Climate alarmists in Louisiana received a double dose of bad news recently: the producer of a renewable energy source about which they have qualms disclosed to the state that last year it violated pollution regulations. Meanwhile, taxpayers are ponying up for this despite that this activity makes little difference in the needless scrubbing of carbon from the atmosphere.
Drax Global, whose North American operations are based in Monroe, earlier this year informed state regulators that it had exceeded considerably prohibited emissions limits in 2023, after already confessing and paying a fine for a similar violation in 2022 and also in Mississippi in 2020, where it also registered a violation in 2023 with the penalty as yet undetermined. In the latest incident, its Morehouse BioEnergy LLC and LaSalle BioEnergy LLC emitted high rates of probable carcinogens acetaldehyde and formaldehyde with a total of more than 38 tons per year of toxic or hazardous air pollutants emitted from each site.
Whether these will cause health problems for nearby residents, a claim made in the Mississippi cases but as yet unverified, is unknown. For its part, Drax proactively reported the violations and in other ways tries to benefit nearby communities besides job provision often in areas with higher unemployment and poverty, as well as practicing corporate philanthropy in Monroe and other areas and allying with Louisiana State University to support sustainable forestry.
But alarmist critics paint a different picture of Drax, as basically a hustler mopping up tax breaks to engage in an activity they claim that doesn’t even help stave off catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, if not makes matters worse. Its main business has been renewable energy through biomass, specifically harvesting wood and making it into wood pellets to burn as fuel. Many alarmists fault this for releasing more carbon into the air than it takes out, through cutting down trees that serve as carbon sinks even as it reduces reliance on fossil fuels.
In the U.S. at least they need not concern themselves about the releasing part, for Drax’s American facilities only fashion the pellets, then it ships these to Europe for burning. However, in the past year Drax has moved into another anti-carbon strategy, which would include facilities at the Louisiana plants, that many alarmists love to hate, carbon capture that Louisiana recently has stepped up its involvement in through policies encouraging it and its regulation. Alarmists dislike this because, in their eyes, this excuses use of fossil fuels, while clear-eyed climate analysts question the enormous costs involved.
But the irony of it all is that Louisiana taxpayers, locally through tax abatements and nationally through tax credits provided by Democrat Pres. Joe Biden Administration legislation and regulation (cited by Drax in its new focus on carbon capture), end up subsidizing this activity despite this kind of policy having no appreciable impact on reducing atmospheric carbon. That’s the conclusion reached by a recent study, building on others in the past, which determined almost no public policy, including tax breaks, designed to accomplish this actually works, with one exception: coercive taxation.
All of this provides yet more demonstration of the folly that is “green” energy policy. You have a renewable producer polluting regardless, using a business model that doesn’t cleanse the air as intended, using enormously wasteful subsidization policies that have no impact anyway. Junk science aside that alleges human activity has more than a tiny significant impact, if even negative, on climate, the marketplace unchanneled by government coercion should be left alone to decide provision of renewable energy.
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