A mile down the road from a hush-hush CIA base where US special forces train for anti-terrorist operations by blowing the hell out of buildings, cars and planes, there’s a far more shocking scene of devastation.
Some 280 acres of once pristine and ecologically-important wetland forest – a mix of oak, maple, hickory, cypress and pine – have disappeared, torn out as if by a marauding monster. All that’s left is a bleak expanse of boggy pools of water and pulverised pieces of wood.
It’s eerily reminiscent of photographs of No Man’s Land at the Battle of the Somme – only with the addition of several large piles of logs that the men who harvested the lumber from this remote north-eastern corner of North Carolina in November 2023 couldn’t even be bothered to take with them and left to rot.
It speaks forcefully about man’s thoughtless and greedy destruction of natural resources and yet the company behind this ‘clearcut’ – as areas where every tree is removed are known – claims it is actually providing clean, green energy to the world. And to Britain in particular.
The site – which a local environmental activist told me was just one of ten he’d seen off that road alone – is one of thousands that have been ‘harvested’ either entirely or in part for Enviva, the world’s biggest wood-pellet manufacturer and the principal supplier of the UK’s controversial Drax power station.
Both businesses have for years been lucratively exploiting a scientifically flawed loophole in the carbon accounting rules of Britain and the European Union that counts forest wood as a renewable energy resource, thereby enabling pellet-burning power producers to claim billions in subsidies.
Trees, of course, serve a critical function in slowing global warming as they absorb carbon dioxide. If you cut them down and burn them, they release that carbon.
However, according to the wood pellet, or ‘biomass’, industry, more trees will grow in their place and re-absorb that carbon.
On the ground in Hertford, North Carolina, where the scale of Enviva’s tree massacre is evident
A partial aerial shot of Enviva’s wood pellet plant in North Carolina
The cooling towers of the controversial Drax Group power station complex near Selby, UK
You could drive a ten-ton logging truck like the ones that clatter down the local roads around Hertford through that argument, and hundreds of scientists and environmentalists have done so.
They point out that burning wood is even dirtier in terms of carbon dioxide than coal and, more important, that it takes decades – 60 or 70 years in the case of hardwood forests – for a new tree to absorb the CO2 lost by burning the old one.
That’s precious time, they say, that a warming planet simply doesn’t have, and hardly anyone’s idea of ‘sustainable’ energy.
However, that hasn’t stopped successive UK governments, the world’s most enthusiastic convert to the wonders of wood pellets, from giving billions of pounds in renewable energy subsidies to biomass operators.
This week, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband became the latest politician to keep this astonishing arrangement – described by opponents as Britain’s ‘biggest green hoax’ – on the road when he approved a new funding arrangement giving the vast Drax power station in North Yorkshire (the country’s largest) around £2 billion over four years to keep burning biomass.
Miliband, the architect of the Government’s drive to Net Zero, has been implicated in the Drax scandal since 2008 when he was appointed Secretary of State for the newly created Department of Energy and Climate Change by then prime minister Gordon Brown.
Although the new deal cuts Drax’s subsidies in half, given all the Starmer government has promised about tackling global warming, environmentalists had been hoping for Drax to lose all its subsidy.
Drax, which ironically shares its name with a James Bond villain who set out to destroy the planet, burns the equivalent of 27 million trees every year and – because wood is much dirtier even than coal – is Britain’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, last year producing nearly 12 million tons of the planet-warming gas.
Miliband, the architect of the Government’s drive to Net Zero, has been implicated in the Drax scandal since 2008 when he was appointed Secretary of State for the newly created Department of Energy and Climate Change
An aerial shot of Enviva’s wood pellet production plant in Southampton, Virginia
For their part, Drax bosses insist that they mainly use old logs, sawmill dust and ‘low-grade’ wood such as offcuts in their pellets.
But the company, which is required to reveal precisely where it sources its wood and whether it comes from natural, previously untouched forests, has not always been entirely precise about the origins of its biomass.
