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Tag: climate

  • Study: Thinning Forests for Bioenergy Can Worsen Climate

    A new study out of the Geos Insti­tute in Ash­land, Ore­gon con­cludes that selec­tive­ly log­ging or “thin­ning” forests for bioen­er­gy can increase the amount of car­bon diox­ide in the atmos­phere and exac­er­bate cli­mate change. The study, “Thin­ning Com­bined With Bio­mass Ener­gy Pro­duc­tion May Increase, Rather Than Reduce, Green­house Gas Emis­sions,” by D.A. Del­laSala and M. Koop­man, chal­lenges…

  • EXCLUSIVE: Biomass Energy and the Carbon Neutral Shell Game

    - by Brett Leuen­berg­er, July 6, 2015 (Graph­ics by Brett Leuenberger) Who would have ever thought that clean renew­able ener­gy could come from a smoke­stack? And yet, accord­ing to our U.S. gov­ern­ment and the bio­mass indus­try, that’s exact­ly what’s hap­pen­ing when you burn trees (bio­mass) for ener­gy. I don’t know about you, but when it comes…

  • Oregon Senate OK’s Carbon Neutral Biomass Bill

    - April 9, 2015, KTVZ State Sen. Tim Knopp (R- Bend) car­ried Sen­ate Bill 752 on the Sen­ate floor Mon­day and the effort to declare bio­mass “car­bon-neu­tral” sailed through unanimously. SB 752 declares bio­mass to be car­bon neu­tral, tak­ing a rule pre­vi­ous­ly cre­at­ed by the Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Qual­i­ty and mak­ing it law. It is chief…

  • Company to Burn Biomass in Escanaba, Michigan Coal-Fired Plant

    - by Jen­ny Lan­cour, April 3, 2015, Escan­a­ba Dai­ly Press Any­one want­i­ng to express com­ments on a com­pa­ny’s recent pro­pos­al to buy Escan­aba’s pow­er plant can attend a pub­lic hear­ing next week at city hall, accord­ing to city officials. A pub­lic hear­ing on a pur­chase pro­pos­al sub­mit­ted by Ster­ling Ener­gy Group, Inc. will be held dur­ing the…

  • Study: The Dark Side of Forest Carbon Sequestration

    Sci­ence has taught us that humans and trees have a sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion­ship: humans and oth­er liv­ing crea­tures exhale car­bon diox­ide, which trees absorb to pro­duce oxy­gen, which we then breathe. It’s a per­fect cir­cle that main­tains life on Earth as we know it. But a recent study out of Rhode Island’s Miska­ton­ic Uni­ver­si­ty has iden­ti­fied…

  • Citizens Urge EPA and Congress to Choose Public Interest Over Politics on Energy Policy

    - Mike Ewall and Saman­tha Chirillo In Decem­ber, 900 Amer­i­cans, includ­ing 100 orga­ni­za­tions across the U.S. col­lec­tive­ly voiced their con­cerns about major parts of Pres­i­dent Obama’s Clean Pow­er Plan, in com­ments sub­mit­ted to the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency (EPA). Cit­i­zens specif­i­cal­ly asked the EPA to: ·      set more aggres­sive tar­gets and address envi­ron­men­tal justice ·      not encour­age more…

  • Will Energy Storage Plus Solar Inspire Customers to Abandon Utilities?

    - by Lisa Cohn, Feb­ru­ary 28, 2014, Ener­gy Effi­cien­cy Markets To hear the Rocky Moun­tain Insti­tute tell the sto­ry, it’s not a ques­tion of whether util­i­ty cus­tomers will start defect­ing from their util­i­ties in favor of off-grid solu­tions that involve ener­gy stor­age and solar ener­gy. It’s a ques­tion of when. Truth is, it’s already hap­pen­ing in Hawaii—where…

  • Destruction of Demand: How to Shrink Our Energy Footprint

    - by Richard Hein­berg, Novem­ber 4, 2014, Post Car­bon Institute The human econ­o­my is cur­rent­ly too big to be sus­tain­able. We know this because Glob­al Foot­print Net­work, which method­i­cal­ly tracks the rel­e­vant data, informs us that human­i­ty is now using 1.5 Earths’ worth of resources. We can tem­porar­i­ly use resources faster than Earth regen­er­ates them only by…

  • Keep Corporate Polluters at Bay, Please Donate Today!

    Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work is one of the few nation­al non­prof­its in the U.S. orga­niz­ing with grass­roots com­mu­ni­ties to say NO! to all forms of dirty ener­gy, from fracked gas, to coal plants, to bio­mass and waste incin­er­a­tion, to nuclear power. Over 2014, we have raised $89,700 from indi­vid­ual donors, only $10,300 away from our goal of $100,000! Will you…

  • Census Bureau Releases Biomass Incinerator Data

    - by Erin Voegele, Decem­ber 3, 2014, Bio­mass Mag­a­zine   The U.S. Cen­sus Bureau recent­ly released new eco­nom­ic cen­sus sta­tis­tics on renew­able ener­gy, report­ing that rev­enues for elec­tric pow­er gen­er­a­tion indus­tries that use renew­able ener­gy resources increased 49 per­cent from 2007 to 2012, reach­ing $9.8 bil­lion. In 2007, rev­enue was only $6.6 bil­lion. Bio­mass is among the…