AUDIO:

The following is a rough machine transcript. Click the words to skip to that point in the audio.

TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. Joining me is Climate Attorney at EPIC, Matt Simmons.

So we are joined by Gary Graham Hughes, the America's Program Coordinator for Biofuel Watch and a Humboldt County resident.

HUGHES:

And a Bay Area resident, though I do have my Humboldt County roots. Hi, Tom. Hey, Matt. How's it going?

WHEELER:

Thanks for joining us. And we are also joined by Rita Vaughan Frost, the forest advocate at the Natural Resources Defense.

RITA VAUGHAN FROST:

Hey y'all, how's it going? Happy to be here.

WHEELER:

We are talking about biomass today, the issue of biomass generally, and a new threat that we are seeing from Golden State Natural Resources. So let's let's begin with biomass and why it is a problem, both for our forests and for our climate. So let's start with climate. I'll kick this over to you, Gary. I've seen figures before that suggest that biomass, the burning of material from our forests, is a worse climate polluter than other fossil fuels, burning methane or even coal. Can you talk about why biomass is a problem for our climate?

HUGHES:

in terms of the greenhouse gas emissions, the life cycle analysis, what it means to burn woody material, or to be burning crops. There's an explosion of renewable diesel being consumed on the north coast. Renewable is air quotes type of term. Take a look at the red dye diesel that's being sold at Renner's. You'll notice that they're talking about biomass-based fuels, but it's not woody biomass in that instance. It's mostly soy that's being made into that fuel. So you've opened up the discussion with an amazingly large can of worms.

One of the biggest problems with bioenergy, whether it be woody biomass or biofuels, is that it's characterized as carbon neutral. Ostensibly the process of photosynthesis will draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere when vegetation is being grown, and then when you burn it, ostensibly it doesn't do any damage to the atmosphere because you're just returning the carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. But to understand, this is completely a fabrication of industry. The fact that it permeates now environmental discourse is a big problem, but that is the challenge that we're facing in the fact that burning forest for electricity or burning crops for fuel is being characterized as a climate solution when it isn't, and it's probably making the situation worse faster.

WHEELER:

You were the person who pointed out to me carbon cycles and how this is a problem, how people are always like, well, it's just part of this carbon cycle. How is this bad? Right? Like we're taking something that is sucking out carbon dioxide and we're just putting back out there this closed system as opposed to fossil fuels, which is taking fuels out of the ground that have been safely sequestered away for thousands of years and are now re-releasing the carbon. Can you talk a little bit more about like why the math is skewed and why this isn't a carbon neutral solution?

HUGHES:

With fossil fuels, we're talking about carbon that's locked away for millions of years. But when it comes to forests, we're talking about centuries or millennia. And when we're on that really short rotation forestry model, then we know that the emissions are just staying there in the air because the trees aren't being given enough time to grow. This question of carbon neutrality really is caught up in the Western mindset that we can instantaneously wash away our environmental damage.

And it's been very effective. Industry used it. The timber industry, the fossil fuel industry, they have captured the public's imagination. Biofuel Watch, one of our primary objectives is to educate people about how dangerous this concept of carbon neutrality or the other really popular phrases, net zero, can really be. This is a really important topic, but I want to make sure that we're attentive because Listeners to the Econose report know about biomass energy, but what they might not know about is this emerging threat of Golden State Natural Resources, in particular, Golden State Natural Resources' ongoing partnership now with DRAX, the UK climate villain.

WHEELER:

All right, so Rita, I understand it that you cut your teeth on biomass issues across the country. You are the forest advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. What does biomass mean for forest management and for public lands? And I know, like with Gary, this is an overly broad question.

FROST:

Happy to. I'm really happy to be living on the West Coast now. I live in the Willamette Valley and I work in Washington, Oregon, and California. Since 2015, I actually have mostly worked and lived in the Southeastern United States where I tracked and traced the wood pellet production industry on the ground. Because as Gary was talking about the encroachment of proposals like entities like GS&R, as well as DRAX, to create more industrial scale wood pellet facilities in the West Coast, this industry is actually very well established in the Southeast, which is one of the primary wood baskets of the world.

