Biomass is net worse for the environment---affects health, is inefficient, and it increases emissions.

Thick dust has been filling the air and settling on homes in Debra David’s neighborhood of Hamlet, North Carolina, ever since a wood pellet plant started operating nearby in 2019.

The 64-year-old said the pollution is badly affecting the health of the population, which has already been hit hard by Covid.

“More people are having breathing problems and asthma problems than ever before,” David said. She started suffering from asthma for the first time two years ago and other people in Hamlet have been getting nosebleeds, which she also puts down to the dust.

“The older people have it the worst,” she added. “They stay inside most of the time and when they do come out they struggle to breathe. They can’t sit out in their yards like they used to.”

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The plant, owned by Maryland-headquartered Enviva, the world’s largest biomass producer, is one of four the company operates in North Carolina, turning trees into wood pellets, most of which are exported to the UK, Europe and Japan to burn for energy.

Biomass has been promoted as a carbon-neutral energy source by industry, some countries and lawmakers on the basis that the emissions released by burning wood can be offset by the carbon dioxide taken up by trees grown to replace those burned.

Yet there remain serious doubts among many scientists about its carbon-neutral credentials, especially when wood pellets are made by cutting down whole trees, rather than using waste wood products. It can take as much as a century for trees to grow enough to offset the carbon released.

Burning wood for energy is also inefficient – biomass has been found to release more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than coal or gas, according to a 2018 study and an open letter to the EU signed by nearly 800 scientists.

This CO2 is theoretically reabsorbed by new trees, but some scientists suggest relying on biomass could actually end up increasing emissions just at the time when the world needs to sharply reduce emissions and reach goals of becoming net zero by 2050. “During these decades, warming increases and permafrost and glaciers continue to melt, among other permanent forms of climate damage,” said Tim Searchinger, a senior energy and environment research scholar at Princeton.

Over the last decade a wave of biomass plants have opened their doors or ramped up production across the US south, where they have access to the region’s vast hardwood and other wetland forests, many of which are on unprotected private lands.

Campaigners say there is an environmental justice aspect to the industry, too. The plants are 50% more likely to be located in counties where at least 25% of the population is Black and other people of color and where poverty levels are above the state median, according to an analysis by the environmental non-profit Dogwood Alliance. Hamlet, David’s neighborhood, has a poverty rate of nearly 29%, significantly above the state poverty rate of 13.6%.

Still, the biomass industry continues to grow, supported by subsidies especially from the UK as well as the EU, which declared biomass a carbon-neutral energy source in 2009 and is relying on it to help the bloc replace fossil fuel energy and meet climate goals.

At least 22 plants in the south-east are now exporting pellets to Europe, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC). This number is increasing, with permits filed or issued for 12 more plants, according to the SELC.