A recent report from the Senate Environment and Public Works committee detailed how the EPAs new backdoor regulations will cause a shocking job loss – nearly a million jobs. In their quest “green” the nation, the EPA is steamrolling over American industries – cement, steel and coal, among others – with unrealistic standards and impossibly complex regulations, threatening thousands upon thousands of jobs, not just in the industries themselves, but in the surrounding communities that depend heavily on the industries’ welfare.
But the effects of the EPA’s new regulations – especially the new “Tailoring Rule” which puts caps on greenhouse gas emissions by American companies – aren’t simply taking their toll on the EPA’s traditional targets. In Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon and elsewhere, the EPA is set to strangle the biomass industry – and cost America thousands of green jobs.
That’s right – green jobs.
In Maine, where unemployment is at a tough 8 percent:
Just a few short months before a contentious election that has many Democrats fighting for survival, the EPA made final a job-killing mandate that will stall development of biomass energy plants from coast to coast. Under the EPA’s scheme, carbon-neutral power generated by sawdust, wood chips and other forestry byproducts will be subjected to the same costly permits and red tape as the country’s oldest coal-burning factories…Maine’s forestry industry, which depends on biomass power production, employs 51,600 people and pumps $1.5 billion into local economies. Plus, more than 21,000 homes in the state get their power from 30 renewable biomass energy producers.
The effects are similar across the northeast and Pacific northwest, where biomass is a primary source of energy, and a primary source of employment. States like New Hampshire and Massachusetts are understandably worried, especially since biomass plants are set to open up all over the country, adding about 100 jobs per plant.
But here’s the real trick. Biomass is carbon neutral. According to Thomas McCain, a professor of wood science at Oregon, state, the carbon dioxide that is released in the process of getting energy from biomass doesn’t increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere at all. It’s part of the natural “biogenic” carbon cycle that happens as trees absorb CO2 in their youth and release it as they decay; it’s totally different from the carbon released by burning fossil fuels, which just adds carbon to the atmosphere as it burns carbon long buried underground, separate from a sustainable biological system. Of course the damaging results could be more than economic: states that depend on biomass can’t turn to unproven green industries like solar or wind to satisfy their need, so they may end up returning to burning fossil fuels.
The bottom line: biomass jobs are the kinds of carbon netural energy jobs that the Obama administration claims to want to create but the EPA is choosing, instead to shut the industries down. Other green indutries who can’t live up to the EPA changing and evolving environmental standards will have to watch out. It’s not just the same industries they’re out to get anymore.