While I was living and working in the Southeast, tracking and tracing this industry, what we were really trying to figure out is what was the impact to the forest. The industry persists in using language that they are taking waste, residues, unmerchantable trees. It's definitely not how wildlife or the climate view these forests. What you end up seeing is you'll follow logging trucks from the forest back to the facility that are loaded down with whole trees, the entire stem of the trees of various sizes, but of very large trees. In fact, from the very first investigation that was originally done by, I believe, the Wall Street Journal back in 2013, they actually found this industry logging in old growth wetland forests, which in the Southeastern United States, that's some of the best, highest quality forests that you can find when you're considering climate, biodiversity, as well as protection to communities from climate change impact.

Fast forward to today and going to another sourcing region that the industry loves to use up in Canada, British Columbia, the BBC has also found another industrial wood pellet giant, DRAX, sourcing from old growth forests in British Columbia. On the ground, what it looks like is an encroachment into forests where logging is increasing and becoming worse because of the wood pellet production industry. They are taking forests that could or could not be used for other industries, but when they're talking about unmerchantable trees, anything that's slightly crooked or has knots in it, those are still very high value trees when it comes to biodiversity, climate change, things that we're all trying to reassess our values towards forests around. I think that today we need to really reevaluate how we view our forests and what we are trying to get out of our forests, aside from products.

WHEELER:

You talked about pelletization of our forests. Can you explain that a little bit more? And where are these wood pellets ultimately being shipped to and what they're being used for?

FROST:

Yes, absolutely. Wood pellets, we're also referring to it as biomass for shorthand here, but they're being shipped boatload after boatload from the southern United States, from British Columbia over to the United Kingdom and Europe, where they are burned in former coal plants to generate electricity. The reason for this is actually because the European Union created a set of energy policies back in 2010 and then reinforced them in 2020 that incentivized coal power plants to switch them to burning biomass. They took their notions of sustainable forestry and extended that into the energy market. After all, trees grow back, so if you burn it and another tree is grown in its place, it must be renewable.

However, the wood pellet biomass industry has uniformly sent that notion of sustainable up in smoke. As Gary was saying, because no matter how much you're actually using sustainable forestry designations, which as I just described, that is very questionable on the ground, there is still no proxy for carbon emissions. When a tree is cut down to burn electricity, those carbon emissions happen at every step of the way. From the forest, to being put on the truck, to heading to the manufacturing facility, to putting that pellet back in a truck or on a railcar, sent to a port, then placed on a tanker and sent across the ocean to finally be burned. You're stacking up carbon dioxide emissions throughout the entire supply chain. Once it's burned at that smokestack, you put a lot of carbon into the atmosphere right away, trapping heat at precisely the moment that we are desperately needing to be cooling the earth.

WHEELER:

I am often a critic of carbon accounting for the forestry industry and in producing long-lived timber products as I like to call them, things like 2x4s. But at least for a 2x4, you're capturing some carbon in something that's going to stick around for some period of time. You might build a house with it. You might build furniture with it. It's not going to just immediately go up in smoke.

While there are substantial carbon losses associated with timber production, over 50% of that tree is not going to be merchantable. It's not going to be things that are turning to long-lived timber products. At least something is going to stick around and be sequestered in some form. It's not the best form. I'd prefer it to be stored within forests. I feel like I need to have these caveats in there. But with biomass, you're just taking forests and you're slicking them off and you're pretty much instantaneously turning them into carbon emissions.

As Gary said, the time issue here is going to be a problem for us. As we're trying to rapidly decarbonize our economy, as we're trying to rapidly deal with the threat of climate change, we're taking things that were safely sequestered and stored in forests and now we're releasing that carbon into the atmosphere where it's going to do damage for a good amount of time. So it's an issue for our climate.

SIMMONS:

I always find it ironic, here in California, every wildfire season, we get a ton of reporting about the carbon impacts of wildfire, but we know that in a natural wildfire, the majority of the carbon stays in the forest, stays in the burned tree, and then is replenished into the soil. Whereas, in this scenario, where you purposefully transport the entire tree somewhere and burn it up, all of it on purpose, that doesn't get counted as a climate catastrophe the same way a wildfire would. It doesn't make any sense to differentiate the two, right? One is for electricity production, and one is a natural phenomenon.

WHEELER:

Yeah. So here in Humboldt County, we've talked a lot about our local biomass plant, which burns mill waste. So a little bit different of a conversation. And I feel like these international conglomerates of energy companies that are turning their eye like the eye of Sauron onto our forests to figure out the next place to generate energy from, generate money from, hadn't really discovered California until recent. But now we have a new entity and it's an entity clothed, an illusion of government and this veil that this is this above board thing that is looking to radically transform California forests and to create new biomass plants, new pellet plants here in California. Gary, what the heck is the Golden State Natural Resources? What is this entity that is now on the scene here in California?

