In a February 2024 StarNews article, Gareth McGrath writes, “According to Enviva, the company supports more than 1,800 jobs in mostly rural North Carolina at its four wood pellet production plants and Port of Wilmington facility and has invested more than $675 million in the state.”
To be clear, supporting 1,800 jobs is not the same as employing 1,800 people. Using the word “supports” allows Enviva to include workers in every fast food restaurant, gas station, and truck stop that independent loggers might visit during their rounds. Even the loggers are not Enviva employees. Enviva isn’t paying healthcare, insurance, or any of the other benefits that come with full-time employment.
Enviva’s jobs claim is based on the “ripple effect” that occurs with any industry. As example, someone directly employing five carpenters to build a home, may claim they “support” twenty jobs simply because their carpenters take lunch at a nearby restaurant, visit a hardware store for materials, or get gasoline at a nearby convenience store. And if their crew is from out of town, the homebuilder may claim they support hotel workers. Yes, the ripple effect used in economic impact assessments is true, but it’s a bit like a shell game and easily exaggerated.
Enviva claims it wants to be net zero by 2030. From today until that time, at their current forest destruction rate of 160,000 acres per year, Enviva will have destroyed close to one million acres of natural forests in eastern NC by the year 2030. But the hunger for wood pellets is growing and the future rate of NC forest destruction could double quickly, especially with Asian markets opening to buy our trees and forests; our children’s natural heritage.
“[Enviva] also has repeatedly said it embraces sustainable logging practices.”
Again, “embraces” is not the same as “conducts.” Anyone can say they hold something in mind, like replanting clearcut forests, but Enviva does none of that. It’s easy to assume they replant cut forests, but Enviva does not own any forestland. They buy trees from others. And the cost of replanting the types of forests Enviva gets its wood from is more expensive for the landowner to cover, than the amount of money that owner receives after the loggers have been paid. In fact, the landowner usually receives the least percentage of money paid to all the parties involved in the “ripple effect” that’s ingrained in the timber industry, including the contract forester who draws-up the logging contract that pays the loggers, truckers, and other handlers, whose hands receive payments before the landowner. Kind of like a shell game.
No one is examining the collateral human costs related to wood pellet production, although the StarNews notes in the above-mentioned piece that, “Enviva also has faced environmental justice questions over its logging practices and emissions from pellet production, since many of the company's operations are located in low-income and minority communities.”
Enviva has faced these questions and failed to meaningfully answer them, let alone implement measures that reduce their emissions. Instead of diligently working to minimize harm to politically weak neighbors around Enviva’s strategically placed pellet plants, the pellet industry lobbies state policymakers and regulators to obtain emission permits that allow greater, not lesser emissions. History shows however, that Enviva exceeds their permitted pollution emissions, opting to instead pay the trivial financial fine.
This is like raising the speed limit of a highway where drivers routinely travel above the posted speed limit, thinking the same drivers won’t exceed that elevated speed limit. Highway driving offers insight into the unwillingness of most people to self-regulate; just ask the Highway Patrol.
And then there is the biggest flaw in the whole burning NC trees to electrify Europe scheme: the biofuel industry’s claim that burning whole trees, as Enviva does, to generate electricity is better than burning dirty coal. In their argument, what’s dirty about burning coal are the exhausts produced, including carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas.
In truth, harvesting trees, processing them into pellets, and shipping the pellets more than 5,000 miles across the ocean, is a process that produces more CO2 per kilowatt those pellets provide, than mining, processing, and shipping coal. As an example, the single ship transporting a single load of NC wood pellets from Wilmington, NC to Great Britain, generates more than 5,000 tons of CO2 from burning bunker fuel to power its engines.
If fighting climate change is an objective behind the wood pellet scheme, it is in fact the opposite of what we need to be doing right now, for the benefit of future generations who are already losing hundreds of thousands of natural forest acres per year, for wood pellets, roads, and other land-altering developments.
Again, in truth, we and our children and grandchildren need living forests to remove CO2 already choking our atmosphere.
And, as for the $675 million that Enviva claims to have invested in NC, that money is not theirs. It’s money taken from taxpayers in Britain and here in NC as a corporate subsidy under the guise of supporting renewable energy efforts. In fact, given the manner and rate of forest destruction to generate pellets and the manner and rate of forest regeneration, it is illogical to claim burning mature trees to generate electricity is renewable. The time lag required for young trees to capture CO2 cannot keep pace with the pace of CO2 produced by burning mature trees. This is an biological, ecological, and thermodynamic fact. Hard stop.
Enviva is just a corporate tool for a larger biomass industry that’s based on resource extraction and corporate profit. Sadly, the environmental community at large was originally duped into supporting biofuels as an energy scheme, due to fraudulent CO2 accounting cooked into global climate treaties. And ironically, NC’s State Treasurer was even duped by a so-called renewable energy scheme, as evidenced by his investment in Enviva, now credited with losing more than one million taxpayer dollars by the Treasurer investing our money in an energy scheme regarded as a fraudulent endeavor from its outset
As I’ve shared before, just because a thing has the prefix “eco” or “sustainable” or “bio” or “green,” that doesn’t mean it’s any of them. Those words are marketing terms that support the sale of a product, regardless of that product’s true environmental benefits.
“Sustainable” for example, is a word that implies a future, unpredictable condition. Anyone can claim anything is sustainable in a closed system, but here on earth we live in an open system that receives heat energy from a nearby star. Entropy is our Achilles’ Heel because an open system tends toward disorder, as we see with climate change; disorder, in turn, reduces the sustainability of whatever disorder, entropy, might affect.
This is a helpful read: https://journals.plos.org/sustainabilitytransformation/article?id=10.1371/journal.pstr.0000098
We can hope for sustainable use of resources, but I’m reminded of that infamous line from the movie Men in Black, where the character, Kay, offers, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals….”
Human history bears this out. We brought whales to near extinction merely to light candles, make women’s corsets, and splash perfume. Countless other examples of resource mismanagement identify our species as panicky consumers. Remember hoarding of toilet paper, face masks, and sanitizers at the onset of Covid?
At the risk of seeming cynical, I trust our species can and will cut the last tree to generate one last electron of electricity if that’s what it takes to recharge our smartphone. As the egregious wood pellet to electricity scheme proves, we are that selfish and panicky.
Or am I missing something?