wood wastes that in fact, they're cutting whole forests, whole trees as their primary source of biomass.

(slow music) - And they would come to this community and say, "We're gonna bring jobs and gonna be green.

We're going behind loggers and we're just gonna take the trash stuff and that's what we're gonna make into these pellets.

That ain't what they done, I mean, it's not even close.

You don't believe it go to the Enviva site and look at all the damn logs.

And I don't mind saying it, they've flat out lied to this community, lied to me.

- The wood-based biomass industry in the south didn't exist here five years ago.

This map shows the existing pellet mills and those that have been proposed.

And overlapping sourcing areas, accelerating cut and harvest of hardwoods and swamp forests in the region.

What's clear is that there's a concentration in what we call the coastal plain, within a 100 miles or so of the coast.

The reason for that is this is all for export.

So, the trees will be harvested, pelletized and then taken to a port and transported to Europe.

This industry's been deceptive, they have misrepresented their sourcing but I actually put at fault the countries that are behind these policies.

- The European Union got together, probably 10 years ago and said, "We're gonna be the global leaders on this, we're gonna cut our emissions of fossil fuel, carbon dioxide, so you gotta supply 20% of your power from carbon-neutral or non-carbon emitting sources.

It was a laudable thing to do, except that, I think without thinking, they decided that biomass should be carbon neutral.

- That's biomass energy is seen as a carbon neutral option, it's a pure political decision.

Biomass is pretty easy, you just get some wood and throw it in the coal-fired power plants and you do coal firing, you don't need to change any infrastructure.

So it is an easy one and you do get to your percentages.

So therefore, any idea to say, "But hey, don't we need to do proper accounting," was a bit like put on the back burner so to, "Yep, we'll come to that later on."

- United Kingdom decided it's approach is gonna rely heavily on converting old coal-fired power plants to burn wood biomass.

- And a big culprit of that is Drax Power Station which is the biggest carbon emitter in the UK, the biggest power station in the UK and the biggest burner of wood fire industry in the world.

- We're in the middle of implementing a project to turn it from being a coal station that burns a little bit of fire mass to a biomass station that burns a little bit of coal.

In forestry, it's mainly when you harvest a tree, there are lots of twigs, branches that aren't used and also when you plant a forest, you over-plant and then you thin.

That is what we call biomass.

- The subsidies are of very significant part of their economic model.

The UK tax payer or bill payer because it comes out of our power bills, is paying disproportionately large amounts for a so-called renewable technology that is destroying forests by diversity and making climate change worse.

- Well, if you're interested in reducing emissions now, then burning something that puts more carbon up into the air than the thing you're replacing which is coal doesn't make sense.

- And nothing could be farther from the truth, when you burn wood pellets or other kinds of woody biomass, what you're releasing into the atmosphere is biogenetic carbon.

Biogenic carbon is part of the natural life cycle of wood.

- It's about what the atmosphere sees, that's the only thing that matters here, is what does the atmosphere see?

How much carbon is the atmosphere seeing when you burn different kinds of fuel?

And it's just a fact that there's more carbon coming out of the stack when you burn wood than when you burn coal.

The physics are the physics, there's CO2 coming out of the stack, there's nothing special about that CO2 that makes it have less climate warming potential than fossil fuel CO2.

What's different with bio-energy is that there's an assumption that sometime in the future those emissions will be offset.

No one's making sure that happens.

There's no bio-energy company that I'm aware of that is actually managing forests and assuredly proving that the wood that they burn today, which is emitting CO2 is being offset by new trees being planted which are equivalent in mass to the trees that they just cut.

And the industry likes to make it sound like it's super complicated.

You know, "Leave it to the experts, don't trouble your heads, we got it under control, we would never do anything to harm the climate."

Well, they are and they will and they do and they'll get you to back them up by telling you that it's green and clean and you end up being duped by this industry.

- The UK Department of Environment has come out with a report that shows that the use of wood pellets for energy actually decreases the greenhouse gas footprint of energy between 74 to 90% as opposed to the use of coal.

- [Woman] Switching to biomass from coal can reduce carbon emissions by between 74 and 90%.

- The claims that Enviva's making are based on just not counting any of the CO2 that's emitted when you burn biomass.

The carbon accounting framework they use only counts the emissions that are associating with harvesting and transport but they would not count the CO2 that's emitted by burning at the stack.

And this was identified as the critical climate accounting error in Tim Searchinger ed-all paper which was so important in getting this conversation started.

- So here's where the actual accounting error came from.

In the long story, we ended up developing an accounting rule for global national reporting that said for bioenergy purposes, we're gonna count the carbon when you cut down the tree, so we don't have to count it again when it goes up the smoke stack.

And that rule works if and only if you're actually counting the carbon when you cut down the tree.

- [Mary] But the U.S. isn't really reporting those numbers, at least not in an official way.

