Episode 21: Dogwood Alliance w/Scot Quaranda

Welcome to Audible Café!


Today I’m speaking with Scot Quaranda of the Dogwood
Alliance. From their website: “For over 20 years,
Dogwood Alliance has worked with diverse communities, partner
organizations and decision-makers to protect Southern forests
across 14 states. We do this through community and grassroots
organizing, holding corporations and governments accountable and
working to conserve millions of acres of Southern forests.” And
one of their major campaigns is called “Our Forests
Aren’t Fuel” - taking on the forest biomass industry.


I’ve been looking at the forest biomass issue recently, and I’d
like to bring you a series of shows about it, not only because
burning forest biomass threatens our environment and our health
as much or more than coal or oil, but it is destroying entire
forest ecosystems for the profit of corporations, and for little
to no return to the people who live in these deforested regions,
and who actually pay for the huge profits these corporations make
from it through massive subsidies. And we’re only at the
beginning of this monster - with pending changes to energy
regulations here in Massachusetts, the biomass industry is coming
for OUR HEALTH and OUR FORESTS. Just ask Governor Baker.l


I’m going to try to untangle this complex subject for you, so
that you are in full possession of the facts.


I’m relying on the great work of a lot of people for this show.
Just a few are the Partnership for Policy Integrity or PFPI, the
Dogwood Alliance, The film “Burned: Are Trees the New Coal?”, and
other sources. See below for links


FOREST BIOMASS is fuel derived from the burning
or heating of growing things, like trees and other plants. We’re
discussing the industrial scale forest biomass, not your home
woodstove, although home woodstoves are terribly polluting
despite their cozy appeal.


The fact is, we’re clear-cut logging the forests of the
southeastern United States at an alarming rate for biomass fuel
for export to Europe. The trees being cut down,
processed into pellets, and shipped to Europe, are causing
devastation to the southern states, especially along the Atlantic
coast, and it’s all being touted as “clean” energy, “renewable”
energy, “green” energy. It’s helping governments meet their
carbon goals here and in Europe and the UK, and the entire
industry is based on a lie.


The big lie is that the burning of trees is a clean,
green, sustainable energy solution. Anyone with a
smidgen of common sense would conclude that this couldn’t
possibly be true, and it isn’t. But by some bizarre “accounting
error” — let’s point out this was no error - this was political
and corporate maneuvering to make the logging and biomass
industry a LOT Of money.


Let’s break it down:


The logging companies cut down the trees. How do they get access?
The same way industry vultures got access to coal in the South
and fracking rights across our country — they coerce and bribe
decent people who have no money to speak of to sell the logging
rights to their land. Or they access public forests, like what’s
happening now in Massachusetts - by manipulating the political
power brokers, like Governor Baker, into passing regulations that
favor the cutting of trees for profit. Or they simply buy up the
land and create biomass plantations, turning thriving, diverse
bioregions into moonscapes.


Once the trees are cut down, they are transported to biomass
plants where they are either burned for electricity — a stupid
way to meet our electricity needs if ever there was one — or
processed into pellets for Europe’s energy needs. And no
government is really counting the carbon cost of this process!
Voilà!! A convenient “accounting error” — where no country is
counting the carbon cost of decimating our forests — and they all
get rich.


But how are these industry giants getting rich? Our tax dollars.
There are HUGE subsidies and tax breaks for the biomass
industry. Otherwise, it would not be profitable! But it
is, hugely profitable, and all the costs are borne by the earth
of course, who suffers the most, and by US, the regular folks.


Here are the ways we all suffer: the devastation
of clear-cutting in the first place, which turns a thriving,
living, diverse forest with all the creatures that live there,
into a dead, desolate waste-land. It’s a soul-crushing
experience, to witness the before and after of a clear-cut, and
it should be. Because if a person has an intact heart and soul,
,they know deep in their bones that it is wrong, that it is
horribly, horribly wrong, to perpetrate this kind of violence on
any single living thing, let alone on the millions of living
beings destroyed when a region is clear-cut. The forests that
shelter us, and sustain life, and are living, breathing beings in
their own right. All the biological diversity that lived in those
forests can NEVER be replaced by a pine plantation, a
monoculture. Pine trees are lovely, but they can’t replace
diversity all on their own.


It’s devastating to our health to live anywhere near one
of these biomass plants - and by the way, there is one
planned for Springfield, Mass, on the Palmer Renewable
Energy Corporation (don’t let the name fool you) site,
to be built and operated right in the middle of the ASTHMA
CAPITAL of the United States, Springfield, Mass, and not
coincidentally, in an environmental justice neighborhood, which
means people who live in poverty or are low-income, who have been
disenfranchised of their power to stop such a project because
they don’t make huge contributions to politicians.


So, why is this all allowed to happen? It’s
because people who are in power plot for years, decades even, to
lay the groundwork for their money-making schemes. And they have
plenty of money for schmoozing politicians, dumping thousands to
hundreds of thousands to millions into their campaign chests.
When we say we need to “get money out of politics” that’s what
we’re talking about. GETTING MONEY OUT OF POLITICS so politicians
can think straight and make good decisions. Our elected
representatives are so distracted by having to immediately start
fundraising the minute they take office, pressured by the
political machine of their parties, that of course they can’t
just do their jobs! The entire system is a mess.


So that’s the groundwork for my great interview with Scot
Quaranda, Communications Director for the Dogwood Alliance.


Thanks for listening to Audible Café!
Judy


SHOW RESOURCES


Dogwood Alliance website


Burned: Is Wood the New Coal? a documentary film


About the Palmer Paving Corporation’s proposed biomass plant in
Springfield, Mass:


Arise for Social Justice website


“Scrutiny persists over biomass plant in Springfield.” Daily
Hampshire Gazette. December 31, 2020.


“Mass. Has Strong Rules About Burning Wood For Electricity. In
2021, It Plans To Roll Them Back.” WBUR report. December 22,
2020.


“MA Pushes to Greenlight Subsidies for Polluting Biomass Power
Plants.” Press release from Biomass Energy Subsidies section of
the Partnership for Policy Integrity (PFPI) website, December 22,
2020