David Boraks, a talented environmental reporter for WFAE-Charlotte, the second-largest public radio station in North Carolina (reaching lots of South Carolina), contacted me in December after my Mongabay story regarding the Enviva whistleblower. He, too, has covered Enviva and its impact on communities and the environment in the poor counties where it operates, four out of 10 of which are in North Carolina.
David invited me to join him in a detailed discussion on the popular noontime news program Charlotte Talks. We discussed the wood pellet industry, its impact on the Southeastern US and the policies overseas that enable this controversial energy source to keep proliferating.
As Derb Carter, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center, told Boraks: “What’s happening in North Carolina is the forests are being cut and exported to Europe. None of that is used to produce anything benefiting North Carolina in any way. And you’re losing that carbon storage in the forest.”
Logged trees for biomass in Bischofsheim, Germany. Image by 7C0 via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Thisstory describes the final revisions to a multi-year process in the European Union that led to a largely status quo rendering of the European Union’s Renewable Energy Directive, especially as it applies to burning forest biomass for energy and heat as a means of reducing coal burning.
Before the debates in Brussels even got started in earnest in 2021, hoped was raised in Madrid, Spain, at the end of the United Nations climate summit, COP25, when Frans Timmermans, the Dutch politician who is the EU’s top environmental minister, answered a question of mine regarding biomass energy and whether not counting emissions at the smokestack was skewing emission-reduction accounting. Timmmermans’ response — that it was time to take a close look at regulations regarding biomass because new science had emerged — sent a wave of hope through European forest advocates.
If Timmermans was willing to follow the science, they reasoned, certainly changes were possible that would protect native forests, reduce or eliminate subsidies for purchasing wood pellets, and most importantly, reverse the science-challenged definition of woody biomass as a renewable energy source equal to zero-carbon wind and solar. Australia made this definition change policy in December 2022.
After two years of intense lobbying, special documentaries, investigative reporting, overwhelming public opposition, letters signed by hundreds of EU scientists and clear evidence that exchanging coal for wood is not only adding to deforestation globally but adding to emissions as well, the changes in the third iteration of RED are minimal — at best. My story explains the details. This quote captures the alarm and disappointment:
“The revised RED is not based on advancing scientific or even pragmatic insights as we fought and hoped for years,” Fenna Swart, a forest advocate with The Netherlands’ Clean Air Committee, told Mongabay. “It is only a political solution for key stakeholders… for an unsolved global problem.” Stakeholders who benefit, she said, include northern European member states with large harvestable forests such as Sweden and Finland, and the forestry and energy industries.
As I witnessed during a reporting trip to the North Carolina coast in November 2022, native forests are falling at a constant and growing rate to enable Marylond-based Enviva, the world’s largest maker of wood pellets, to meet accelerating demand for wood pellets in Europe, the United Kingdom and Asia — all because of deeply flawed national policies at the worst possible time in the climate crisis. Deforestation in harvest areas of North Carolina is estimated at 6 percent a year and will only increase an Enviva’s wood pellet production doubles by 2027. This photo of mine is of Enviva’s smallest plant in Ahoskie, NC.
Two weeks before this photo was taken in Edenton, North Carolina, a small town in the state’s coastal plain, this 52-acre site was a densely wooded, biodiverse forest. It was clear cut in part to feed Enviva’s nonstop, bottomless demand for trees for wood pellets in the US Southeast. Enviva says this is a climate-friendly solution to energy production; the world’s top forest ecologists argue otherwise.
This story — the first of its kind ever written about the global biomass industry — started with an email in spring 2022 forwarded to me through the Mongabay web site. A well-placed source at Enviva, the world’s largest producer of wood pellets for industral-scale energy, wanted to talk. “I’m sick of the lies,” he wrote.
Over the course of the next several months, the source and I spoke many times at length. He shared with me his unique and powerful insider view of a company that claims one set of principles and priorities to the public, to regulators and to investors when it comes to wood harvests, and by all appearances, largely does the opposite.
To verify much of what this source was telling me over the summer and fall, I traveled to Edenton in eastern North Carolina in November 2022 with my friend and colleague Bobby Amoroso to observe a clear cut taking place on 52 acres of city-owned land. There I witnessed illustrations of Enviva’s apparent double talk about sustainable wood harvesting.
With the expert production work of Sandy Watt in London, we produced this YouTube video to summarize and complement my exclusive report for Mongabay.
The reporting for this story was extensive. It was also full, fair and thorough. I spent nearly 30 minutes on the phone with an Enviva communications staffer and explained to her, in detail, the story I was preparing and the reporting I had completed. Enviva chose to respond in writing. But I went further. I researched Enviva’s web site to show the message it puts out to the public. I interviewed an independent forester who believes, on balance, that Enviva is replacing demand for wood in eastern North Carolina, not increasing demand. I ignored allegations made against the company that I could not adequately verify to my own professionals standards. And I also made compelling use of a new study by the Southern Environmental Law Center that for the first time quantifies Enviva’s growing impact on forest cover within the wide harvest area of three wood-pellet mills in eastern NC and southern Virginia.
