Biomass forum

I'm blogging live from the Pinchot Institute's forum entitled, "Ensuring Forest Sustainability in the Development of Wood Biofuels and Bioenergy: Implications for Federal and State Policies". It's a mouthful, but it's basically a meeting of foresters, academics, and industry people associated with bio energy who are coming together today to discuss the future market of biofuels, specifically forest-based biofuels, under current and upcoming renewable energy legislation.

As with any environmental legislation, interest groups are fighting tooth and nail to either "strengthen" or "weaken" the proposed legislation. Today, the most forceful pushback against an RPS, or renewable portfolio standard, has come from a representative of a large paper company. Many in that industry fear the eroding of their market resulting from the brand new biomass market that would be created by legislation. It is interesting how they frame it, however. Instead of stressing the economic effect of an RPS, they cite the detrimental effects on forest health resulting from the large scale harvesting of wood for biomass as a reason for at least creating an "exit strategy" in the event the legislation overestimated it's potential supply. Bioenergy advocates, those in the heat or electricity industry, argue for a wide definition of biomass to ensure a large and sustainable supply.

On the other side, environmental groups are afraid, echoing strangely the paper companies' argument, that a new biomass market would create such a demand that any benefit to growing renewable energy is negated by the effects of land use conversion, fossil fuel-based transportation requirements, and the ecological loss of healthy forests for single-species plantations. At the Union of Concerned Scientists, we work with many stakeholders - environmental groups, landowners, foresters, government agencies - to craft, or attempt to craft, legislation that meets somewhere in the middle. I'm quickly realizing that there may be no middle ground in this case - there are too many sides and too many arguments for this to be realistically achieved. I do believe there may be a chance to craft a least common denominator-agreement that makes the least number of people angry, but that will take patience and a pragmatic and open-minded approach by all at the table.

I'm also starting to realize, if I hadn't already, that this is not a problem endemic to the biomass sector, or even the environmental one. Effective policy on any level on any topic is never the "perfect" solution, it can only be the best "worst-case" solution.