Protests Grow as Corporate-Backed Biomass Projects Threaten Forests and Communities

“Who will own the forests? Who will own the sky?” sang dozens of umbrella-wielding protesters as rain drizzled outside the World Forestry Center in Portland, Oregon on Sept. 25. Inside the building, timber company representatives, investors and others involved in deciding the fate of forest ecosystems were meeting for an event called CANOPY: Forests + Markets + Society.

Billed as “the premier annual event on institutional forestland investing,” CANOPY is a conference whose 2023 attendees included Weyerhaeuser, Boise Cascades, biomass energy giant Drax and J.P. Morgan. It was formerly called “Who Will Own the Forests?” and has drawn criticism from climate groups concerned about its focus on corporate and investor-led approaches to forest management. Last year, climate activists blockaded entrances to the event’s opening reception for over an hour.

Organizers of the 2024 conference not only changed the name, but erected chain-link fencing around the World Forestry Center to keep out anyone unable to pay the $1,660 registration fee.

“The title of the event has changed, but the conference has not,” Brenna Bell, forest campaign manager for 350-PDX, told the crowd chanting in the rain outside. “At it’s root this is a capitalist event, and the so-called climate solutions being promoted here are Wall Street backed and funded.”

Bell is part of the growing movement to defend forests from industries that hope to turn a profit by investing in carbon-dense ecosystems during the transition away from fossil fuels. Examples include firms involved in the controversial practice of buying forestlands as carbon “offsets,” and those trying to turn trees into “renewable” biomass energy. This last point is especially relevant for West Coast communities.

Global energy companies are currently pushing to build at least four major biomass pellet plants along the West Coast: two in Washington and two in California. The rhetoric they use to describe these projects includes phrases like “carbon neutral” and “renewable energy,” terms also featured prominently at the CANOPY conference.

However, for communities that will bear the brunt of the forest biomass industry’s environmental impacts, the benefits of these types of projects are far less clear than they appear in the rosy picture painted at CANOPY. In fact, up and down the West Coast the burgeoning biomass boom threatens to derail hard-won progress on climate, ecosystem protection and environmental justice.

Burning Forests

Gloria Alonso Cruz had recently started a job as the environmental justice advocacy coordinator for Little Manila Rising, a grassroots organization in South Stockton, California, when she heard that a company called Golden State Natural Resources wanted to build a wood pellet storage and export facility in the community.

“They hadn’t provided many details,” Alonso Cruz said. “But I attended a scoping meeting the company was putting on. All I knew going in was this was a project having to do with vegetation management that would lead to shipments coming through Stockton.”

To Alonso Cruz’s surprise, the virtual meeting was joined by activists from around the world, some as far away as Japan and Australia. Many spoke about negative impacts of the forest biomass industry in their countries.

“That’s how I got a more comprehensive picture of what this industry is and the greenwashing it does,” Alonso Cruz said.

In regions where the biomass industry is well established, like the U.S. South and British Columbia, forests have been denuded as companies like Maryland-based Enviva and U.K.-based Drax turned their wood into pellets. Now, Golden State Natural Resources, or GSNR, wants to build pellet plants in California’s Tuolumne and Lassen Counties.

Together, these plants would have the annual capacity to process almost two million tons of wood from forests in the Sierra Nevadas, where battles over logging have raged between environmental groups and timber companies for more than a century. Both plants would send their pellets to be exported out of the Port of Stockton.

“It would lead to more rail and truck traffic through our community, which already has some of the highest asthma rates in the country,” Alonso Cruz said.

At the other end of GSNR’s supply chain, environmental groups worry about where wood to supply the proposed plants will come from. Biomass companies typically insist they will mainly process “waste” wood like sawdust and slash leftover after logging. This claim is key to the industry’s assertion that it is an environmentally friendly, carbon neutral enterprise — a portrayal that doesn’t match the experience of communities close to where forest biomass companies have set up shop.

“I can guarantee additional logging will happen if this plant is built,” said Nick Joslin of the Mount Shasta Bioregional Ecology Center, which works to protect forests near where the Lassen County plant would be built. “They want high quality, dense wood because that gives them the biggest return on their investment. Their plant will increase logging on nearby national forest lands, and I don’t know anyone familiar with the project who’d say otherwise.”

