Blackmon Hole is a neighborhood of trailers located next to the Drax Biomass production facility. Local residents are fighting a plant that they say is making them sick. Timothy Ivy is a photographer for HuffPost.
When she returned to her hometown last year, Carmella knew something was wrong because she had slept on her grandmother's screened porch to smell the longleaf pines. She had not smoked a cigarette in years, but she was having a harder time breathing.
Her great-grandparents first bought the property where she now lives nearly a century ago, and within months of moving into a small, prefabricated home, she was so dizzy she felt faint. She had to take at least three breaks to catch her breath after Dragging the garbage. Lifting herself into her Nissan pickup became a process, with one leg, a gargled inhale, and a lean, then the other leg. She was hooked up to an oxygen tank and couldn't sleep at night.
She had had breathing problems before. Her doctor had to increase her medication. She said that her inhaler had become her best friend. It became a little too true when her two beloved pugs, Rayray and Tiny, died three weeks apart. The dogs struggled to breathe and died.
People stay sick around here. People with respiratory problems have to use asthma pumps that didn't exist before.
She said that her lungs hurt when she went to bed. I woke up with my lungs hurting. It is horrible.
Drax, a British utility giant, turns tree trunks into wood pellets the size of vitamins, which are shipped to the United Kingdom to be burned in power plants. When the company opened the mill here eight years ago, the tiny town of Gloster became part of the global supply chain for wood-fired electricity. The industry is expected to grow by more than 6 percent this decade.
The Drax plant was the first sign of life since 2002 when the lumber mill closed and left a once-thriving main street a ghost town.
To some, the facility was a curse. Reducing the local forests that once teemed with deer and squirrels meant feeding it. Many in this mostly Black community say it has polluted the air with disease-causing gases without delivering them promised new jobs.
Many residents of Mississippi claim that pollution from the local Drax plant is making them sick. Timothy Ivy is a photographer for HuffPost.
The push to build the Drax mill and feed it with Southern forests is a result of policies meant to stop global warming.
European Union and British regulators decided that emissions from wood-fired power plants would not count the same as pollution from fossil fuel generators, making companies like Drax eligible for billions in subsidies for green energy. The firm received more than $1 billion in clean power subsidies last year.
Seeing how quickly the industry grew off government funding meant to cut emissions, scientists and activists protested to stop its expansion, complaining that the whole thing was built off faulty premises. It was too late because the industry had already put down roots.
In the U.S., federal incentives to build wood-burning power plants are much smaller, and their share of the country's electricity generation has declined over the past seven years. Tax breaks have been given to firms that harvest and process wood to send it across the ocean. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is one of the industry's boosters inside the Biden administration, as well as a spurious new sales pitch promising that new technologies will make it possible to pull more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits.
Mary Booth, an ecologist, said that when the industry claims it is carbon neutral, it is actually saying that there is CO2 coming out of the smokestacks, but it is not in the atmosphere. That is not what is happening. If you burn a tree, it emits carbon. If you grow a tree, it takes up carbon over time.
The facility in Gloster that produces woodchips for the British heating market is owned by Drax. Local residents are at odds with each other over the plant, which some say is making them sick, while others support the economic stability provided to local loggers who sell to the plant. Timothy Ivy is a photographer for HuffPost.
Is wood a climate solution?
Studies show that earlier species of hominids used plant matter for fire. The oil crisis of the 1970s spurred interest in alternatives to fossil fuels, which led to the rise of the modern biomass industry, which burns plants or plant-based synthetic fuels to power generators and produce power.
The wood-fired power sector started to grow in the 21st century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change advised countries to attribute carbon from chopping down trees to the land-use sector, not energy, to avoid double counting. The emissions from wood-burning power plants were not required to be reported as part of the carbon footprint of the country.
Over the years there have been many different justifications for doing so. One of the simpler explanations was that dead trees and scrap wood would emit carbon into the atmosphere, so turning that into fuel would balance out the atmospheric pollution ledger.
It set the stage for creating an accounting convention that would allow some of the richest nations that contributed the most to the cumulative carbon mess in the atmosphere to inflate their green credentials.
Europe has a long-standing view that wood is a renewable resource. The European Union followed a tradition of giving wood-fired power plants the same emissions-free status as wind when it adopted its Renewable Energy Directive. Coal dependent countries like Britain and Germany began subsidizing wood burning.
If you burn a tree, it emits carbon. If you grow a tree, it takes up carbon over time.
This was despite the fact that burning freshly cut wood chips emits between 40% and 60% more carbon per megawatt-hour of electricity than coal. The dried wood pellet produced at the Drax plant is more efficient and emits less emissions when burned.
