Wood Pellet Boom Sparks Climate and Health Debate

Despite industry claims, scientists say using wood pellets is little better than fossil fuels.

The harvesting and burning of forest biomass to produce energy continues to surge, according to a new report on near-term global production and demand for wood pellets. This growth comes despite scientists’ warnings of the industry’s harm to the climate and its contribution to deforestation ...

Woody biomass energy has exponentially grown in the last decade as a renewable energy alternative to fossil fuels. The growing trend of burning trees amid global climate crisis suggests that the wood pellet industry has been grossly successful in positioning itself as a sustainability leader.

Forest and air quality advocates in the United States have long argued that manufacturing wood pellets from leveled forests and burning the compressed wood for energy is neither a green nor clean climate solution as biomass industry advocates have long claimed.

Continuing to extract from these lands and fuel the climate crisis for something as egregious as burning trees for utility-scale electricity will exacerbate these impacts. Forest biomass also risks locking B.C. communities into a boom and bust cycle that has plagued the province for generations. Union leadership has previously highlighted the wood pellet ...

Ministers were told to lock the biomass giant into an agreement on carbon capture. The government ignored them — and now Drax has walked away.

Regarding the above article’s title, there is no debate about it: the world’s currently available total biomass ready and able to be burned is totally insufficient to supply the world’s current—let alone future—energy demands (as indicated in the above article’s color table’s ...