"Burn Up the Biosphere..."

[amborin]

Burn Up the Biosphere and Call It Renewable Energy: The New Taxpayer Bailout That Will Make You Sick AND Poor
Just when you thought the biofuels bad dream was about over along comes the nightmare of "biomass."

by Rachel Smolker

Last week President Obama announced his plans to ensure that the mandate for biofuels, 36 billion gallons by 2022, voted into law in the Energy Independence and Security Act in 2007, is met, and to provide huge new supports through the USDA for the cutting, harvesting and transport of biomass (aka forests, plants) to be delivered to incinerators and burned as "renewable" electricity and heat.

The transportation biofuel mandate was adopted without clear consideration of the impacts of production on food, public health, direct and indirect land use, greenhouse gas emissions, soils, water or biodiversity. Since being passed into law, the critique of biofuels, particularly corn ethanol, has only grown deeper and more damning. Cellulosic fuels, not much available yet, will, according to mythology, avert these concerns because they are made from the inedible parts of plants. True, we do not eat forests, but creating huge new demands for wood is a recipe for disaster.

Lucky, technological hurdles have slowed the development of cellulosic fuels, but no such hurdles lie in the way of burning biomass for electricity and heat. Across the country, communities are being offered "green jobs" cutting, hauling and chipping their forests to feed the gaping maws of a new generation of "green energy" utilities being constructed or retrofitted in their neighborhoods. At least 200 new burners are proposed around the country. Further, many facilities that burn coal are seeking to co-fire biomass under the assumption that burning trees is a step up from burning coal. It's not.

To fully appreciate the magnitude of this race to burn up the biosphere, consider the scale - each demands on the order of 13 thousand tons of wood per year, delivered by a stream of diesel-fueled trucks, to produce one megawatt of electricity. According to the Energy Information Agency, in 2007 The U.S. produced 4348856 GWh of electricity. If we were to produce 10% of our electricity with biomass, my back of the envelope calculation suggests we would need about 760 million tons of wood. At a moderate harvest rate (20 tons per acre), that would mean cutting an area approximately the size of Florida each year. The impacts on air quality and human health from burning it would be staggering.

States like Massachussetts, where the community resistance has brought these figures to light, are facing 5 proposed new facilities which combined would produce 135-200 MW, an increase of a mere 1.3% in generating capacity for the state. This would require over 2 million tons of wood -- requiring cutting over the entire 844 thousand acres of public and private forest land in the state within 6 years. Similar outrageous proposals are on the table in virtually every state in the nation.

These demands are on a collision course with fast rising new industries producing pellets and chips for export, especially to the EU, where even larger biomass burners are being constructed, (120- 300 Megawatts), requiring millions of tons per year, largely imported!

It gets worse: there is a direct connection with the recent news that Arborgen is seeking to test genetically engineered eucalyptus in the U.S. (see NYT Jan 29) The greater the demand for biomass, the greater the likelihood that GE trees will gain a toehold and native forests will give way to industrial plantations of GE trees. .....

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/10-9