A new study from public health researchers at Harvard found that as coal emissions decreased in the last decade, fine particle air pollution (PM2.5) from wood, biomass, and gas now cause more deaths than coal.
Other studies have shown that because of our country’s environmental racism, exposure to PM2.5 from power plants in not evenly distributed, and that black people are more exposed than any other group. Wood and biomass plants are disproportionately located in communities of color.
Coal is declining because of market forces, since it is so expensive to operate and maintain coal power plants. Meanwhile, because of subsidies and credits, wood (wood pellets), biomass, and gas have taken some of the market share that coal used to have.
However, wood, biomass, and gas ARE NOT CLEAN. Burning anything produces air pollution. Burning wood and biomass creates a lot of PM2.5 air pollution, and other air pollution not evaluated by this study: volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and nitrogen oxides (NOx). All of this air pollution damages health, from airway inflammation to free radical damage to cancer and numerous health problems. They aggravate and can cause asthma and emphysema. As Paul Billings from the American Lung Association says, “It is a toxic soup of air pollution that is emitted from a biomass burning facility.”
What the study found was:
* Power plants that burned fuel were responsible for about $500-$750 billion in health impacts, and about 45,000-70,000 premature deaths in just 2017 alone. Wood, biomass, and gas caused 33,000-53,000 premature deaths. That’s just one year alone, and just the PM2.5 part of the air pollution they make.
* In 2017, wood and biomass caused more deaths than coal or gas in almost half the states in the U.S. (24 states), and gas caused more deaths than coal in at least 19 states.
* Premature deaths from biomass and wood went from about 15% of premature deaths from stationary sources in 2008, to about 45% in 2017.
* Premature deaths from gas went from about 12% of deaths from stationary sources in 2008, to 21% in 2017.
* This study just looked at the health impacts of PM2.5 from burning fuels – it doesn’t include all the health impacts from any fuel source: other kinds of air pollution, mining and transporting gas, processing wood into wood pellets, processing biomass, clearcutting forests to make wood pellets.
An accounting smoke and mirrors policy from 2009 lets countries say wood is “carbon neutral”. But this is fiction, wood and biomass put more CO2 in the air than coal. It also makes lots of very toxic air pollution.
At Mothers & Others For Clean Air, we say “Healthy Air is Health Care,” and this study shows how much that is true. We need clean, renewable energy, not toxic gas, coal, wood and biomass.
Read the Harvard summary of the article here.
Read the scientific study here.
05/07/21