The closed carbon cycle created when trees grow and take CO2 from the atmosphere is what makes sustainable biomass renewable. The same amount of CO2 is released into the atmosphere if the wood is used for bioenergy or if the trees are naturally decomposing. The cycle is in balance because the forests which supply the low-grade wood are replanted and the trees absorb more carbon.
Critics say that the problem is that cycle's time frame. It takes at least 82 years for a plant to grow regrown forests that will lower their carbon footprint. The best-case scenario is outlined in a peer-reviewed emissions calculator tool created by Natural Resources Canada. The calculator data shows that wood-fired electricity could not close the emissions gap with a natural gas plant after 100 years.
By the time this became clear, it had become clear that the traditional green voting bloc in the EU had been split by the growth of the industrial sector of biomass.
Europe was able to credit its existing wood-burning operations as renewable energy because of the reporting metric.
In recent years, the industry has become more focused on the appeal of renewable energy. Wood-fired plants can run for as long as there is something to burn, providing the reliable baseload electricity we expect from fossil fuels.
The EU embraced wood at the same time the U.S. replaced its coal plants with cheap and abundant natural gas. The opportunity for states to revive the timber industry was presented by this, and they welcomed companies that would feed Europe's growing appetite for pellets.
When it opened eight years ago, the Drax plant was one of the largest pellet mills in the U.S.
Blackmon Hole is a neighborhood of trailers next to the Drax Biomass production facility. Timothy Ivy is a photographer for HuffPost.
You can enjoy it.
The trees behind Blackmon Hole, a small trailer park five minutes from downtown Gloster, were chopped down by Drax when wood pellet exports from the U.S. doubled from the previous year.
Pete, a Blackmon Hole resident who declined to give his last name, sipped a Bud lite and tinkered with a new transmission in an old gray Ford Crown Victoria while he talked. All that noise is coming around.
The maze of towering metal chutes that make up the mill was clanking and humming on that late Wednesday afternoon in early December. A cloud billowed from the smokestack.
Air pollution from wood pellet plants comes from a variety of sources. There is a steady convoy of trucks. The kiln that dries the trees to turn them into wood pellets causes smog and ozone pollution, causes asthma and other lung conditions, and causes itchy eyes and skin. When the hammermills shred trees and the pellets are fully processed, there are additional VOCs sent into the air.
The wood pellet industry and regulators almost never account for pollution in permitting according to a landmark study by the Environmental Integrity Project.
The Drax Biomass production facility has wood chips that litter the roadside. Drax is a multinational woodchip production company that operates a facility in Gloster that produces woodchips for the British heating market. Timothy Ivy is a photographer for HuffPost.
There is a yellow sign in the middle of the gravel driveway that says "Slow: Children Playing". At least half a dozen kids chased each other around the lawn between the trailers after school let out.
Heading up the hill towards the chainlink fence between the homes and the Drax facility takes on a sharp, peppery flavor. It stung the inside of my nostrils. My eyes watered and I sneezed, and my lungs felt heavy like a smoker.
The edge of the park is where Jasmine and her family live.
While standing on the steps of her home one night after returning from work, she said that her children have had allergies since they were born. One of my kids breaks out in the middle of the night.
After 30 years of living here, her neighbor, Shirley Bland, stood several feet away and said she only found a daily layer of residuals on her car once the plant opened.
The 57-year-old grandmother said it must be what they put up in the air. I feel out of breath.
The Environmental Integrity Project found that Drax was emitting more than the company was allowed to emit.
The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality fined Drax $2.5 million and demanded the company install new catalyzing technology to help rid the air of pollution before it enters the atmosphere. An agency spokesman sent a link to the fine, but did not respond to questions about whether Drax had fulfilled the regulators' demands.
Drax said it installed oxidizers in two plants in Louisiana this summer, but declined my request to visit the plant.
The highest fine any wood-pellet plant in the U.S. has incurred was according to the Dogwood Alliance. It is difficult to confirm such penalties because they are not widely publicized. The press release about the fine took months to be put out by the groups that track the industry.
The town-hall meeting was held in June by the organizers from the Dogwood Alliance. Many people complained about breathing and skin problems.
Local officials were not happy with the gathering. In a post on Facebook, Mayor Jerry Norwood warned that if people started making noise, Drax could leave town and take its purchasing power, which helped offset the cost of water, gas and electricity in Gloster.
If a big lawsuit happens and Drax closes its gates, please be prepared for your utility rates to triple.
Erniko Brown is the regional partnership engagement manager of the Dogwood Alliance in North Carolina. Timothy Ivy was photographed for Huffpost.
The warning seems to have made a difference. Four people came to the information session to express their fear about their bills going up.
Malcolm is an environmental justice advocate and pastor in Alabama. I don't like a bully. That is what this is.
The town hall meeting had a higher turnout than the previous one. The campaign against Drax threatened the economic future of the city, according to the mayor.
