The witless malfeasance for climate & air quality related destruction of our environment extends beyond our aging reptilian local elected officials–it goes all the way to the top…including President Obama. Sucking up to the robber barons seeking to privatize the very air we breathe has become politically fashionable in much of the nation, though not in Mason County thanks to our fierce protective perspicacious grandmothers residing here.
Rachel Smolker, the editor of the Massachusetts based Biomass Monitor, describes the bone that State’s officials threw to local clean air activists while forcing residents to assume the usual position via regulatory ennui, allowing robber barons to screw them, in her newsletter at: Weak Biomass Regs
Privatizing the Air
Some may recall Ms. Smolker as one of the featured guests at a local gathering organizing opposition to Adage in Mason County. In her newsletter, Rachel goes on to warn:
Those of us who have been battling bioenergy are all too familiar with accusations of shilling for the coal and fossil fuel industries. Apparently, the assumption is that if you don’t want to burn trees, you must therefore support burning of coal/oil. We have to be constantly wary and defend our opposition to bioenergy as a “false solution”—alternatives are a good idea, but burning biomass is not a good alternative.
If there were ever a David and Goliath battle, opposing bioenergy is it. With the harms caused by oil extraction, fracking for natural gas and nuclear power ever more visible and dire, we in the anti-biomassacre movement find ourselves struggling to be heard. Meanwhile, the convergence of interests and power backing bioenergy is daunting: big agribusiness, forestry, biotechnology and transport, as well as the U.S. military are all behind bioenergy. Even the Obama administration is cheerleading.