Last year, it agreed to pay a £25 million penalty after the UK energy regulator, Ofgem, found it had submitted inaccurate data about some of the Canadian wood it was burning.
There’s been further embarrassment in the US states of Mississippi and Louisiana, where Drax also operates extensively and has been repeatedly fined – sometimes millions of dollars – for air pollution near its pellet mills.
Locals have complained of suffering breathing problems because of the near-continual clouds of wood dust, as well as rising instances of cancer and heart disease.
Drax has indicated it has taken some of the criticism of its eco-credibility on board, last month saying: ‘We understand that we need to do more to demonstrate that the biomass we use is genuinely sustainable and that we are taking the necessary steps to operate our business responsibly.’
But nearly 4,000 miles away in the so-called ‘world’s lumber basket’ of the warm and wet, heavily-forested south-eastern US – where Drax gets most of its pellets and where it’s estimated that an area the size of Britain’s New Forest is cut down to be turned into biomass every four to six months – the devastated landscape suggests the biomass brigade has a long way to go to show it’s seriously interested in saving the planet.
My guide, a local man who supports the Dogwood Alliance, an environmental group that seeks to protect the South’s forests, showed me a string of clearcut sites that invariably looked like they’d just been hit by a bomb.
Workers in the process of felling trees along Harvey Point Road in Hertford, North Carolina
An aerial shot of the cutting process undertaken by Enviva along Harvey Point Road
There were no signs of new trees growing, or anyone trying to re-plant, even on one site that was logged three years ago. ‘This is ground zero for clearcuts – you see them appearing all the time and it’s really sad,’ said my companion, who asked me not to use his name as ‘these people can be mean’.
He used to go out regularly looking for new clearcut sites and then follow the lorries taking away lumber and chipped wood so that he could say with confidence that it had gone to an Enviva pellet plant.
The area is sparsely populated and he wonders whether many other people notice what is going on and, if they do, whether they care. ‘This is Trump country, where climate change doesn’t exist,’ he said.
Since it started importing huge quantities of pellets in 2012, Drax has relied on America’s South for most of them, not only because it has vast tracts of forest close to coastal ports for easy export but also because these conservative states impose few of the regulations that protect woodland in the UK and the rest of Europe.
Logging companies traditionally cut down only the biggest trees as they are most suitable for the building and furniture industries, leaving the smaller ones to keep growing. They also left the ecologically-precious ‘wetland hardwood’ varieties such as cypress because they were too gnarled to become planks or tables.
Now, there’s so much demand for wood that will simply be pulped for pellets, everything is worth cutting down. Environmentalists acknowledge that any really high-quality hardwood may still be sent to a sawmill but the rest becomes biomass. Sometimes, they say, an entire clearcut is turned into pellets.
Enviva – Drax’s main supplier – has countered that it only uses leftover and waste wood like tree tops and limbs or dust from saw mills but environmental activists say they were always sceptical about the pellet producers getting nearly enough wood from such sources and would be forced to cut down entire trees in order to obtain enough raw material.
Eco-watchdog groups such as the Dogwood Alliance have provided copious evidence that they are indeed cutting down entire trees by following the logging lorries and photographing them, laden with large tree trunks, arriving at Enviva’s pellet mills.
Trees containing the wood of thousands of felled trees leave the Harvey Point Road site
An aerial shot of yet another wood pellet plant operated by Drax Group in Golster, Mississippi
A worker holds a sample of the biomass fuel pellets used by the Drax Group Power Station near Selby, UK
Aerial shots, captured by drones or visible on Google Maps, have revealed huge piles of tree trunks stacked up inside those plants, alongside mountains of wood chips, waiting to be processed.
In 2022, a company whistleblower insisted Enviva had to pulp whole trees rather than wood waste as only the former could provide pellets with the sufficient ‘density’ they required. Enviva didn’t comment on the claim.