I have been a resident of the area for all my life. I was born here. Cissy Fenn, a former school teacher, said she didn't want her town to go to dirt.
Brandy Hamilton, one of the Dogwood Alliance's lead organizers, told Fenn to be aware that everyone has high emotions and that her group had no intention of shutting down Drax.
She told Fenn that he had been in the town all his life. I have been black all my life.
The implication that racism had anything to do with the Drax plant was shocking to Fenn. Reggie Fenn said, "Look, we all bleed red."
Hamilton said that all of us have things that make us sensitive.
Cissy Fenn said that it was not a Black and white issue for her. It is survival for us.
Hamilton said it was survival for everyone.
Hamilton was asked where she was from by Doug Iverson, who once ran a mill that turned grain into feed pellets. She said Charlotte, North Carolina. He wondered if the air here could be worse than in a big city.
There was always dust around when he was a kid. I had to clean every piece of furniture once a week.
Hamilton said that he was aware that you weren't dusting the houses in Blackmon Hole.
The argument quickly turned into shouting after the mayor joined in. Reggie Fenn walked out. Brown asked Hamilton to leave and cool off.
The president of the local chapter of the National Association for the advancement of Colored People said he didn't think race was the main issue, but hoped Drax would take additional steps to reduce pollution and help those living in Blackmon Hole.
After the meeting, he said that they could still find common ground. I want to look forward to the future. I think about the children in Blackmon Hole.
Jerry White is the president of the local NAACP and he is helping to organize people who say they were harmed by Drax's pollution. Timothy Ivy was photographed for Huffpost.
Brown stopped Bland's grandson, who was working as a janitor, as he drove his car away from his grandmother's trailer in Blackmon Hole, because he didn't know who he was. He was confronted by Brown about the air pollution.
Bland's grandson said it could be pollen.
Brown gestured to the silhouette of the plant in front of the pink dusk sky and said that this was not a pollen season. We know where it comes from.
Health vs. health Wealth.
Others in the community have tried to get a job at the plant.
Blackmon-Butler, who lives about a mile away from Blackmon Hole, said that she doesn't get a job because she keeps putting in applications. She drives to Baton Rouge for work.
In an interview after the debate at the town hall, the Mayor said that those complaining about the plant were probably unqualified to work there and accused them of trying to extort Drax for money.
He said that the town was uneducated. They were talking about the number of people from the area. How many of them can pass a drug test? To get a job there, you have to be drug tested.
One-fifth of Drax's workforce lives in Gloster.
He said that Drax helped keep the town afloat. The company paid almost half a million dollars to the school district this year, and paid nearly $83,000 for gas, giving the town a surplus that prevented it from raising utility rates when the price of natural gas spiked this fall, the mayor said. Drax did not say how much it pays in utilities, but it did say that its local taxes are about $1 million and that it donates to a number of regional charities.
Why is the narrative always about environmental racism? Norwood, who is black, said that the companies picked the poor town and tried to help. That is the only thing I have seen them do.
He said he has talked to another timber-related company about restarting a mill that closed 19 years ago when Georgia-Pacific left town.
If the reputation of Gloster is that of a place with black-white racial issues, they will say there is no way we are coming down with this foolishness.
Many towns in Mississippi are economically depressed. Timothy Ivy is a photographer for HuffPost.
It is not easy to attract companies to Gloster, a town in one of only two Mississippi counties that does not have four-lane highways to get products to market. The town and county gave Drax a 10-year tax break. Incentives like this are typical for a city to try to lure a corporation, but they end in failure once the credits end.
After the tax deal expires, Drax said it would increase production, but declined to say if it would leave town.
Even if Drax leaves after a few years, they would still help the town.
The company could cause an exodus too. Chiquita Cain moved to Baton Rouge last month because she said the environment left her with constantly irritated skin and made her sick from taking her daughter to an allergy shot every Thursday.
It is itchy all day, every day, according to Cain. She said that she was not alone in her cousin's asthma. My mom has bronchitis. My sister needed to see a neurologist because of her headaches.
Robert Weatherspoon broke into tears as he described how it takes him an hour and a half each morning to clear the mucus from his chest.
He said that you are coughing, like something hanging up there. I thought I would get used to it. I don't think I'm going to make it every morning.
The state of Mississippi fined Drax $2.5 million for releasing more pollution than allowed. Timothy Ivy is a photographer for HuffPost.
Bullish or bearish on negative emissions.
Since peaking in 2015, the amount of electricity Americans generated from wood has fallen. Just over 1% of the U.S. electricity is generated by biomass.
The largest wood-burning power plant in the U.S. opened in Florida and caused a public scandal over costs. The city spent $750 million to buy out the remainder of the Deerhaven Renewable Generating Station contract after it became so controversial that electricity bills quickly rose.
