This is chapter 1 of my book, A Natural Language, which exposes the environmental narrative as propaganda and puts bottom-up solutions in front of the actual problem.
Towards the edge of Garysburg, North Carolina, is an industrial facility that generates truck traffic so intense that you can spot the ballet of vehicles on satellite imagery. It is sandwiched between two clusters of mostly treeless lots characteristic of low income neighborhoods in America, a few industrial farm fields, a few wooded areas, and two nearby solar farms. It is operated by Enviva, the world’s leading wood pellet producer.
Wood pellet mills do not make good neighbors. They produce incessant beating and humming noises on top of the incessant truck traffic noises. This disturbs the locals all day long and robs them from their sleep at night. The real issue though is the dust. A logging truck does thousands of times more damage to a road than a sedan does. It generates hazardous dust in that process. So do truck tires and brakes that shed toxic dust and microplastics. Diesel exhaust adds more carcinogenic dust to the mix. Wood dust, a health hazard that can cause a long list of issues ranging from asthma to cancer, then flies all over the place as workers unload the cargo. And to top this all, the wood pellet mill itself creates a cloud of wood dust as it pulverizes and compresses wood waste into pellets. A wood dust cloud is flammable and explosive, too, so these facilities are a fire hazard for neighboring settlements.
These environmental issues are annoying enough that wood pellet operators tend to build mills next to low income communities that live near private woodlands. The Black Belt of the American South, which is an agricultural tract best known for its past of ethnic cleansing and slavery, has no shortage of such places. It gets its name as much for the slavery as for the coastal waters during the Cretaceous era that created a band of dark, rich soil. To the north west of the band are rolling hills with erosion prone slopes where you’re better off growing trees. To the south east are lowlands with poor drainage or outright swampy conditions where you’re also better off growing trees. In between are a band of rich farmlands that you can see from space. You can also see it on county-based electoral maps. Low income communities in this area tend to be of color, and that is why many wood pellets are near such communities.
The environmental injustice argument gets thrown at wood pellet mills for this reason, but it never sticks. One reason is that wood pellets are just one of many wood related facilities that come with living near forests. Wood pellet mills are horrifying for those who live near them, no doubt. So are dusty sawmills and stinky paper mills. Facilities get fines from time to time for not respecting air pollution standards. They create jobs for locals, which is nice to have in a low income community. Enviva’s website, in fact, trumpets that it is “committed to empowering the communities” around their mills for this reason. The pun is very well put. Locals get jobs. Forest owners get extra revenue. Politicians get campaign contributions. Wood pellet users get green energy.
Enviva’s involvement in local communities is typical of modern corporations. Corporate emissaries show up in communities to extend a strategic partnership. The deal is that the locals will get jobs. They don’t pay much, but would-be workers have little choice because they lack the land to provide for their own subsistence. These jobs usually come with strings attached. One is that the corporation will pollute a sacrificial area or destroy the environment — in this case both. Another is that the community must extend lavish gifts to show its gratitude. Enviva, for instance, gets $360k per year according to a mid-2021 piece by journalist Majlie de Puy Kamp. It created 62 full-time jobs in Northampton County in return. This is on top of 120 acres of land to manage, and half a million to cover infrastructure investments. This being a low income county, local property taxes had to rise to pay for this largesse. Between federal, state, and local aid, Enviva has pocketed a sweet $7 million in subsidies since 2013 according to the same reporting. Workers are effectively subsidizing jobs that destroy the area they live in, while corporate owners and execs reward enablers and soak up the profits. This is typical and of course legal. Such is how corporate America works.
Enviva may even epitomize what a model corporation looks like. Its website splash screen opens with a bold mission statement: “Displace Coal. Grow More Trees. Fight Climate Change.” Cliché web 2.0 marketing follows. Enviva brags that World Finance, a corporate gossip outlet, crowned it “most sustainable biomass company” in 2021. The leadership team looks full of well meaning people. They seem to believe in saving the world by burning trees, like the coal miners in West Virginia who took pride in powering America. A video narrated by the CEO sports an Enviva flag beneath an American flag, an inclusive workforce with bright smiles that happily marches to work, and a cheeky testimonial that thanks Enviva for sponsoring firefighting equipment. This is an astute move given the fire hazard. This is corporate America at its best, with its symbols of goodness, outpours of generosity, and towering crosses for converts to worship. The trouble is that burning wood pellets for energy invites no shortage of criticism.