HUGHES:

Well, Golden State Natural Resources is formally an affiliated entity of what's called the Rural County Representatives of California, which is a not-for-profit organization that is made up of some 40 rural counties in California that include Humboldt County. And actually, Humboldt County has a role on the board in the fact that all of the rural counties that are associated with RCRC are members of RCRC, and they send an ambassador delegate from each county to represent that county. The delegate from Humboldt County is also now on the board of Golden State Natural Resources, appearing on the board in January of 2023. Golden State Natural Resources has existed for some years now.

I first got wind of Golden State Natural Resources in the summer of 2022 because it was in the fall of 2022 that they did the first round of scoping under the California Environmental Quality Act for their proposed project to build two new wood pellet manufacturing facilities here in California, one in Tuolumne County and the other in Lassen County, to manufacture together one million tons of wood pellets every year that would then be shipped through the Port of Stockton to global energy markets. These two wood pellet plants would be the largest wood product manufacturing facilities sited and constructed in California in decades. The port facility in Stockton would require a pretty serious transformation of an important segment of the port, and in moving one million tons of wood pellets through the port, there would be very severe public health and air quality impacts for an already severely overburdened community in Stockton.

This is a really big project. They started in November. They did scoping again a year ago. In June 2023, they've been moving slowly on their CEQA review, but also irregularly. The fact that they had to do scoping twice on this project should raise eyebrows as to how they're fulfilling the letter of bedrock environmental law in California. And what I think should be really flagged for listeners of the EcoNews report is the leadership role that the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors has on this project. Golden State Natural Resources and their public messaging relies very strongly on the fact as they state that their governance is being carried out by elected public officials.

They rely very strongly on the fact that boards of supervisors from these rural counties are the ones who are leading this project. What was really interesting is from the very beginning, our organization, Biofuel Watch, we smelled dracks lurking in the background, and other people super experienced in working around dracks like Rita helped us confirm those suspicions. And then it was February of 2024 that it became public news that Golden State Natural Resources had indeed signed a memorandum of understanding with dracks.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. We are joined by Gary Graham-Hughes, the America's Program Coordinator for Biofuel Watch, and we are also joined by Rita Vaughan Frost. We are talking about biomass today.

HUGHES:

This is where I'm tempted, as much as Biofuel Watch works on Drax every single day, to pass the mic to Rita to hear how Rita describes Drax.

WHEELER:

Yeah, Rita, tell us about.

FROST:

Sure, I'm happy to. Drax is a UK-based company. They have a history of misleading statements. They have been caught sourcing old-growth forest from Canada. They have been accused of environmental racism in the Gulf South of the United States. And on top of all of that, they have been fined millions of dollars for excess release of air pollutants in the states of Mississippi and Louisiana, which should tell us enough if the Departments of Environmental Quality of Mississippi and Louisiana are coming down on a player like Drax.

HUGHES:

To go a little bit further just to recognize that Drax is the operator of the largest power stations in the UK and in particular there is the Drax power station near North Yorkshire and Drax has been heavily subsidized to replace coal with biomass. Drax is the world's biggest burner of biomass and it is the largest singular source of carbon emissions in the entirety of the UK and Drax power group has been growing. They've expanded, not only they're sourcing wood pellets from British Columbia, they have acquired companies that have established wood pellet plants so they are now a wood pellet plant operator in British Columbia. Clearly they own plants and operate in the southeast US and they've also been making inroads trying to establish a plant in Washington state and now they have this memorandum of understanding with Golden State Natural Resources to establish the wood pellet industry in California.

WHEELER:

Drax has deep connections to Great Britain. We obviously are on the wrong side of the continent to have our pellets go to Great Britain. Do we have any understanding of where pellets produced in the great state of California might be burned, Gary?

HUGHES:

We think it's highly likely that DRAX will choose the best market for the wood pellets that if they were to be able to establish this industry, and we're committed to seeing that DRAX doesn't get a foothold in California, to be clear to listeners that we're fighting the entry of DRAX to California, but depending on market forces, they could potentially ship wood pellets all the way to their power station in the UK or look for market opportunities in Japan in particular, South Korea, other emerging Asian biomass markets. They're already selling wood pellets from their BC operations to Japan. They're definitely a global player. They're very sophisticated in terms of their public relations machine, and they've successfully secured billions of pounds of support from the UK government over the years, being able to sell the government on the supposed renewable essence of their project.