And the UK is not reporting trees that are being cut down in the United States, so when it comes to those trees being burned in UK power plants, those emissions are treated as zero because if you were counting it both when the tree is cut and at the power plant, then you'd be double counting it.

- So, a rule that's designed to prevent you from counting carbon twice, became a rule that says you never count it at all.

Once that mistake had been made, all kinds of people started thinking, well bioenergy can help solve our climate crisis.

The problem is that this mistake happened to also coexist in a way that would allow people to make a lot of money.

- [Woman] By reliably providing customers throughout the world with an alternative to coal, Enviva is part of a cleaner, greener low-carbon energy future.

- The only green in this industry is the enormous amount of money that the speculators are making in this pellet industry in response to a policy in Europe that makes no sense.

(dramatic music) - That wood as energy is carbon neutral or is zero carbon comes from the notion that if you burn something, something else will grow and absorb the same amount of carbon dioxide.

I used to except that without question.

I thought, "Well, this is great, yeah, sure this is wonderful, what a great way to deal with this problem."

What I hadn't thought about was the lag time and the lag time is hugely important.

- Yes, those trees may grow back in time but we don't have 50, 70, 100 years to wait for those trees to grow back to take that carbon out of the atmosphere.

We need to do it right away.

- This land has been in my family since 1898.

Some of these trees are over 140 years old.

My neighbors tried to talk me into logging mine at the same time they logged theirs.

They said, "They could come right in and knock it out in just a little while," I said, "Yeah, it's a shame that they could devastate a forest that took 150 years to develop and they could wipe it out in a couple of weeks."

Well, both my neighbors come to me after they had theirs logged and said it wasn't worth the money, they wished they had their trees back.

- The southeast U.S. as an eco region is the most heavily disturbed forests, landscape in the world.

On a percentage basis, we estimate roughly a decade worth of time, a third of the tree cover is either regrowing or cleared.

And that percentage is higher than any other like landscape globally.

And it's really just the turning of the landscape into a tree farm.

- The loss of natural vegetation types in the region has been profound.

96, 97% of the long leaf ecosystem having been lost over the last several centuries and something like three-quarters of the landscape is now covered by fields, cities, highways, pine plantations that do not provide the kind of biodiversity values that natural or even semi-natural forests provide.

There's an important distinction to be made between natural and semi-natural forests and pine plantations.

They differ in quite profound ways.

In a natural forest, we often find 80 or 90 or 120 or even 150 different plant species growing in that small in area.

In general, in pine plantations, we just find a few species.

That means that remaining natural and semi-natural forests that we have in the southeastern United States are bearing an increasing burden for maintaining the biodiversity for the whole region.

- I invite each and every one of you to join the SOS, Save our Southern Forests movement.

- One of the roles that Dogwood Alliance has played is really investigating the on the ground practices of the industry and how we do that is we identify the sites in which the industry is harvesting it's feed stocks for pellets and then from there we go down to the ground and we ground truth.

(folk music) And we identify that those sites are actually sourcing the facility.

We follow the trucks directly from the sites to the facility.

We follow trucks from the facility back to the site and we document that extensively.

- [Man] Enviva's raw materials consist of low-grade wood fiber that is unsuitable for or rejected by the sawmilling and lumber industries because of small size, defects, disease or pest infestation.

- When you go into these wetlands, you'll notice that many of the trees are as they say deformed or diseased, the trees are naturally hollow inside.

They can take what they call, low-value wood, this unwanted wood that needs a home and chop it up.

- If there's this incentive for industry to go into wood pellet production and hardwoods are preferred there's a finite resource in the southeast and where are the remaining hardwood forests in the U.S.?

You think about the 50 to the 100 year regrowth in the mid-Atlantic, northeast, these are the big stands of hardwood forests and if this incentive and driver is there you can imagine displacement outside of the southeast into higher latitude forests from Maryland up to Maine as being a source for green energy.

(slow music) - The forests of the eastern U.S. are almost the only place on planet Earth that went from brown to green over the course of the last century as they regrew, as people stepped back, as we began to preserve either because of the accidents of economics or through conscious public policy.

The planet tries valiantly to sequester carbon.

It does it in the oceans and it does it in the forests, primarily and these tempered forests are big sinks for carbon and it's safely locked up for the moment in those trees.

(slow jazz music) - They are burning trees at that plant to the tune of 113 tons an hour which is more biomass than you would get if you went out and cut down an acre of New Hampshire's forests.

So, they are burning the equivalent of clear-cutting more than an acre an hour.

- Burgess represents the absolute worst kind of public policy.

It represents huge subsidies that are going to players who don't live in our community and if they didn't get those credits and subsidies, it wouldn't make economic sense to invest in these plants.

What nobody talks about is the hidden subsidies that the public is giving them in the form of externalities.

- Forests provide a huge amount of services for us besides just the wood products they're growing.

