Treva Gear doesn’t want the woods in her hometown of Adel, Georgia, to be the next place to be “sacrificed” for someone else’s energy needs. However, a new tax credit proposed in the nation’s largest climate spending bill may make that more likely for his community and dozens of others.
The credit could speed up the construction of power plants that convert vast swaths of America’s forests into an energy source called biomass, which scientists say is dirtier than coal.
A private company is about to build one of Adel’s factories. It will be the largest in the world and will emit carcinogenic air pollution.
“Ultimately, we’re killing the earth and killing each other,” said Gear, who began rallying his neighbors after the plant was proposed in 2020 and sued a Georgia environmental agency. “This is supposed to be a solution — it’s a lie. It’s a false climate solution that will continue to hurt black and brown communities the most.
For years throughout the rural South, the forests that black communities called home for hundreds of years have been significantly depleted. In the name of “clean energy,” more than a million hectares of the country’s forests, mostly in the south and northeast, have been cleared, destroyed, and turned into wood chips by private energy companies. At the plants in the community, the pellets are flattened into uniform wood pellets and sold to plants mainly in Europe. The pellets are then burned in power plants to generate electricity, creating what is known as biomass energy. The industry says it’s cleaner than burning coal, but according to a coalition of 1,000 scientists, it actually releases far more carbon into the atmosphere than coal. It also cuts down trees, which are an important tool to combat climate change.
For generations, southern forests have sustained communities and protected them from flooding while also absorbing air pollution, but the wood pellet boom has disrupted it, contributing to reduced ecosystems and increased flood threats. This has few financial or health benefits for black communities who are dependent on the environment and like living next to a perpetual fire. Burning eyes and closed throats from the ash and dust gathered in everything.
These plants emit more than 55 air pollutants that contribute to respiratory diseases and cancer. With 45 percent of the nation’s active or proposed factories located in the South, more than twice as many are located in predominantly black, poor communities than wealthy whites.
Georgia and Pennsylvania, with nine plants each, have more than any other state. Currently, the world’s largest plant is located in Lucedale, Mississippi, which the White House considers vulnerable due to its high fire and flood risk. In another Mississippi town, Gloucester, a mill operated only 500 yards from the houses.
All the while, about 80 percent of the 9 million tons of pellets produced in the U.S. each year are shipped across the Atlantic Ocean and burned by power plants in Europe, meaning mining helps reduce none of the energy burden. It does not rural communities. The South uses the least energy in the entire country, but has the highest energy bills and the dirtiest energy sources.
Proponents of biomass say the industry’s growth is only a product of the world’s increasing energy demand and the need to keep the lights on by reducing the use of fossil fuels. This argument is based on the belief that a large-scale transition to solar and wind energy is not possible.
But researchers and advocates say the growth of wood pellet mills and exports is the latest effort by U.S. and European energy companies to reap huge profits from a cheap and polluting energy source before a mass transition to solar and wind power. (Biomass is cheaper to produce than coal and gas, but actually more expensive than solar and wind.)
Even with stricter pollution laws in the UK, EU and US, many companies have evaded scrutiny by underreporting their emissions or paying multi-million dollar fines for exceeding the limits.
Understanding the “predatory nature of this clean energy source”
Gear and others say this is another example of black American communities being exploited by global trade.
“They have created sacrificial zones for profit, for ‘economic progress,'” Gear said.
Belinda Joyner, an environmental activist in North Carolina, says the rise of the biomass industry should be viewed as a mental health crisis in addition to an environmental crisis. In his state, there are six wood pellet plants.
“We have logging trucks that are constantly making noise on our streets,” he said. We don’t get enough rest, which can affect you in many ways, especially when we wake up every day and work hard to pay for our homes. “It’s disrespectful because these people know they don’t put these facilities in their community.”
Adel, Georgia is a small, rural town of 5,000 people, characterized by deep agricultural and forestry roots and a close-knit community. Surrounded by farmland that was once the economic engine of the region, it is a place where tradition lives on.
Growing up, Geer, who is in his 40s, remembers playing stickball with his brother and friends in the streets of Adel after school, and cycling across town to the library to study for hours.
“This was where you wanted to raise your kids,” he said, but that all changed after Georgia granted Spectrum Energy a permit to build and operate a wood pellet plant in the community. Spectrum Energy did not respond to Capital B’s request for comment.
The White House currently considers the small town “disadvantaged” because of its poor health outcomes. However, the tax credits proposed by the Biden administration through the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate spending bill to date, may help exacerbate the public health problem. These credits help subsidize the construction of these types of power plants or new facilities to offset the environmental effects of power plants by absorbing carbon emissions from the air.
Read more: The nation’s largest climate bill threatens black communities
The Biden administration, primarily the US Treasury Department, is now investigating competing claims about the environmental risks and benefits of burning wood. American forests are actually one of the most important climate tools of this country. Home forests absorb about 11% of our greenhouse gases annually.
Later this year, the Treasury Department is expected to decide whether to allow biomass companies to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks over the next decade. Former President Donald Trump’s administration first declared the forest biomass industry as renewable, like solar or wind energy, opening the door for the industry to take advantage of federal clean energy tax credits.
While the Biden administration is not to blame for its initial framing of the practice as “renewable,” Gear questions how, despite large government investments to ensure that communities of color are disproportionately affected by pollution and water changes, Air is not damaged, how is the “industry”. “It is still allowed to enter our communities through the back door.”
Last year, Gear filed a Title VI civil rights lawsuit against the Georgia Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Environmental Protection. The lawsuit claims the state’s air quality program doesn’t do enough to identify and protect the most vulnerable Georgians. As Capital B has reported, the environmental civil rights lawsuit process is under attack from Republican attorneys general, so it’s unclear what success he will have.
“The attorneys general that we pay with our tax dollars to try to violate our civil rights to clean air and water are unconscionable,” he said.
Read more: A court ruling that secures the future of environmental racism
Earlier this year, a coalition of U.S. representatives sent a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel opposing the tax credit. And in April, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey introduced a bill that would require the Environmental Protection Agency to be more stringent in tracking pollution from these types of facilities.
A recent study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the National Wildlife Federation found that wood pellet plants underreport greenhouse gas emissions and that biomass power facilities can emit more pollutants than fossil fuels or even coal. The industry’s green claims rely heavily on wood pellet companies replacing dried-out forest growth with new trees, but the young trees aren’t as good as the sponges they replaced.
Additionally, many wood pellets are “co-fired” alongside coal in traditional power plants, allowing companies to earn green energy credits while still burning coal.
Adam Collette, director of programs for the Dogwood Alliance, a North Carolina-based environmental nonprofit, said the Biden administration’s climate bills are actually “one of the biggest emerging threats to the forests of the South.” For every pound of wood pellets produced, 12 acres of forest are lost. Forty pounds of pellets are needed to heat an average-sized European house during the winter.
Since the advent of US colonialism, the country has destroyed 95% of its old-growth forests. With fewer trees, this means more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. As the “timber basket of the world,” the forests of the south are currently being cleared for other industries and supply 20 percent of the world’s paper and other wood products.
In Gloucester, Mississippi, an 80 percent black community whose homes are next to a bullet factory, the average resident earns $15,000 a year. The community has no local school and a small health clinic without a full-time doctor. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about a third of the city’s residents report being in poor health.
“It’s real. Visit our communities and see people’s living conditions. Come see the sawdust falling on people and talk to them and hear their stories about medical problems, breathing problems and dependence on oxygen tanks . Then you will understand the true predatory nature of this ‘clean energy’ source.”
You can leave a public comment for the IRS on their proposal to extend the biomass tax credit here.
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