In the U.K., the Drax Power Station, a huge coal- and wood-burning complex in northeastern England, supplies about 7% of the country's electricity with millions of tons of wood.
Drax said this week that it will spend over 53 million dollars on carbon capture machines that will catch and store 8 million metric tons of CO2 per year. The company calls its plant the largest decarbonization project in Europe because it swapped coal-fired production for wood.
The investment news came just a few months after Drax and the U.S. engineering firm Bechtel announced a deal to equip wood-burning power plants across North America with carbon capture technology.
The deals demonstrate Drax's commitment to deliver a vital technology which is needed to address the climate crisis.
He said that it was no longer enough to reduce emissions. If we are to avert this climate crisis, the world has to start removing carbon from the atmosphere.
The third-most viewed power station is Drax Power Station.
The power station is located close to North Yorkshire, England. The third-most polluted power station in Europe is located close to North Yorkshire, England. The third-most polluting power station in Europe is located close to Selby, North Yorkshire, England. The data-credit-link-back is from Edward Crawford/SOPA Images/LightRocket.
Since trees suck up huge amounts of carbon naturally, Drax and others in the industry say that if they equip their plants with technology to capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks and store it underground, it will make them a potential source of negative emissions. As governments set net-zero targets for the amount of carbon they absorb or emit, demand for quantifiable ways to pull carbon from the atmosphere is growing.
The U.N.'s IPCC acknowledged in its most recent report that the concept of bioenergy with carbon capture rests on the premise that bioenergy production is carbon neutral.
Booth said that Drax's claims are "bogus."
She said that burning trees and using CCS can't deliver carbon neutral emissions. It is the same problem. Trees don't grow back quickly.
Drax may be playing for more subsidies. The Forest Defenders Alliance noted in a recent post that Drax's existing subsidies are set to phase out in five years. The company is looking for a new scam to get more money out of the public.
The U.K. government subsidies for power generation and carbon capture after 2027 were proposed in a report commissioned by Drax.
A chart from a recent Natural Resources Defense Council report shows the different ways that biomass power emits carbon even with technology to catch pollution at generating stations.
There are other issues to consider when using wood energy. If the world were to supply 2% of its electricity demand with wood, it would need to double the harvest every year, according to Timothy Searchinger, a senior researcher at Princeton University. The number of trees cut down would need to be doubled to provide 3.5% of America's energy demand.
Other ways to provide negative emissions, such as direct air capture technology or soil management techniques, wouldn't require felling forests that are actively sucking carbon as it is. The proposition was compared to exercise.
He said that if you eat lots of sugar but work out, you could be healthy. If you don't work out and eat lots of sugar, you'll be healthier.
If the cost of capturing carbon with technology comes down, he said, you would be better off burning coal or gas at a power plant than wood, since you would get a lot more energy per unit anyway.
Drax's claims seem to be doubted by investors. S&P dropped the company from its index. Citi's stock was changed from a buy to a hold.
Holly Jean Buck, a researcher at the University at Buffalo who studies negative emissions and decarbonization, said that there are some places where limited biomass energy could be useful, such as in California, where dead trees in the forest need to be cleared to reduce the harmful effects of wildfires.
Buck said the best case was waste biomass. We should think more about using waste streams and less about for-purpose crops that could be used for other things, whether those be lumber to build houses or land dedicated to other things.
If the world were to reduce the amount of land used for agriculture, the tree plantations could only contribute to a negative emissions target. In most countries, old-growth woodlands such as the Amazon or Borneo are being felled to make way for cattle ranches and palm oil plantations.
In a world where we are actively reducing agricultural land, you have a choice as to whether you replant or reforest it. It is entirely speculative, but depending on the assumptions you make, you could potentially get more benefit from the fast-growing plantations.
There are some theoretical scenarios in which this could be useful, but they are too far in the future to be relevant right now.
The second half of the decade will see the fastest growth in the industry. A report published last year found that South Korea was subsidizing plants that were crowding out wind and solar in the power market. Japan is moving ahead with plans to burn palm oil for electricity.
More than 500 scientists wrote a letter to Biden in February of 2021, urging him not to undermine both climate goals and the world's biodiversity by shifting from burning fossil fuels to burning trees.
The letter said that trees are more valuable than dead. To meet future net zero emission goals, your governments should work to preserve and restore forests.
She feels like she can relate.
She said she wanted to live.
She has a lot to live for. She adores her husband and niece. She cares for a horse. She wants to start a charity to help local kids, and she takes elderly women who can't drive to the post office and bank once a week.
She said that she was in bed every night. I am praying and asking God to let me wake up in the morning.
The article was originally on HuffPost.
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