Over 50,000 US citizens are appealing to European Commissioners Arias Cañete and Vella for a change in the EU legislation that has caused a boom in the demand for wood pellets produced from Southern US forests. Their demand is today being delivered to the European Commission by BirdLife Europe and the European Environmental Bureau.
The longer forests are allowed to grow, the greater the climate benefit. This basic biological fact has given rise to a number of international programs and policies designed to encourage the protection of forests as carbon sinks. In fact, the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, of which many European nations are signatories, has developed a variety of tools and policy frameworks to encourage greater forest conservation.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has failed to protect the forests, communities and climate with its new proposed framework for regulating biogenic carbon emissions from stationary sources. They have not followed the recommendations of their own Scientific Advisory Board as well as the mounting government and academic research that burning trees for electricity is going to increase Carbon emissions and accelerate climate change.
Early this month, Dogwood Alliance was proud to attend the Environmental Paper Network’s 2014 Fall Steering Committee meeting in Boulder, Colorado. Environmental Paper Network (EPN) began in 2002 as an unlikely alliance of organizations with very diverse approaches to a common problem — addressing the scale of the challenges and opportunities for social justice and conservation presented by the expanding forest, pulp and paper industry. It should come as no surprise that with 15 years of history working to transform the pulp and paper industry in the US South, Dogwood Alliance was one of the founding partners of the EPN.
The biomass industry is one more instance of the corporate greed that concentrates wealth in the top 1% of our society, increasing inequality while ravaging the resources of and giving little in return to the communities that bear the consequences. On Blog Action Day 2014, Dogwood Alliance highlights and applauds the community power and resistance that is growing in opposition to biomass and calls on policy makers and biomass corporate executives to stop destroying our forests and our communities. We call on Enviva to halt destructive practices and invest in solutions that work in partnership with communities and the environment.
