Guest View: Biomass Plant May Prevent Fire
By David S. Cohen
from the Mountain View Telegraph, December 6, 2007 [here]
“Mega-fires are torching America as never before, with towering infernos scorching more than 1.5 million acres this year, consuming homes block-by-block, and forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee,” the Chicago Tribune recently reported. “And as numerous large fires barrel over Southern California, experts warn things will likely only get worse, especially across the West.”
Recently, the residents of the East Mountains got a mild taste of what’s to come.
At a time like this, New Mexicans expect forceful and responsible government action, not foot-dragging, in addressing the looming catastrophe. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Sandia District Ranger Cid Morgan recently warned: “Don’t be surprised if we have a large, catastrophic wildfire in the East Mountains.” Given low moisture next year and the great number of dead trees lying at the floor of our overgrown forests, Morgan says “you’re talking explosive conditions, and if we get a fire in there (the Sandias) we will not be able to put it out.”
The Edgewood Independent added more bad news: “… the National Weather Service is now predicting a dry winter and a hot, windy spring— the worst possible conditions for potential wildfires. Add the climate forecasts to the (bug) infestations and you have the makings of a disaster.”
As evidenced by the California fires, the impacts could well be awful: loss of life and property, death of wildlife and habitat, water pollution and enormous plumes of dirty wildfire smoke traveling hundreds of miles, putting human health at grave risk.
Already the Manzano Mountains have suffered. During the Thanksgiving holiday, a fire destroyed 7,500 acres and at least three houses, while 100 families were evacuated from their homes.
So what’s our government’s response?
Important tax credits, which create incentives to clean up forest waste, are being arbitrarily delayed and withheld. The state government, contrary to the direction of the Legislature and the governor, is attempting to deny needed tax incentives on ever-changing, unreasonable and unlawful grounds to biomass projects seeking to clean up the dangerous forest and brush waste, which fuels these wildfires.
This is more than odd. The Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department categorically asserts on its Web site that biomass energy development would reduce the wildfire threat. Yet bureaucrats in this same department would now recklessly make biomass impossible.
Why?
Incredibly, they argue, contrary to accepted rangeland practices, that landowners in the area are not serious about removing brush and cannot be trusted to honor contracts because they are unable to specify every shrub to be picked up under existing multi-year landowner contracts and state Land Office leases. They are in effect implying that locals and the Land Commissioner do not care that the nearby forests are on the verge of explosion.
Evidently, cleaning up these dangerous conditions, while also making practical use of the waste for energy, isn’t a pressing priority. And so, while state government fiddles and attempts to justify its arbitrary decision, life and property are endangered. We deserve better.
News reports from California showed that homes remained untouched where forest thinning programs were implemented, while hundreds of homes were destroyed where it was not. This was also true of the fire that hit the Manzano Mountains.
Biomass opponents
But if certain attitudes toward biomass are a public safety menace, then the attitude of some of our state’s self-labeled environmentalists to air pollution and public health is no better.
The Forest Guardians, a litigious activist organization that calls for “more use of prescribed fires closer to home,” has utterly demonized biomass by grossly exaggerating the impacts of biomass facility air and greenhouse gas emissions and the amount of biomass to be removed. They and certain misguided anti-development status quo East Mountains zealots, and their apparent political and bureaucratic allies, are spearheading the effort to unlawfully derail biomass development in the East Mountains based on junk science and misinformation to the endangerment of the community.
European environmentalists and governments are far more enlightened. Witness the Swedish city of Växjö, winner of this year’s prestigious European Union’s sustainable energy award. According to the London Independent, it was the city’s “(biomass) power plant that has helped the small Swedish city … become arguably the greenest place in Europe. On closer observation, the only thing emerging from the chimneys is the faintest wisp of steam. And inside it smells more like a sauna than a furnace.”
Indeed, rather than harming air quality, the U.S. Renewable Energy Laboratory found that, compared to a biomass facility, open burning of wood— i.e., what the Guardians advocate— puts into the air more than double the nitrogen oxides, more than 1,000 times the particulate matter, 20 times more carbon monoxide, more than 30 times the methane and about 1,000 times more volatile organic compounds. Rather than harming the forests and rangelands, responsible thinning proposed by biomass developers and landowners improves the health of the forests and restores rangelands.
Even the recently mild prescribed fire in the Jemez caused such pollution that the Albuquerque Journal had to warn that “people with asthma or other lung diseases should avoid prolonged exertion outdoors.” The Manzano fire demonstrated the air pollution consequences of wildfires in our midst.
With embers still smoldering in California and New Mexico, with homes destroyed in the Manzano Mountains, with a catastrophic wildfire still on the horizon, this is no time for bureaucratic appeasement of radical groups, but leadership. As things stand now, the fire next time will indeed be catastrophic if nothing is done.
David S. Cohen is a former chairman of the New Mexico Service Commission. a utility lawyer and president of Western Water & Power, the alternative energy company proposing to build a biomass facility south of Estancia.