In 2022, a whistleblower accused biomass company Enviva of turning large, whole trees into pellets in North Carolina, in violation of its own sustainability policies. In 2022, the BBC documented another biomass giant, Drax, sourcing trees for its mills from British Columbian old-growth forest. Drax, which has operated for years in Canada and the South, is also the main backer of a proposed pellet plant in Longview, Washington. Earlier this year, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with GSNR.

“Drax has shown themselves to be a bad actor,” Joslin said. “GSNR wants to portray themselves as a more responsible company, but they don’t have the money to bring these projects to completion on their own. So, they’ve sold out to a multinational corporation that basically does whatever it wants.”

Before any biomass company can break ground on a project in California or elsewhere on the West Coast, it will need a variety of permits from state and local governments entities. Climate, forest and environmental justice groups are already rallying their supporters to engage in this permitting process.

“We’re getting members of the public to submit comments, educating the community and trying to give people a voice on this issue,” said Megan Fiske of Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch, an organization based near Tuolumne County that opposes GSNR’s project there. In Washington State, where the other two West Coast pellet plants would be located, activists are mounting similar efforts.

The grassroots movement against forest biomass taking shape up and down the coast resembles the one that successfully beat back a flood of proposals to export coal, oil and natural gas from the same region last decade. Most of those fossil fuel export projects were eventually stopped, with communities at the points of extraction, transport and export speaking out against their local pollution and global climate impacts. Today, opponents of forest biomass are building similarly diverse coalitions.

In doing so, they are pushing back against an emerging, powerful industry that is endangering forests and action on climate change, even as it claims to be furthering the clean energy transition.

Trees as Energy

An irony of the push to develop forest biomass is that it’s largely a response to policies meant to combat climate change. At industry conferences like CANOPY, turning trees into energy is seen as a way for companies to take advantage of government subsidies for renewables established in European and East Asian countries.

The U.K. is perhaps the most prominent example of a country embracing biomass as a domestic energy source. Biomass is now the U.K.’s second-largest source of renewable energy, meeting 12.9 percent of the country’s electricity needs in 2021. Much of this energy comes from the massive Drax power plant in North Yorkshire, England, which last year finished fully transitioning to burn wood pellets instead of coal. Drax’s shift to wood has helped the U.K. eliminate coal from its energy mix, but at a cost to North American forests.

“This whole idea that we should cut down forests in California, use a lot of energy to send them overseas, burn the wood there, and that somehow this is a win for the climate, just doesn’t make sense,” Joslin said.

Burning trees for energy releases carbon into the atmosphere — more per unit combusted than coal, in fact. Still, biomass companies claim their product is carbon neutral because this CO2 can theoretically be reabsorbed if the trees are allowed to grow back. Even when forests harvested for biomass do regenerate, though, there is a lag time of decades during which heat-trapping gases remain in the atmosphere. This is known as the “carbon payback period,” and it is especially long when mature trees supply the fuel for biomass.

The biomass industry also argues it will remove wood from forests that would otherwise burn during Western states’ increasingly long, dry, fire seasons. However, the science on forest thinning as a means to reduce fire is inconclusive — and to the extent that it results in removing large, whole trees that are relatively fire resistant, it may actually do more harm than good.

“As someone who lives in a fire prone area myself, one of my biggest frustrations with GSNR’s project is it’s wasting time and money without fixing the real problem,” Fiske said. “Meanwhile it’s sending us backward rather than forward in terms of carbon emissions.”

In certain regions of the U.S., such as the Northeast, state laws that classify biomass as clean energy have given rise to a domestic forest biomass industry. However, in most parts of the country the financial incentives to turn forests into energy come mainly from overseas. Biomass companies like Drax and GSNR don’t qualify for major subsidies under U.S. federal law — at least not yet.

Drax competitor Enviva has submitted an application to the U.S. Treasury Department to receive clean energy tax breaks under climate provisions of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Companies aren’t required to disclose publicly if they are applying for these incentives, so it’s unclear how many others in the biomass industry may be doing so. However, recent moves by Drax, such a decision announced last year to establish a North American headquarters in Houston, suggest the company is positioning itself to play a bigger role in the U.S. energy market.

Regardless of whether biomass companies eventually receive additional subsidies for generating “clean” energy in the U.S., the fight over industrialization of forestlands in the name of climate solutions is shaping up to be a major front for the climate movement on the West Coast in the years ahead.

“Now that Drax is involved, they can take advantage of global financing and private equity to support their biomass projects,” Joslin said. “To them, this is just a money-making deal for investors. It’s not about the health of forests or the climate at all.”