According to Pike Research, the growth of worldwide capital investment in biomass infrastructure will remain steady over the next five years, rising from $28.2 billion annually in 2010 to $33.7 billion by 2016. The major impetus for this expansion is flawed renewable portfolio standards that qualify burning “biomass” as “renewable” and in the same category as other “renewables” that have comparably miniscule pollution footprints, such as wind and solar. These RPS programs, combined with federal laws, make biomass power lucrative. Since Oregon passed its Renewable Portfolio Standard in 2007, Oregon has given subsidy after subsidy for biomass energy. In 2010, the oldest and dirtiest biomass burners in the State,including International Paper, the biggest air polluter in Lane County, were grandfathered in to be able to receive renewable energy credits. Transport subsidies also threaten public forests in more economically vulnerable areas. According to the facility manager, Biomass One in Medford is able to burn whole trees transported 150 miles from public forests near La Pine via a subsidy. Biogreen’s proposed 25–MW facility in La Pine would further tax Eastside public forests. The BLM currently reports that Eastside public forests have already been more heavily harvested than Westside public forests.

Several environmental groups in Oregon, with Oregon Wild in the lead, have promoted plans to increase logging and biomass extraction on public lands in economically vulnerable areas. Sen. Wyden’s Oregon Eastside Forests Restoration, Old Growth Protection, and Jobs Act of 2011 (S.220), although touted as the economic solution for rural Oregon at his recent town hall meeting in Eugene, is regarded by bill opponents as a Democratic version of Republican George Bush’s 2003 Healthy Forest Restoration Act. In its original form, Sen. Wyden’s bill would have tripled logging across 3 million acres of Eastside public forest and cut trees as old as 150 years, and even older trees via loophole language. Despite revisions, Sen. Wyden’s ambition to boost biomass energy production in Oregon ensures a bill that allows more public lands logging and biomass extraction on an unsustainable scale. An environmental and economic justice issue, rural areas face increased clearcutting and water pollution at the benefit of affluent and more politically powerful, more energy-consuming urban areas.

Furthermore, legislation currently proposed by Sen. Wyden and Congressman DeFazio would log more public forest in a historically low market. As forester Roy Keene explains, “When public timber gets sold cheaply on easily extended contracts and the public subsidizes the road work and logging costs, this encourages corporations to further treat public forests as a private commodity. Selling cheaply is why old growth logging persists. Under archaic log grading rules, valuable old trees can be purchased at cull wood prices, chipped, and fed to furnaces.” Biomass extraction is not an alternative to older forest logging, it is, in part, the impetus for it. Seneca timber company, which says it has not ruled out burning whole trees, is still logging public old growth in Eugene’s watershed and in the Elliott State Forest. Biomass burning facilities admit that they burn these “nonmerchantible” whole trees, which they often call “waste,” just as they call mill residue and slash “waste.” Sen. Wyden’s Eastside Act facilitates this form of subsidy by allowing more old growth pine to be logged directly or through loophole language. Another problem with logging in a low market is that it discourages the use of expensive low-impact logging equipment and a large labor force. It encourages the use of cheap, brute equipment and little hand labor, like in the soilhammered Snow Project in the Deschutes National Forest, being touted as a model for Sen. Wyden’s bill.

Keene says, “Just as the spotted owl is an indicator species for what we are losing in Westside forest ecosystems, soil is the indicator of what we are losing in the Eastside forest. It is the unseen soil realm, which makes the most important contributions to health. Impacts from 150 years of heavy grazing and logging are now surfacing as unhealthy watersheds and forest stands. How these soils are treated this coming century may determine the success or failure of both forest and human ecosystems.” On a USFS tour of some of these forests in 2010, agency officials dodged questions about recent soil test results and how more industrial logging would improve soil test results. Keene comments, “When the money dries up, the Forest Service and their contractors will go to the cheapest logging equipment -- skidders and tractors -- with the worst soil impacts. Some sites will not recover for a thousand years.” Note deletion Keene notes that “The private forest, when compared to the public sector, is totally unprotected from liquidation. The private forest is the one that surrounds us, the one our water comes from, a forest already degraded with pre-mature timber harvesting, pesticides, and algae-producing fertilizers. Oregon’s 40-year-old private forest practice rules were designed to protect logging rather than public resources and health. Eighty-five percent of most watersheds can be logged at a time, and trees of any age can be cut. Re-establishing fiber plantations in short-rotation clear-cutting requires increasing amounts of herbicides and fertilizers. Our cities and counties, although impacted by these archaic practices, are legislatively preempted from creating their own protective rules.