Wood pellet makers are keenly aware that the optics of fighting climate change by burning trees are bizarre. They explain that they only use waste from wood harvesting and processing operations. The latter would get burnt or oxidize as it decomposes anyway. Wood pellet makers make a few exceptions for trees that are dead, diseased, or misshaped. Those could arguably have stayed where they were, but it’s just a few trees and loggers want clear fields to plant new saplings in. No healthy whole trees get turned into pellets, pellet makers explain, because the latter couldn’t be considered renewable energy. The idea is to not end up burning trees that sucked carbon out of the atmosphere for decades or centuries. Pesky activists and journalists have reported trees outside of wood pellet mills that would have not looked out of place at a paper mill. The industry refers to such incidents as past mistakes.
Wood pellet makers invite their critics to look at the bigger picture. At any point in time, they explain, you have fields of saplings, young trees, and more mature trees. You want to look at things from a carbon stock perspective with a rotational harvest cycle. New saplings replace mature trees as loggers harvest the latter. Saplings mature until they’re harvested too. As long as the total surface area of forest is the same (or growing), we are told, the overall stored carbon is more or less the same (or growing) in the end. This line of thought stems from forestry math, an intriguing discipline that defines a forest as anything with trees on it. It catalogs such places and then sticks to tracking land use changes only. A field full of tree stumps, for instance, is a forest.
Forestry math shares many traits with economics, a no less intriguing discipline that confuses people with wallets. The two share an obsession with stocks and flows that is inescapable. One fetishizes forest cover and carbon storage, even if the forest is a lifeless tree plantation. The other fetishizes economic activity and wealth accumulation, even if these activities pollute the air, water, and soils. Both use static diagrams with steady growth intertwined with external shocks. This is to simplify more realistic but complex dynamic systems that would sport internal feedback loops. It eliminates the need to understand and solve differential equations, but leads to reductionist models that are out of touch when reality hits. Such is how discontinuities tied to stock market crashes or debt bubbles interrupt steady economic growth in models. Such is also how discontinuities tied to droughts, wildfires, pests, or unusual weather interrupt steady forestry-related carbon stock growth. These events should all caution us about tracking forest-related carbon stocks based on land use changes only. They should also prompt us to wonder how external these shocks actually are — a point that we’ll get into later.
The way that forestry math makes arguments derived from economic reasoning hints at a further tie between the two disciplines. Enviva, for instance, claimed to journalist Michael Grunwald that “the more markets there are for forests, the more forests people grow.” Loggers doubling down on cutting trees during a climate crisis is a good thing, it appears. Ignore for a moment that those trees could have soaked up carbon dioxide for decades or centuries instead of getting burnt. (A lot of logged trees get burnt as firewood.) Taken at face value, the forestry math checks out. It tells us that the amount of forested areas is growing, therefore we are storing more carbon. However, it ignores that we are cutting (mature) trees and planting (puny) saplings. It ignores how, on the ground, it’s all a net loss until the saplings mature. It ignores how it’ll remain a net loss if saplings die from a drought or a forest fire. It also makes the implicit assumption that you grow trees from scratch over bare soil, with no carbon ramifications tied to soil or wildlife, when in reality a prairie stores lots of carbon. This economic argument seems implausible at best.
If anything, an economic argument would point to maximizing profits by shortening the tree harvesting cycle. To wit, Grunwald observed that “one frequent refrain in North Carolina forestry is that rotations are getting shorter. Tree farmers are cutting saw timber after 30 instead of 40 years, and sometimes even harvesting pulpwood after 15 years instead of thinning their forests and waiting for higher-value harvests. It’s not clear how much Enviva’s demand for pulpwood is contributing to that trend, but it helps shift the financial calculus toward cutting down trees before they maximize their carbon storage.” Forestry math says nothing about the decades of sucking carbon out of the atmosphere that go missing in this process, but you can bet that it’s a significant amount if you aggregate the shorter cycles across the planet.
If you take the economic argument to its logical conclusion, you could even suggest growing trees on a short coppice cycle for wood pellets only. That, incidentally, is precisely what the International Energy Association (IEA) recommended doing in a 2021 report. Its findings were tailor-made to make climate change activists celebrate. The IEA had finally shown a path to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 without investing into new fossil fuel developments. Or so climate opinion leaders explained with great fanfare. Climate social media lit up in celebration. This was to the dismay of indigenous rights activists. The IEA’s plan, the latter noted, would involve putting a land mass of about the size of India on a short coppice cycle. The plan, in other words, is not only full of shoddy forestry math, but also has neocolonial land grabbing written all over it. Perhaps a climate expert will innocuously suggest that we sacrifice areas that will soon sport inhospitable wet bulb temperatures. India is such a place, incidentally.
Summary | Next: Tree Plantations.