Drax pursues tax breaks & subsidies as
annual general meeting provokes fresh criticism from communities,
scientists, and activists around the world
WASHINGTON,
April 25,
2024 /PRNewswire/ -- As Drax stakeholders gather
for the giant biomass company's annual general meeting on
April 25 in London, community leaders, scientists, and
activists on both sides of the Atlantic are calling for an end to
the logging, wood-pellet making, and burning that is harming
communities and forests in the U.S. and Canada, polluting the air in Europe and Asia, and contributing to climate change that
affects the entire planet.
Adding insult to injury: from Washington to Westminster, government policies have helped
spur the fast growth of the wood-pellet energy industry, and fresh
incentives are being considered. According to Drax's 2023 annual
report, the company burned almost six million tonnes of wood and
received hundreds of millions of pounds worth of subsidies from the
British Government.
Environmental Justice
Drax sources much of the wood burned at its giant power station
in North Yorkshire, England, from
the American South, where wood pellet plants are disproportionately
located in lower-income communities of color. Neighbors say the
airborne wood dust and pollution are causing health problems, noise
disturbs the usual peace of rural living, and industrial-scale
logging robs communities of flood protection and other forest
benefits.
To make sure Drax stakeholders know what the wood pellet biomass
industry is doing to Southern communities, community
representatives from Mississippi
are coming to London for Drax's
annual meeting.
"We're on a local-to-global mission bringing the same dire
warnings of the harms to human health that we deliver within our
own country," said Kathy Egland, an
environmental advocate with the NAACP. "Our message is the same
whether we're speaking to the U.S. government as it considers tax
breaks, or to the manufacturers that supply the wood pellets, or to
the U.K., whose great demand for wood pellets is enabled by massive
government subsidies."
"We want both the U.S. and the U.K. to hear our pleas to stop
burning wood for energy. Transitioning to bioenergy is simply not
clean, safe, or carbon neutral," Egland added. "The manufacturing
process of grinding our forests into wood pellets releases highly
toxic pollution that disproportionately affects poor, Black, Brown,
and Indigenous communities. We're sacrificing people for profit at
our planet's expense."
Drax has been fined for breaking pollution rules at
wood-pellet mills in Mississippi
and Louisiana.
"Drax's wood pellet facilities release harmful pollution that
can cause respiratory infections and asthma in nearby communities,
which are often communities of color that are already overburdened
with industrial pollution," said Heather
Hillaker, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law
Center. "Even worse, Drax has a long record of exceeding air
pollution permit limits, racking up more than $5 million in fines since 2020. Drax's violations
make these already-dirty facilities even more dangerous."
CO2 Emissions
Drax claims to be leading the way to a zero-emission economy.
But the Drax biomass plant in North
Yorkshire, which burns wood pellets sourced from the U.S.
and Canada, is the single largest
carbon dioxide emitter in Britain's power sector — even as it collects
hundreds of millions of pounds annually for providing "renewable"
energy. The U.K. government is engaged in a consultation to decide
whether to extend these subsidies.
Another carbon cost comes from the fact that cutting down
forests releases carbon from trees and soil. Drax claims this
carbon is reabsorbed as forests grow back, but scientists say it
doesn't work that way: the new trees absorb only a small fraction
of what mature forests absorb, and it takes decades for new growth
to catch up – decades we don't have when it comes to curbing
climate change.
"With its global reach and continuing drive for government
support, Drax is becoming one of the world's most dangerous forest
destroyers. And still, the company tries to frame its efforts as
climate-friendly and good for the environment," said Adam Colette
of Dogwood Alliance. "The truth is that turning forests into tiny
wood pellets and shipping them overseas to be burned to make
electricity is bad for our forests, communities, and climate."
Ecosystem Effects
Researchers, the BBC and the CBC have all found that in
Canada's British Columbia, Drax is directly sourcing
from primary forests – dense, ecologically important forests that
have never been logged and that capture and store enormous amounts
of carbon.
"Forest-burning biomass industry giant Drax is still sourcing
wood from primary forests in British
Columbia on a massive scale," said Richard Robertson, forest campaigner at
Stand.earth. "This degrades critical, high-carbon forests in
Canada, weakening one of our best
defenses against climate change, and releases vast carbon stocks.
Burning forests for electricity has no place in a renewable energy
future."
Carbon Capture and Storage
Drax is betting big on an expensive and largely
unproven technology called Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and
Storage, or BECCS. The company wants to try to capture carbon
emissions from wood-pellet-burning plants and store it underground.
