Louisiana Governor Spends Time at COP26 Touring One of the UK’s Biggest Polluters

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards is certainly one of a lot of officers attending the United Nations local weather convention in Glasgow. As with most individuals on the convention, often called COP26, he was there to tout his dedication to a protected local weather.

In between threads on his participation in panels on power resilience and adaptation, Edwards retweeted a post from biomass firm Drax, which posted images of the governor touring an influence plant fueled by wooden pellets. The firm mentioned through the tour, Edwards realized about “sustainable biomass generation.” But Drax’s plant is something however sustainable—and poses an enormous threat to the planet and Louisiana’s forests.

Using biomass to supply electrical energy is a kind of concepts that sounds good in idea, however has numerous issues in follow. The thought behind biomass energy it’s basically a closed loop; timber are minimize down, was pellets, and burned, and the saplings planted of their place suck up the carbon dioxide emitted by burning the wooden pellets. But research have proven that burning wooden for power can really emit extra carbon than coal. The carbon debt incurred by chopping down forests for gas can take more than 90 years to be paid back—not precisely what we want as we face an more and more diminishing timeline to stave off catastrophic warming.

What’s extra, whereas many biomass producers declare they use sawdust and woodchips which are the undesirable byproduct of the lumber {industry}, the {industry} is more and more relying on chopping down trees solely for pellet manufacturing. The Southeast is floor zero for the pellet {industry} whereas the Drax biomass plant is one of the world’s largest.

Biomass has additionally come beneath fireplace from environmental justice advocates, who level out that the {industry} within the U.S. is poorly regulated and that services are overwhelmingly situated in Black and brown communities. Big biomass states like Louisiana and North Carolina solely require crops to acquire air and water high quality permits to be constructed, permitting them to be exempt from laws that restrict emissions from different forms of industrial services. In Mississippi, that state’s Department of Environment Quality fined Drax in February for $2.5 million, charging that the plant has been producing three to 4 instances the quantity of air air pollution its allow permits for years.

“Our observation in Alabama is that these companies claim to be using discarded lumber while getting owners of large swaths of land to give them access to the timber on their lands, often clear-cutting those forests,” Michael Hansen, the chief director of the nonprofit GASP, mentioned through e mail. “Local politicians claim these are drivers of local economic growth and job-creating opportunities for poor areas like Alabama’s Black Belt and other areas in the Gulf South, but that has never proven to be true for the locals. It’s usually a boon to the wealthy landowners whose families have owned hundreds or thousands of acres for generations.”

But the {industry} has taken off within the U.S. lately, fueled largely by demand from the EU, which has decided biomass as a carbon-neutral energy supply. Drax calls its massive power station within the UK the nation’s “largest renewable power station,” which it feeds with pellets produced at its three pellet crops in Louisiana and Mississippi. The transatlantic journey these U.S.-produced wooden pellets make to achieve their last locations overseas provides the hefty carbon footprint of the pellets’ life cycle. Climate and power analysis agency Ember calculated earlier this month that, with correct accounting procedures that the UK at the moment doesn’t use, the Drax plant is the largest single supply of carbon dioxide emissions in your entire nation.

“Ember’s interpretation of the figures for Drax’s CO2 emissions is inaccurate and completely at odds with what the world’s leading climate scientists at the UN IPCC say about sustainable biomass being crucial to delivering global climate targets,” a spokesperson from Drax mentioned in response to a query about the Ember report.

If Edwards has gotten the memo about biomass’s questionable renewable creds, he doesn’t appear to have listened. He’s been a reasonably vocal supporter of Drax lately, and the corporate has made itself a house in Louisiana; Drax at the moment operates two of the state’s 4 biomass manufacturing services and makes use of the port in Baton Rouge to export wood pellets to Europe. After Drax moved its headquarters from Atlanta to Monroe, Louisiana, in 2018, Edwards issued a statement saying that “Louisiana aggressively pursued Drax Biomass” to maneuver their headquarters. “This is a testament to our state’s ability to attract new business opportunities and create jobs.”

According to a press release about Edwards’ UK Drax tour, the governor heard about Drax’s plans for bioenergy with carbon seize and storage (BECCS) throughout his tour of the services. The {industry} has set its sights on deploying BECCS that may permit it to claim biomass facilities are a supply of “negative emissions.” That’s the holy grail of power, basically which means that the facility plant would really be a supply of emissions reductions and never simply averted emissions.

In the press launch, Jason Shipstone, Drax’s chief innovation officer, talked concerning the firm’s plans to “develop the world’s biggest negative emissions power station” within the UK, which, he mentioned, signifies that “Louisiana could play an even greater role in addressing the climate crisis.” But an NRDC evaluation has discovered that as a result of most carbon emissions from biomass manufacturing happen offsite, moderately than on the energy plant itself, the addition of carbon seize at a biomass energy plant would nonetheless emit round 80% of the carbon as what comes out of a coal plant smokestack. BECCS can be a far-off know-how nowhere close to prepared for primetime. It’s one price investing analysis into, however not a slam dunk by any means.

The NRDC evaluation “relies on a long list of false assumptions, is incorrect and ill-informed, and is not aligned with latest climate science or policies on bioenergy,” the Drax spokesperson mentioned. “The UN IPCC is the world’s leading body on climate change, made up of thousands of the world’s foremost scientists. It has recently stated that sustainable biomass and BECCS have a vital role to play in meeting global climate targets.”

Edwards’s go to to Scotland is a part of a larger push from his administration to be seen as a climate-friendly governor in a very at-risk state. “No state in our nation is more affected by climate change than Louisiana, but it’s also true that no state is better positioned to be part of the solution to the problems facing our world,” Edwards mentioned in a press launch on his journey. ​​”Make no mistake: an industry-wide transition to cleaner, much less environmentally impactful power manufacturing and utilization goes to occur no matter if Louisiana participates, so it’s greatest that Louisiana be a frontrunner on this house.”

Perhaps it shouldn’t be shocking {that a} U.S. politician looking for local weather creds would cozy up with polluters in an try to bolster his state’s public picture on the world stage. But it’s one thing we might even see extra of with politicians from the South who might see massive cash from biomass corporations. (The name could also be coming from contained in the White House, too: EPA administrator Michael Regan was previously the top of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality, and beneath his watch there, the state turned the world’s largest exporter of biomass gas.)

“I don’t think any politician promoting biomass as a solution to climate change should be taken seriously,” mentioned Hansen. “Their commitment to solving the climate crisis is meager at best.”