WHEELER:

I could try to steel man the argument for, for Golden State Natural Resources, and then have one of you describe why this is not true, because Gary, as you said, they have a very sophisticated PR campaign. And I think that it could be easy for folks who are afraid of forest fires, who think that we need to have increased management of our public lands here in California. They might be hoodwinked into thinking that this is a good thing for the state. So Rita, you can respond to my argument here.

We obviously have a wildfire crisis here in California every summer. The fires seem to be getting worse and people are living with the pollution from wildfire and it is impacting our forests, including the loss of old growth. So we need to do more in our forests. And one of the problems is, is that if we're just relying on commercial timber, we're not going to be able to remove a sufficient amount of those trees to really make an impact on fire behavior. In particular, we need to engage in some work that has historically not produced profit, where there's not a market for these very small diameter trees, which are causing so much of our fires.

In addition, we also have so much forest biomass that is burned in dead forests that need to be regenerated. And so we need to go in and we need to salvage log them to create a healthier forest and conditions and new markets like biomass are going to be able to help invest in good forest management in California. All right. That is, I think, roughly the argument that they make to the public about the benefit add in jobs and other things as well, because jobs are always going to be a great argument for Lawson County. Rita, what is wrong with this argument or where are the logical flaws here?

FROST:

Yeah, of course. So let's dig into this, because this is, at least in California and in the West, this is really the heart of the issue. We all need to be incredibly sensitive in the West, that over a century of fire suppression and Indigenous displacement has left many forests in the state that people are calling and referring to as unhealthy. When it comes to vegetation management, which is quickly where the conversations go, because we see forests burning, and we see communities that are around forests burning, we talk about vegetation management. The experts are telling us that vegetation management can make fires slower, and it can buy a little bit of time for defense. And serving those functions, though, is really only relevant if it's adjacent to an asset that we're trying to protect. There is no management trend that shows that we are going to be able to control all wildfires.

The forests of the West Coast, they evolved alongside fire. They are meant to be in a fire-prone landscape. That is why we have the forest that we have today. So what matters is where we conduct vegetation management, when we do it, and how often we keep up with it. As you were saying, you know, it's pretty expensive. It can be pricey. I would say that the urgency of responding to communities losing their homes, their livelihoods, and sometimes even their lives calls for a serious investment in that protection. If reducing home loss, then, is our goal, these same experts are telling us that the condition of vegetation more than 60 to 100 feet away from the home has nothing to do with the ignitability or likelihood a home will burn. The best, most durable investments to reduce home loss are focused on home hardening in at-risk communities using proven firewise technology.

The difference with Golden State Natural Resources is that their proposal doesn't have this degree of specificity. Rather, they are proposing to cut and remove trees of any type and any size within a 100-mile radius of each facility. That means every single national forest in California, as well as forests in Nevada and Oregon, are susceptible to this proposal. The mills and the infrastructure of GS&R are going to cost them, their investors, their debtors, hundreds of millions of dollars. They have a drive to recoup those costs. This means that they're going to do what is most economical rather than what is most ecological. We'll end up in a situation where the tail is wagging the dog. GS&R's demand could shift economic incentives away from forest management based on the best available science, including regimes informed by traditional cultural practices that incorporate prescribed and cultural burning, towards management based on maximizing logging trees for industrial wood pellets.

While we need to be addressing the risk of destructive wildfires, we need to be very wary of false solutions like GS&R's proposal, which doesn't consider forest land restoration or climate-oriented wildfire prevention for communities.

WHEELER:

All right.

FROST:

All right.

WHEELER:

Rita, I think you nailed that out of the park. Wow, what a great answer. But I was aggressively shaking my head yes at many points of your answer.

SIMMONS:

Well, can I just add one thing? So we at EPIC have seen so many examples of past forest restoration or thinning projects that happened decades past. And then no follow-up work is done to ensure that that condition is maintained in the forest, right? Because we're trying to cover too large of an area to actually make those lasting changes. And so it's exactly what you said, Rita, which is, this is, it's a beast that needs to be fed constantly, right? And so it's always going to be, they're taking too much, they're not thinking about it holistically. They're not thinking about it at the minute, like place-based level that you really need to, in order to have good fire defense and safety.