Meanwhile, the Oregon State Lands Board is transferring more public land into unprotected private lands. They recently sold several thousand acres of mature and old growth public forest (Common School Fund lands), including about 750 acres in Eugene’s water source, to private timber companies. The Board is now considering selling another 4,920 acres of older public forest in Josephine and Jackson counties. The Western Oregon BLM may decide to follow suit with many times more acres, as privatization is the quickest way to supply sawmills and biomass-burning facilities from public forests.

Often used to justify burning biomass over fossil fuels, biomass burning proponents have called it “carbon-neutral.” However, in June 2010, a study commissioned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts demonstrated that burning biomass over decades puts more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than burning coal, even when considering forest regrowth. At the same time, a large study published by the Environmental Working Group demonstrated that biomass power increases clearcut acreage and atmospheric carbon dioxide and called for government accounting. Scientists, like Searchinger et al. in the Oct. 23, 2009, issue of Science, called the current scale of proposed biomass burning a “carbon bomb.” Recognizing that extraction results in more carbon dioxide emissions than wildfire, Stephen Mitchell and Mark Harmon at Oregon State University, regarding Westside forests, concluded in a study published in Ecological Applications in July 2009: “Fuel reduction treatments should be forgone if forest ecosystems are to provide maximal amelioration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the next 100 years.” Other scientists are questioning the viability of forests as global warming puts more stress on forests already strained by logging. Increasing extraction in already vulnerable forests could push them over a
threshold for irreversible dieoff.

Massachusetts announced in July 2010 that it would put conditions on biomass under its renewable portfolio standard. Under pressure from industry to avoid regulation and scrutiny, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced in January of this year that it would not subject large-scale operations that burn wood debris for electricity or heat to the new permit requirements under the federal Clean Air Act but that it would reconsider after conducting a three-year study of CO2 emissions from such facilities.

Some European countries became reliant on biomass for energy in the 70s. The result is that Europe now imports biomass from forests in the Southeastern U.S. As demonstrated in the Environmental Working Group report, the Eastern U.S. is experiencing the same resource depletion. Similarly, in Washington state, 3 existing facilities have already harvested beyond their 50-mile maximum cost-effective radius, while another 10 such facilities are proposed in the state.

In order to preserve Oregon’s forests, we must cut off the supply of forest trees to large-scale energy facilities from public forests and stop further privatization. Agency proposals and legislation that promote destructive industrial-scale activity should be publicly challenged. We must conserve energy foremost and fund current efficiency technology (e.g. heat pumps), but also subsidize according to a full carbon accounting – this would give the bulk of subsidies to solar and wind, not biomass energy. Finally, to help rural communities, we need to create jobs in the relocalization of food systems that are currently at risk from rising oil prices rather than relying on another round of short-lived boom-and-bust industrial extraction.

Samantha Chirillo, M.S., M.P.A. As co-director of Cascadia’s Ecosystem Advocates, Chirillo, has been a leading figure challenging biomass subsidies and policies as proposed in Oregon and by its Congressional delegation. She participated in a 2010 lobby effort on Capitol Hill with other biomass opponents and recently finished a report for the Biomass Accountability Project on proposed biomass facilities and ‘stimulus’ grants nationwide. Chirillo is currently a member of the Steering Committee of the nationwide Anti-Biomass Incineration, Forest Protection Campaign and is starting a forestry restoration program (forestryrestoration.org) and organizing tours of public forest biomass projects with public interest forester Roy Keene.