The Trump administration on Thursday endorsed burning trees and other biomass to produce energy, vowing to promote a practice some scientists have declared more environmentally devastating than coal-fired power.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) joined the departments of Energy and Agriculture in a letter to congressional leaders committing to "encourage the use of biomass as an energy solution." The EPA also reasserted its view that power plants burning trees and other woody materials to generate electricity should be viewed as carbon neutral, because when new trees are grown, they remove carbon dioxide from the air.
The agencies also are committing to collaborate on policies promoting biomass, which could include Energy Department research and encouraging utilities to substitute wood for coal in power plants. EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the move "will support good-paying jobs in rural communities, protect our nation's air quality and remove unnecessary regulatory burdens."
But environmentalists say burning trees releases carbon dioxide previously trapped inside the plant. And when forests are cleared to produce energy, it can take them decades — or longer — to regrow, if they ever do.
The result is a power source that can generate more carbon dioxide emissions than the coal it is sometimes meant to replace.
"When biomass from forests is burned for electricity, it immediately emits CO2 to the atmosphere in amounts equivalent to, and often greater than, fossil fuels," more than six dozen scientists said in a letter Wednesday to Wheeler. "If trees are harvested for use in bioenergy production and then regrown, the combination of the regrowth and displaced fossil fuels can eventually pay off the carbon debt, but that 'payback period' typically ranges from decades to hundreds of years."
The EPA's own science advisers also warned that assuming biomass emissions are carbon neutral "is inconsistent with the underlying science."
Thursday's letter from the federal agencies responds to a provision Congress tucked into a spending bill directing federal agencies to establish policies that "reflect the carbon neutrality of forest biomass for energy production." Even before that directive, under former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, the agency declared in April that it generally considered burning biomass for energy as carbon neutral.
