“While the biomass bonanza from plants like Covanta’s in California may be dead, byproducts such as biomethane, and other applications such as the utilization of biomass vegetation to create biochar … do show promise in more selective operations.”
Over the years, posts at MasterResource have documented the environmental problems of wood/plant/garbage-generated electricity, as well as opposition from environmental groups. Biomass is “the air pollution renewable.”
Last summer, Kennedy Maize documented the lost luster of government-enabled waste-to-energy power plants, such as the Wheelabrator plant near Baltimore and the Detroit Renewable Energy plant.
“Waste-to-energy had a 15-year heyday, driven in part by the 1978 Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA),” Maize explained. “The law essentially created the non-utility generating industry.” He continued:
…Many local governments had long incinerated garbage to reduce volumes flowing to landfills, but that provoked public opposition due to air pollution.
“It’s never been remotely plausible that [Exxon] did not understand the science.” – Naomi Oreskes (Harvard University), Scientific American, 2015.
“We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury it like they suggest…. [Critics] pull some documents that we made available publicly in the archives and portray them as some kind of bombshell whistle-blower exposé because of the loaded language and the selective use of materials.” – Allan Jeffers (ExxonMobil) Scientific American, 2015.
The conclusion that the physical science of climate change was “settled” or “proven” in favor of crisis is a major history-of-thought fallacy. Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University (quoted above), must make peace with the quotations below from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as many others, to show that ‘settled science’ on the human influence on climate unambiguously pointed toward alarm.…
” … with adaptation, total costs will be much smaller than the headline-grabbing numbers that climate economists and our government agencies choose to highlight, and with future growth our society will be far better equipped to handle them.”
“[If] changes occur gradually (as they are expected to), if they emerge in a world far wealthier and more technologically advanced than today’s (as we expect it to be), and if policymakers ensure that people have the information and incentives to plan well (something over which we have control), then climate change will impose real costs but ones that we should have confidence in our ability to manage.”
– Oren Cass (Manhattan Institute), Testimony, June 11, 2019.
Last summer, Oren Cass of the Manhattan Institute testified before the U.S. House Committee on the Budget on adaptation as a proactive strategy to address climate change.…