Obama's Climate Plan Could Threaten U.S. Forests

By MICHAEL GRUNWALD

    President Obama’s signature environmental initiative, his Clean Power Plan, is designed to fight climate change and crack down on America’s carbon-emitting power plants. But behind the scenes, a dispute is raging over obscure language that could promote the rapid destruction of America’s carbon-storing forests.
    This highly technical but consequential fight over the Environmental Protection Agency’s approach to “bioenergy”—energy derived from trees, crops, or other plants—has gotten lost in the larger hubbub over the Obama plan’s impact on coal, and the potential upheaval in an electricity sector that will be forced to rein in its greenhouse-gas emissions for the first time. But while the overall plan was hailed by environmentalists and attacked by industry when it was unveiled in draft form last June, the EPA seems to be taking industry’s side on bioenergy.
    A November 19 EPA policy memo suggests that the administration intends to treat electricity produced from most forest and farm products as carbon-free. In an interview with POLITICO this week, an EPA official tried to walk back the memo, calling it a mere “snapshot in time,” emphasizing that no firm decisions will be made until the plan is finalized this summer. But in private meetings with advocates on both sides of the issue, the EPA has indicated that it intends to exempt most biomass from its carbon rules.? (The EPA official requested anonymity to speak about a still unfolding and unfinished rule-making process.)

    This would not be the first time Obama has disappointed conservationists, who are upset about his recent plan to allow some offshore drilling and his general “all-of-the-above” approach to energy, even while they celebrate his disdainful rhetoric about the Keystone pipeline, his new efforts to block drilling in the Arctic, and his continuing support for wind and solar power. But the arcane disagreement over biomass could have an outsized impact on the American landscape. Princeton University researcher Tim Searchinger has calculated that if government electricity forecasts are correct, treating biomass as carbon-neutral would produce a 70 percent increase in the U.S. wood harvest, consuming more than four times as many trees as Americans save through paper recycling programs. If the rest of the world adopts similar rules, the global timber harvest would more than double, he says.
    Carbon regulation was never supposed to produce mass deforestation. “The stakes are so high because producing even a small amount of bioenergy requires cutting down a huge amount of trees,” says Searchinger, a former attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund who has published several papers on bioenergy.
    Searchinger is the lead author of a new World Resources Institute report demonstrating the limited energy potential of biomass, along with the massive potential for destruction that could result from a global embrace of bioenergy. The report concludes that producing just 20 percent of the world’s energy from biomass by 2050, an oft-cited goal, would exhaust 100 percent of the world’s current food and fiber harvest, meaning it would require all the crops we now use for food and all the timber we use for houses and paper. WRI also found that on most of the world’s land, solar panels would produce 100 times more energy than biomass, a testament to the relative inefficiency of photosynthesis.

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