Trash and Biomass Incineration Worse for the Climate than Coal

After bring­ing togeth­er the nation’s grass­roots “No New Coal Plants” net­work in 2006, help­ing stop over 100 coal plant pro­pos­als, we’ve focused back on bio­mass and trash incin­er­a­tors, which are far more pol­lut­ing, expen­sive and worse for the cli­mate. On cli­mate pol­lu­tion, here’s where they fall:

Please note that, espe­cial­ly with the prac­tice of frack­ing, nat­ur­al gas is actu­al­ly worse than coal for glob­al warm­ing, if you count all of the methane leak­age from extrac­tion to pipelines to end uses.  This chart is just for smoke­stack emis­sions, but for the whole pic­ture on glob­al warm­ing pol­lu­tion from gas vs. coal, see: http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/howarth/Marcellus.html

The “bio­genic does­n’t count” (a.k.a. “car­bon neu­tral­i­ty”) argu­ment relies on the assump­tion that the extra pulse of car­bon pol­lu­tion is instant­ly sucked up by trees grown specif­i­cal­ly to off­set the emis­sions from the trees burned. In real­i­ty, it takes cen­turies to become “zero” and about 40 years for bio­mass to become only as bad as coal. That fig­ure, from a study done for the Com­mon­wealth of Mass­a­chu­setts, caused that state to adopt the strictest lim­its on bio­mass incin­er­a­tion in the nation, mak­ing it basi­cal­ly inel­i­gi­ble for renew­able ener­gy cred­its. Stud­ies on this can be found in the links on the right side­bar on our bio­mass page: http://www.energyjusticenetwork.org/biomass/