1

Bad Business

Click here for PDF

Bad Business: RCC Report Reveals Failing Future for Wood Pellet Industry

The Rachel Carson Council’s latest report, Bad Business, takes a detailed look at the money behind the wood pellet industry that is clear-cutting America’s forests and producing pollution and climate change. In this powerful sequel to Clear Cut, the RCC’s widely praised exposé of the damage and injustices caused by wood pellet production, Bad Business shows that the growing, but little understood, woody biomass energy industry is propped up by mistaken counting rules and a host of subsidies, credits, and tax incentives. Woody biomass energy also burdens rate and taxpayers with additional costs through its destruction of natural forests that filter the air and water, prevent run-off and flooding, and absorb greenhouse gases.

Bad Business decisively describes how wood pellet production is neither renewable, carbon neutral, nor cost competitive through a close comparison with truly renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

This breakthrough report concludes with a series of carefully designed policies and actions that citizens, policy makers and investors alike can take in order to move toward a just, sustainable future and put an end to an energy source that is destroying forests, communities and the planet.