Industry goes to court to burn forests for fuel

Does forest destruction count as "renewable energy?"

It does in North Carolina, thanks to a new ruling by the North Carolina Court of Appeals. The court just upheld a state utilities commission decision that Duke Energy could count whole trees burned for energy as renewable biomass under the state's renewable energy standard.    

The Southern Environmental Law Center and the Environmental Defense Fund had appealed the commission's decision, arguing that wood waste products, but certainly not the southeast's diminishing forest lands, should count as a renewable energy source. Duke Energy fought back to defend its ability to not only burn whole trees for energy, but also to get credit for that energy as renewable.  And the Appeals Court judge ended up ruling that:

“Any resource that can be considered a biomass because it is organic and renewable is a biomass resource within the plain meaning of the statute. All wood fuel meets these criteria and thus is a ‘biomass resource’ and a ‘renewable energy resource’."

The North Carolina decision demonstrates the real, on-the-ground danger of incentivizing biomass power without imposing legal and regulatory safeguards to protect our forests from being liquidated under the banner of "renewable" energy. As many of my colleagues consistently point out on this blog, you can grow new trees, but forests are not "renewable." Nor does it put us ahead in the carbon accounting game to burn forests for fuel and disingenuously mark them down as "carbon neutral." 

Learn more about why our forests aren't fuel and what NRDC is doing to protect them here.

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