WHEELER:

Speaking of the beast needs to feed itself, one of my fears with something like this is that we worsen forest conditions to feed the beast. So one of the reasons why we have this wildfire crisis in the West is plantations. We logged the native forests that were fire adapted because of millennia of fire on the landscape, and we replaced them with monocultural stands that were overly stocked and too dense, and we never have historically well treated these. And so we have a vast degree of the landscape, which is just in this anomalous condition that is putting the rest of the forest at higher risk because we have these areas of super extreme fire risk.

And what are we going to do if we commodify the forest further? We're going to continue to treat it as a crop. We're going to do more of this sort of management. We're incentivizing bad forest management through commodification of biomass. Gary, I want to turn to you because you raised this earlier, and this is an important part of the picture, and I am so glad that you're focused on this, the impacts to communities in Stockton and along the way from projects like these that are going to continue to worsen environmental conditions for these urban residents. Can you tell me about the Stockton connection to GS&R?

HUGHES:

Certainly. It starts in Richmond, actually. When GSNR did their first round of scoping in the fall of 2022, they actually suggested that they would look at exporting wood pellets through either Richmond or Stockton. And they preferred Richmond because Richmond, California, there in San Francisco Bay actually has a deep water port. But Richmond is also one of the most active environmental justice communities in the state, if not the world.

It was in February that myself and Shea Wolfe from the Center for Biological Diversity were invited to make a presentation to the Richmond City Council about Golden State Natural Resources and what the project implicated. Because Golden State Natural Resources did not even approach Richmond during scoping. They didn't even do basic outreach. The City Council of Richmond didn't even have to make a decision because the operator of the Levin Terminal there saw the writing on the wall that there was going to be fierce environmental justice opposition to Richmond being host to a wood pellet export scheme. And they pulled their collaboration with Golden State Natural Resources from the table.

So now Golden State Natural Resources is explicitly focused on Stockton. Stockton, as we said earlier, is overburdened with pollution. It's really a crisis situation with all of the recent development of the warehouses for Amazon and others. Stockton's under a lot of pressure. But Golden State Natural Resources is insisting on developing their wood pellet export facility there. What makes this really interesting for Humboldt County listeners is to ask why literally the Board of Supervisors, the Humboldt County in a formal sense, promoting a project that the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors would most likely not welcome on Humboldt Bay. We see the draft environmental impact report on the horizon. People in Stockton are getting organized to be able to respond to this draft EIR when it comes. When it comes out, Humboldt County, the Board of Supervisors, are going to be the owners of this DEIR because they are represented in the highest levels of leadership of the Golden State Natural Resources project.

So I think this question of why Stockton is having to put so much energy into resisting a dirty energy project that Humboldt County would most likely reject right off of the bat is a really important moral and ethical question that needs to be considered as we head towards the release of the DEIR and politically, in particular, how the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors are going to handle this situation.

FROST:

Natural Resources Defense Council is lining up alongside our partners in California, locally and across the state to make sure to be prepared for this Draft Environmental Impact Report once it comes out. We've all been sitting on our heels waiting for it, as we've been told a number of deadlines that GSNR has missed for this Draft Environmental Impact Report, but most recently we have been told that it's going to be released this summer. Once it's released, we hope to analyze it and also make sure that we open up comment for the public to get involved. It's going to be a cumbersome document. I think that that's something that can't be understated.

There are multiple parts of this project. It's going to have two facilities, one export facility, there is transportation all up and down across the state. There are going to be forest impacts, climate impacts, community impacts, and people being aware of that in California and being able to raise their voices to let the entity know how they feel about it is really important and critical. Please keep a watch for Natural Resources Defense Council, for our partners such as Gary at Biofuel Watch, for any communications we put out on Golden State Natural Resources. We would love for you all to get involved.

HUGHES:

So I definitely want to recognize the fact that there's some local Humboldt organizations that have already leaned into this. 350 Humboldt, EPIC has been involved, and then also the North Coast Environmental Center by hosting a show like this, but also I've published a couple of articles in the EcoNews on specifically this issue, Golden State Natural Resources and DRAC. So this is an opportunity for grassroots activists and Humboldt too to get involved with an issue that goes on beyond just the local dynamics around energy and climate, which are intense as they are, but this is not one that people can put their heads in the sand about.

WHEELER:

All right. Well, when there are more updates, we'll be sure to have Gary and Rita and other voices from across California back on the show to talk about what's going on. Gary and Rita, thank you so much for joining the Econews Report.

HUGHES:

Thanks, Tom.

WHEELER:

Thank y'all. Thank you, Rita. Join us again next week on this channel for more environmental news from the North Coast, California.