Why is this story important? Intact forests are the best and most effective planetary means we have of slowing the rate of global warming and mitigating the impact of climate change. The second-most important thing we can do is reduce carbon emissions from energy production. Science shows that the global biomass industry undermines both of these vital goals, and it will only get worse as pellet demand continues to grow in the UK, EU and Asia.
If you are new to the issue of biomass for energy and the controversy that has surrounded this growing industry for a decade, I encourage you to read this story and watch the video. A special thanks to Gizmodo for reporting on my story and Yahoo News for spreading it farther and wider. And thanks also to the Pulitzer Center in Washington, D.C., which has sponsored some previous wood pellet reporting of mine, for including this story and others in its December newsletter.
Mongabay also had my story translated into German. That link is here.
As I was preparing my exclusive whistleblower story, a commentary was released in the journal Nature that sought to weigh in on the late-stage negotiations in the European Union on its Renewable Energy Directive (RED) as it applied to biomass harvest and burning. The headline pretty much summed up the message: EU climate plan boosts bioenergy but sacrifices carbon storage storage and biodiversity.
I interviewed the lead author, Tim Searchinger of Princeton, sought comments from sources in The Netherlands and Germany regarding the state of the negotiations, got one German member of parliament to answer a few questions without attribution, and layered in context regarding European politics and bioenergy industry lobbying.
The result: this story that updates readers on the state of RED negotiations and the latest scientific arguments for limiting biomass harvest and burning, and eliminating billions in subsidies. A reference to my whistleblower story fit into the story as well.
Forest advocates in Europe, led by Fenna Swart and Maarten Visschers of The Netherlands, have lobbied against the growing use of biomass across the continent for several years now. They’ve been joined by a host of NGOs from the United Kingdom to the Baltic states, all raising public opposition to wood-burning-for-energy-and-heat. Citizen petitions have been signed by the hundreds of thousands.
Collectively, though, their efforts, combined with forest ecologists using their science to speak up as well, hasn’t made a dent in European Union biomass policy. This story explains, however, that among the Environment Committee of the European Parliament, there is a now majority of members who have been persuaded enough to recommend unprecedented policy changes to biomass usage under the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive, RED.
As I note in my story, forest advocates are cautiously optimistic and highly skeptical. Another parliament committee can derail the recommendations. The Russian war with Ukraine, and the rush to stop the flow of Russian fossil fuels to Europe, complicates matters. And the most influential climate politician in the EU, Frans Timmersmans of The Netherlands, still backs biomass as the primary way for the EU to stop burning coal, as it is legally mandated to do. A final decision is expected in September 2022.
Torbjørn Gjefsen of Rainforest Foundation Norway, writing in my notebook, makes sure the spelling of Joseph Itongwa’s name and tribal association are correct for my story. Joseph spoke French through a remarkable interpreter who was on the phone he is holding.
A few days before leaving for Glasgow and COP26, I had a Zoom call with Torbjørn Gjefsen of Rainforest Foundation Norway in Oslo. We spoke at length about the issues he and his group are most focused on: promoting and supporting indigenous rights in tropical countries around the world. He wanted me to do a story from the climate summit; he was pushing on an open door. Here’s why I was eager to write this story.
In September 2018, I covered the Climate Action Summit in San Francisco organized by then California Gov. Jerry Brown and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Mongabay wanted me there primary to write about an issue then largely underreported and little recognized: that if tropical countries were serious about preventing deforestation and meeting their carbon reduction pledges under the Paris Agreement, they had no better means of doing both than by returning land tenure and civil rights back to the Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLC) who have occupied the land, as one tribal leader told me, “since time immemorial.”
Years of meticulous scientific research comparing places where rights had been returned to those where IPLCs were still largely marginalized demonstrated the impact of doing the right thing by nature and humanity.
In Glasgow, during my first two days on site at the Scottish Events Center at the end of the summit’s first week, Torbjørn arranged for me to interview, through translators, Indigenous leaders from Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia. It was an honor to talk with each one of them and share their stories at a summit where for the first time their presence was met with praise, recognition and billions in funding for the important role they can play in their home countries in climate mitigation.
As my story explains, the momentum tribal leaders felt in Glasgow will only translate into action if the leaders of those countries allow it. DRC? Yes. Brazil and Indonesia? Not until there are regime changes.
I wrote my second story for COP26, the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, while I was still in North Carolina. The first two days of the summit were attended by heads of state from around the world, eager to show some kind of eagerness toward climate action. The result here was the Glasgow Declaration on Forests and Land Use, signed by the U.S as well as more than 100 other countries. The goal — eliminating deforestation by 2030.
This declaration dovetailed well with my first story, which highlighted the importance of nature-based solutions in fighting climate change, and how deforestation was undermining nature’s ability to sequester carbon and provide the ecosystems services it has always provided to slow the rate of warming.
