Public Forests Not Part of Nation’s Energy Solution
By Bryan Bird, New West Unfiltered 6-20-07
In the rush to solve our nation’s energy supply predicament, Congress is considering legislation which would promote logging our national forests and other public lands for electricity and other biofuels generation. The Energy Policy Reform and Revitalization Act of 2007 and the Biofuels for Energy Security and Transportation Act of 2007 both consider our national forest heritage as “renewable” biomass.
Biomass is being pushed as an alternative, clean and renewable energy on par with solar and wind sources. Biomass energy generally comes from three sources: wood, waste, and alcohol fuels. Wood energy may be produced from harvested wood as a fuel as well as wood waste streams. Concerning to us, the owners of federal, public forests, is that trees and brush would be harvested from forest lands for the sake of energy production.
Trees can fuel some of our energy needs, but at what cost: wildlife, clean air, and clean water? The fundamental problem with burning wood to generate energy is that it is not always clean nor is it necessarily renewable.
Burning woody material generates air pollution and greenhouse gases not to mention toxic air pollutants such as Mercury. Expensive air pollution controls can reduce these emissions to meet National Ambient Air Quality Standards or better so that burning trees for energy can be cleaner than coal or natural gas. All energy production sources contribute to climate change and air pollution in the production and maintenance of infrastructure, but discounting these sources, only solar and wind are in fact low to zero emissions.
The renewability of forest biomass energy is not as simple a matter. Forests are complex and depending on climate and other local conditions can take hundreds of years to reach maturity. But power plants need fuel now and will eventually outstrip any excess growth and we’ll be mining forests for electricity just as we do coal. Biomass energy facilities require cooling and enormous amounts of water. Depending on where a facility is located, water can be a significant limiting factor.
Public forests are already under an inordinate amount of pressure to produce all things to all people and are recovering from years of severe resource extraction. America’s public forests should not be a source of biomass energy as they are far more valuable for carbon sequestration, oxygen production, clean water, recreation opportunities, and sanctuary for imperiled plants and animals.
While woody biomass production may make some sense for private forestlands and those in agricultural rotation, any legislative effort to promote this questionably efficient energy source must ensure that public lands are not in the mix. The energy legislation of 2007 should focus on biomass energy produced from society’s waste stream, zero waste being the goal and promote existing clean and renewable energy technologies such as solar.
Bryan Bird is public lands director at Forest Guardians a regional, conservation organization that protects and restores wildlife and wildlands in the West.
Comments
Do YOU have a positive suggestion? One that is both fair for current and future generations, equitable to all people of the earth (regardless of socio-economic status and skin color) and easy on the environment? I look forward to your answer.
Wind energy will not work for the places in the south that have no wind, solar power is less effective for thsoe of us who have very short days in the winter, it would be pretty useless in the winter in Alaska for instance.
The only thing that woould actually provide non-fossil energy that we have available now would probably be nuclear.
Just because someone including congress demands that a clean, cheap, pc fuel be available, does not mean that it is possible. Funding research would be far more effective than demands for an ideal that may not exist.