Monthly Archives: April 2020

Mongabay: As investment giant BlackRock pulls back from coal, NGOs urge the same for biomass energy

Drax coal-fired power station

The four eastern cooling towers at the Drax coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire, United Kingdom. Image: Jono Brennan, CC BY-SA 2.0

This story came to me directly as a result of my coverage of the biomass-for-energy story over the past two years. Biofuelwatch, an environmental group, had organized a global group of NGOs to appeal to the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, to pull its 5 percent stake in the world’s largest energy-generating plant using wood pellets. Millions of tons of pellets are produced annually largely Southeastern US forests.

The underlying goal? If the world is going to dramatically reduce its use of fossil fuels, large investment companies like BlackRock need to divest hundreds of billions of dollars in oil, gas, coal and biomass, and ramp up investment in genuine zero-carbon wind and solar energy.

The company in question is one of I’ve about often; Drax, the United Kingdom’s largest energy provider. I interviewed its CEO at COP25 in Madrid, Spain, in mid-December in a fairly contentious encounter following a presentation in which no questions from the audience were allowed.

Thanks to Mongabay editor Morgan Erikson-Davis for her careful attention to detail. And thanks to my Mongabay colleague Erik Hoffner for arranging for the story to be republished here with the environmental news site Eco-Business.

Those stacks and stacks of tree trunks collected from eastern North Carolina private land and tree farms before being turned into wood pellets bound for the UK? Most were once part of thriving forests and intact, biodiverse ecosystem.