They're really critical in the water cycle and clarifying water.

They're critical in erosion control, they're critical in sequestering carbon, in producing oxygen, in removing pollutants, they do all sorts of services that if we actually had to pay for them on our own, the cost would be astronomical.

So, they have real important roles for our well-being.

- Biomass is the ultimate commodification of the forest, it's that simple.

It treats it as an inanimate object to be degraded or used and exploited for human purposes with no consequences.

And so I look at a project like this and I say, "This is what qualifies as sustainable green, clean, carbon-free energy?"

This is a disaster, this is not sustainable and it is not green and it is not clean and it's certainly not carbon neutral.

- The fact is Mr. President, that biomass energy is a sustainable, responsible, renewable and economically significant energy source.

The carbon neutrality of biomass harvested from sustainably managed forests has been recognized repeatedly by numerous studies, agencies, institutions and rules around the world.

- Susan Collins' quotes are lifted directly from the website of the American Forest and Paper Association, word for word.

- Our amendment supports this carbon neutral energy source as an essential part of our nation's energy future.

(dramatic music) - [Mary] The L'Anse Warden plant in Michigan is representative of plants in the U.S.

They're not just burning wood but are burning post-industrial waste and other kinds of contaminated materials.

- I'm taking off the dust.

- I am approximately 100 yards away from Warden Electric Plant.

The so-called green energy or biomass that they're burning here is creating a toxic cloud of ground up railroad tie dust.

This is creosote-treated wood fiber that's going airborne, becoming fugitive dust.

In the industry they call them fines that blow right down into town.

- [Catherine] In the beginning when they first announced they were going to open up this plant, it was gonna be a green plant and they were gonna be using forest products, residues and things like that.

They never told us they were going to be burning railroad ties.

- At the Warden Plant, they've been burning kind of a witch's brew of a lot of different fuels including chipped railroad ties, chipped railroad ties that are treated with pentachlorophenol which is a banned pesticide in the United States.

But they're importing those ties from Canada.

They're burning clean forest wood and they're burning tires, they're burning chipped tires which might contain 20% rubber by content and so that has been treated in some regulatory context as biomass.

- A protest is growing in L'Anse as more and more villagers are speaking out against the L'Anse Warden Electric Company and alleged air and water pollution.

- I think it's important that we know who owns Warden Plant.

Warden's owned by a conglomerate called Traxys.

"Traxys provides worldwide finance and commercial services" unquote.

Traxys China, Traxys Hong Kong, Traxys Shanghai.

Would you think Traxys cares about us here?

Do you think they care about us?

Do you think they care about our children?

Do you think they care about our environment?

Do you think they care about our air, our water, our health?

Who cares about us here?

We need your help.

Who else do we have to turn to?

(applause) - You know, it's like you don't believe us?

What do we have to do, do we have to come up here and drop dead while we're talking to you?

- 30 seconds.

- You are our only hope but nothing is being done, nothing is changing.

- [Man] Your time is up.

- In this consent agreement you're permitting 20 tons an hour of railroad ties to be burned.

So that means the Warden Plant downtown can burn 19 truckloads of railroad ties every day.

Are you kidding me?

Let's talk about the tires.

All right, four ton an hour, that's 8,000 pounds of tires to be thrown in the hopper every hour.

You've permitted the Warden Plant to burn close to 10,000 tires a day.

Are you kidding me?

- [Man] 30 seconds.

- Yeah, well, we'll make it quick.

This is an incinerator, it's terrible, you've gotta throw out that paper all together and start all over and make it known as an incinerator.

I mean, we're not gonna stand for it, this community, we've decided, you can go back to your office tomorrow, tell your people the people in L'Anse are not buying this.

(clapping and cheers) - The thing about bioenergy is that if we give it the green light, it will take over the world because there simply isn't enough biomass to remotely replace the free gift of fossil energy that we've had over the last century and we will kill ourselves in trying.

We will stamp on the biosphere.

- When I look at a huge biomass plant, I don't just see that this is a business that generates energy by burning trees, I see this as a cultural phenomenon that affects every aspect of our life.

And it has implications for how we as a species relate to the land itself.

- This is what we're up against is that our economic system values forest destruction over forest protection and at the end of the day that's what we have to change.

- And certainly the public should not be subsidizing actually putting more carbon into the atmosphere in the name of addressing climate change.

And when those subsidies go away, which I think they will, this industry is gonna go away as fast as it appeared in the U.S. - And we have to be actively reducing carbon dioxide, not even just holding it constant.

The best technology for that is trees.

- It seems to me like climate change is a kind of final exam for our species.

We'll find out if the big brain was in fact a good idea or not, maybe if it's connected to a big enough heart to make a difference.

And I just refuse to believe that this interesting creature that we are can't come to grips with this and do something.

We've been given ample warning by the world's scientist, now the question is whether we'll head it or not.

(upbeat folk music)