Backed by $19 billion in funding to assist in reducing deforestation and promoting Indigenous land tenure, it even sounds pretty good. As I wrote: The Glasgow signees, the declaration says, “emphasize the critical and interdependent roles of forests of all types, biodiversity and sustainable land use in enabling the world to meet its sustainable development goals; to help achieve a balance between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and removal by sinks; to adapt to climate change; and to maintain other ecosystem services.”
But it’s what’s not in the declaration that not only weakens it, but according to a variety of my sources, implicitly encourages logging forests for timber and pellets so long as they are replaced with what is usually monoculture tree plantations that lack biodiversity, sequester little carbon and are harvested on a regular cycle. My story looks at both the positive and suspect aspects of a declaration whose primary goal is truly needed.
In preparation for covering my seventh United Nations climate summit, I spoke at length with my editors Glenn Scherer and Willie Shubert about the stories on which I should be focused — especially the first story that sets the scene for COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland. Here’s the story. Here’s how we arrived at it: given the amount of reporting I’ve done on deforestation in both tropical and boreal forests, I looked into how the land sector was holding up as a natural sponge for greenhouse gases, which slow the rate of global warming.
In doing so, I was reminded of a scientist I met in Bonn, Germany, at COP23, Bronson Griscom, who had just published a landmark study in PNAS about how “nature-based solutions,” if enhanced, could significantly boost carbon sequestration, which when coupled with dramatically reduced usage of fossil fuels for energy and heat, could help nations meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to hold temperature rise to 1.5 degree C from pre-industrial times.
Four year later, it turns out (spoiler alert) we can no longer take for granted that nature will provide the natural buffer she’s been providing in a range of ecosystem services. We agreed that that should be my COP26 opener, especially as it related to Article 5 of the Paris Agreement, which in the first time in an international agreement, called for the protection and enhancements of forests as carbon sinks and reservoirs. I was fortunate to, among other scientists, interview Griscom for the story.
This story linked here is one I originally imagined reporting from Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The Canadian province seems intent allowing the last of its majestic, irreplaceable old-growth forests be taken by the timber and pellet industries — aside from perhaps the Great Bear Rainforest on the central coast. But Covid restrictions locked the border between the US and Canada in late July (2021), so I shifted my focus to Washington state and Olympic National Park for my first field reporting since summer 2019.
My idea was simple — tour a coastal, old-growth rainforest with a forest ecologist and discuss why such rare ecosystems are important to harboring vast biodiversity, cleansing air and watersheds, and storing more carbon per hectare than the rainforests of the tropics. A good source and expert, Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at Wild Heritage: Earth Island Institute, agreed to fly up from Oregon to meet me on the Upper Peninsula of Washington state, just a few miles across the sound from British Columbia.
I also wanted a video, linked here, to complement my story. My my editor Glenn Scherer approved a budget for me to hire Seattle-based Ted Grudowski, a friend of my Greensboro neighbor and documentarian Michael Frierson (lucky connections all around). Ted is an award-winning environmental videographer and knows the Olympic National Park inside out. He was as much as a fixer in helping me map a plan for where to report from as he was an expert videographer in capturing my hike with DellaSala, and later, a key interview with John Talberth, an expert Pacific Northwest forest conversation. The multimedia package came together exactly as I hoped it would, with a special assist from Mongabay video producers Manon Verchot in India, Lucia Torres in Spain and Lisa Golden in Great Britain.
Here’s an excerpt:
“As humans endure one of the worst summers ever punctuated by climate catastrophes around the world, and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases its most dire report yet, I’ve invited DellaSala, past president of the Society of Conservation Biology, to join me on this hike to discuss the value of old-growth forests.
“What’s at stake in protecting much of what’s left? How can government policy on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border do more to preserve old-growth, perhaps the most effective means we have of slowing the alarming rate of global warming — letting tall, old trees grow taller and older in large, fully intact ecosystems?”
This story was months in the making. Glenn Scherer, my editor at Mongabay, and I had been discussing a story that took a step back from the breaking news around climate policy and rising biomass consumption to look at the science behind the issue. Since last spring, I researched and printed out peer-reviewed studies with diverging outcomes and read them closely. The biomass industry can point to scores of research that supports its claim that wood pellets are good for forests and a genuine climate solution, while forest advocates can pile up even more research that explains just how big a mistake the Kyoto Protocol made when it classified all bioenergy as renewable and carbon neutral.
Because there are so many points of difference, the biggest challenge in this story was narrowing the scope of issues to compare, knowing full well that in a 2,000-word story, important issues would not make it into this story. Still, I kept my focus on the issues industry officials tend to use the most in defending themselves against their growing chorus of critics.
This particular story is as balanced as fairness allows. By that I mean, it is fair in clearly explaining the industry arguments and citing the studies that back their claims, while making sure to be accurate in the overall thrust of the story in terms of the impact woody biomass is having on — to pick just one issue — the accuracy of carbon-emissions accounting.
This is among the more important stories I’ve done on this issue since I started covering it in 2018. Hopefully, it will serve as a trustworthy resource for new reporters coming to this story and heavily lobbied policymakers trying to figure out who and what to believe when it comes to energy generation and actual climate mitigation.