Drax told the Mail it wasn’t going to comment on its suppliers. Although leading environment groups have condemned clearcutting as an ‘extreme’ and ecologically-damaging logging method, Enviva insisted it is a ‘common sustainable forest management practice in many countries in Europe and North America’ and ‘helps prevent forest degradation’. It added: ‘Enviva is committed to preventing the conversion of forests to non-forest uses.’
On its website the firm now says that 53 per cent of what goes into its pellets is hardwood.
Whatever the tree, the wood bound for Enviva – and ultimately Drax – is ground into sawdust so it can be compressed into pellets, regarded as the most efficient way of burning the wood.
The pellets are then taken to the coast from where they are shipped to countries such as the UK and Japan – a long transportation route that, critics note, only increases the already large carbon footprint.
None of the pellets stay in the US as Washington does not consider wood pellets a green alternative to coal and gas.
The US government has listened to experts such as researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who concluded that wood burns dirtier than coal (emitting more carbon) and that it takes at least 44 years for re-planted trees to absorb the carbon released by burning the ones they replaced.
The Drax logo seen along a train delivering biomass pellets to the Selby power plant
The logo of Enviva, the manufacturers of the wood pellets which are sourced from forests along the southeast of the United States
And that’s only going to happen if lost trees are actually replaced. But Republican states, such as North Carolina, which are far more worried about creating jobs than imposing environmental regulations, place no legal requirement on landowners to replant woodland they’ve allowed loggers to cut down. Landowners don’t even need to notify anyone before cutting down a forest.
If landowners do plant new trees rather than just wait for them to ‘naturally regenerate’, it is invariably not the hardwood that stood there before but fast-growing, more lucrative pine tree plantations.
Some studies have suggested that pine plantations –which are typically cut down after just 25 years – don’t retain carbon nearly as well as other trees.
These plantations are also terrible for biodiversity as they attract few animals. Consequently, they are eerily silent and lifeless places, as I discovered when I visited one over the state border in Virginia that had been planted in 2018 to replace a natural wood forest sacrificed to the biomass boom.
Indeed, as Dr Alan Weakley, a biologist at North Carolina University, told me, Drax’s demand for wood pellets has been disastrous for the fragile ecology of the coastal plain running along the Atlantic coast.
This area, which is producing most of the wood for pellets, has already lost more than three-quarters of its native forests owing to human encroachment.
It has been declared a ‘biodiversity hotspot’. But the demand for wood pellets, says Dr Weakley, is accelerating the destruction of that precious habitat.
Another consequence of removing the trees in this wetlands region is waterlogged land. And that, says Dr Weakley, makes it far less likely that new trees will be able to grow.
He doesn’t mince his words about the environmental damage, saying, ‘Most people would be appalled to know that, in the interests of supposedly green power, forests are being irrevocably degraded and destroyed.’
Everyone I spoke to in North Carolina admitted they were slightly shocked that ‘tree-loving’ and climate change-aware Britain, of all countries, had facilitated the biomass industry –adopting renewable energy accounting rules that didn’t account either for the forests being lost in the US or the carbon emissions from burning the wood.
Derb Carter, a senior lawyer at the Southern Environmental Law Centre, told me he had repeatedly visited the UK to explain the situation to government officials.
‘There was this assumption that surely the US regulates how forests are managed to protect the public interest,’ he said. The Brits were ‘surprised’, he said, when he explained that in southern states like North Carolina, there was nothing of the sort.
He was disappointed by Ed Miliband’s verdict on Drax this week, saying: ‘This is not a good decision for our climate and certainly not for our forests over here.’
‘We had hoped that a new government would have taken a really hard look at this. When you’re basically cutting forests and hauling them across the ocean to burn instead of coal, it makes no sense.’
Mr Carter believes the fact that the environmental destruction happens out of sight – and therefore out of mind – has been very useful for Drax in winning British acquiescence.
‘It’s a lot harder to burn your own forest than someone else’s,’ he says. ‘People are going to be a lot more tolerant if the wood pellets just show up on a ship and you don’t see the trees being cut and don’t see the forest being lost.’
