FInal Blog Post - Climate Change

Our group’s chosen topic was Climate Chance.  We chose to focus on biomass and its implications as a “green” alternative energy source to coal.  Recent policy decisions in the European Union aimed at mitigating Climate Change have led to some member states scrambling to find a quick alternative to coal.  The solution it seems is wood pellets since they are inexpensive and can be swapped out easily for some of the coal in current power plants without any major retrofitting.  Limited resources, few existing pellet manufacturers and stringent regulation of the lumber industry have steered Europe to look across the Atlantic for help.  The pellet industry in the southeastern United States and Canada were more than willing to oblige and expand.  This resulted in increased jobs in US plants while the EU is able to work towards meeting its self-imposed goal of reducing carbon emissions and mitigating Climate Change.  It seems like a win-win situation.  But, as research shows, it is not that simple.  Although burning biomass such as wood pellets emits far less contagions (in particular carbon) into the atmosphere that is only part of the picture.  It does not incorporate the amount of carbon released in the process of producing and transporting the wood pellets to Europe.  Also not included in the calculus is the amount of carbon sinks eliminated by cutting down old growth forests in order to make the pellets.  Trees act as nature’s filters and containment units for carbon and other greenhouse gases.  Pellet giants such as Enviva claim that they only use waste material from flooring and other manufacturing processes and sick or “unviable” trees in the manufacturing processes.  However there are few, if any, US state regulations which would prevent them from logging old growth forests on their own property.  While many, including a number of environmental organizations, are cheering the EU’s policy decisions as a successful environmental step forward in the fight against Climate Change, wood pellets produced in the Western Hemisphere is not the  magic "green" bullet they were hoping for.

As a group, we realized early in the process of creating our blog that the topic of Climate Change was immense and encompassed vast and varied subject material.  It forced us to focus on one particular aspect of climate change while making a clear connection to Global Politics.  I feel that all of us were in agreement that having a more narrow and specific topic was especially important since we had a small number of members compared to the other blog groups.  Being that my brother works in the petroleum and chemicals industry, I had some prior knowledge of biomass as an alternative energy source and that was somewhat useful in the beginning.  However, it was not until after extensive research utilizing online resources along with print and government sources that I gained a better understanding of what types of biomass are currently being used for energy and the rapidly expanding use of wood pellets.  The staff at the library was extremely helpful and for me Fusion was a great resource in locating articles on the subject.  I appreciate working in a group atmosphere because it affords you the opportunity to explore other people’s views, opinions and learn from their ideas.  I enjoyed working with the members of our group.  I felt each of us brought to the table a unique perspective to the topic and together we were able to cohesively construct our posts.

I was able to absorb a good deal about the “alternative energy” sector in the United States through my research for this blog.  It led to me to think critically about how policy decisions in one part of the world can affect states in another part of the globe.  Climate Change is global in scale – everyone essentially is exposed to the same atmosphere on Earth, so everyone is connected.  Legislation which, on its face, attempts to solve a problem, in this case mitigation of Climate Change, could actually lead to the opposite result than what is intended.  What may be widely accepted as being “green” may actually turn out to be less so when you look at the big picture.  Prior to working on this project I would never have thought this could be possible.  One of the statistics that shocked me the most was that the United States has less than 5% of old growth forest left and that states in the southeastern part of the country are willing to allow corporations who own forested land to use those trees for fuel production.  The amount of published information and analyses was somewhat overwhelming at times, but the constraints of a blog forced me to tailor my contributions to be more concise and digestible.  As for the project itself, creating a blog was a brand new experience for me, and one I look forward to exploring again in the future.