Ahead of a major UN Climate Conference in Glasgow, activists in North Carolina are trying to draw attention to a kind of renewable energy that they say isn’t so green.

... Enviva is the largest wood pellet company in the US, with $684-million in revenue in 2019. According to Enviva’s investor presentation from May 2021, demand for wood pellets has more than doubled since 2012, as power plants around the globe phase out coal in favor of the subsidized biofuel.

... Advocacy groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) have criticized the Sustainable Biomass Program (SBP), which gives sustainability certification to wood pellets — including Enviva's. NRDC says companies like Enviva rely on SBP as "an industry-dominated certification scheme to 'greenwash' their practices as environmentally friendly." The Dogwood Alliance, which has long opposed the wood pellet industry, refers to Enviva's sustainability policy as 'greenwashing.' Enviva disputes these claims.

... A recent study from the British think tank Chatham House found that wood pellet burning in the UK accounted for 13 to 16 million tons of CO2 emissions in 2019.

... Enviva’s director of sustainability, Kim Cesafsky, called that count inaccurate because it differs from the accounting structure used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC’s accounting measures emissions over the course of a century instead, because carbon emitted today will be pulled back into a tree through photosynthesis sometime in the next hundred years. “When you look at biomass energy, you need to look at the lifecycle emissions," she said. "When you burn coal, it's a one-way street.”

... “It's very simple forest economics, says Enviva's Director of Sustainability, Kim Cesafsky. When foresters replant trees at a faster rate than they're cut down due to the economic incentives, "there are no net emissions to the atmosphere. That is not the case with fossil fuels, which is what our product is displacing directly.”