But while forests are proven to capture and store carbon at a grand
scale all around the world, BECCS has struggled to expand beyond a
handful of demonstration and limited-purpose projects for economic
reasons, and there are questions about whether the technology will
ever work as advertised.
In the U.S., Drax has created a BECCS team headquartered in
Houston and is looking at multiple
potential sites. Drax is believed to be seeking federal tax breaks
under the Inflation Reduction Act for new BECCS facilities in the
South.
The British government is considering subsidizing Drax's BECCS
efforts and the company has just asked for stop-gap funding to give
it more time to develop the technology, which many experts believe
may never be viable.
"Drax's claims about BECCS are at best optimistic, and at worst
downright deceitful," said Katy
Brown, bioenergy campaigner with Biofuelwatch UK. "Every
large-scale coal and gas power plant equipped with carbon capture
and storage has failed to meet its target for carbon capture
performance, so it makes no sense to assume it will suddenly work
for Drax's wood-pellet-burning power station."
"Believing in this madness allows fossil fuel burning to
continue in the false expectation that emissions will be captured
in the future," Brown said. "It encourages the continued burning of
millions of tons of imported wood, devastating forests and harming
biodiversity and local communities. BECCS diverts money and
attention from genuine climate solutions that are proven effective
and are ready for deployment, including wind and solar energy and
energy efficiency."
"Time and time again, our polling tells us that British
politicians don't believe in bioenergy and the public don't trust
the bioenergy industry and don't want to be propping up its profits
through their energy bills," said Matt
Williams, senior forest advocate for the Natural Resources
Defense Council in the U.K. "Forest damage and pollution of
Southern communities in the U.S. are the last thing that the UK's
low-carbon subsidies should be spent on."
Drax Looks West
Drax, which already has 18 wood pellet plants in the U.S. and
Canada, is now eyeing California and Washington state as part of its efforts to
double its supply of pellets to Japan. Air pollution regulators with
jurisdiction over Drax's proposed wood pellet factory in
Longview, Washington, say the
company has already broken its rules by starting construction
before an air discharge permit was issued.
"After logging unsustainably in the South and western
Canada, Drax wants to 'expand its
fiber basket' by building a new facility that uses trees from the
Pacific Northwest," said Brenna Bell, forest climate manager
for 350PDX. "We know that Drax has been a bad neighbor to
communities and forests where similar plants are located, and so we
are taking a strong stand to keep this new facility out of
Washington. And Drax is lending us
a hand by flagrantly displaying its disregard for local permits and
rules."
In California, Drax recently
announced an agreement with Golden State Natural Resources, which
is proposing one site in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada
Mountains and another in the far northeastern corner of the state.
The company's plans call for producing one million tons of wood
pellets sourced from areas encompassing multiple National Forests,
and exporting the pellets from the environmental justice community
of Stockton, California.
"Golden State Natural Resources' proposal of industrial-scale
wood pellet production for overseas energy generation is a complete
boondoggle that will undermine resilience against climate-driven
wildfires," said Rita Vaughan Frost,
forest advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "This is
a dangerous misuse of valuable time and resources that are needed
for real solutions. Destructive wildfire is something we must
address — but not by harming California's vulnerable communities and
forests."
"Our community is in danger. If California buys into the GSNR scheme,
South Stockton will get hit with
even more harmful pollution, noise and traffic," said Gloria
Alonso Cruz, environmental justice coordinator at Little Manila
Rising. "We are already overburdened with severe health risks from
existing toxic air pollution. South
Stockton understands the lasting trauma and sacrifices of
the past, and we rise in opposition to this project because we
deserve development that values our health, well-being, and is
non-emissive. We deserve to not be treated as a sacrifice
zone."
"By joining forces with the California timber beasts from yesteryear, Drax
is fanning the flames of wildfire hysteria in California while aggressively selling a false
narrative about biomass as a global climate solution,"
said Gary Hughes, Americas program coordinator with
Biofuelwatch. "Drax shareholders must recognize the abundant
evidence exposing how their company is putting forests and
communities around the world on the chopping block."
Media Contacts:
Carina Daniels
carina@storyandreach.com
Scot Quaranda
scot@dogwoodalliance.org
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content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/stop-subsidizing-draxs-forest-destruction-environmental-injustices-and-climate-damage-say-dogwood-alliance-and-other-environmental-groups-302127665.html
SOURCE Dogwood Alliance