Sonoma Clean Power Board needs new members who understand facts and science….
Not so clean energy
EDITOR: In his Aug. 13 Close to Home column, Sonoma Clean Power CEO Geof Syphers admitted that Sonoma Clean Power relies on gas-powered electricity plants that negatively impact the health of people in low-income communities (“North Coast’s dirty little energy secret”).
But Sonoma Clean Power’s so-called Clean Start mix contains 16.4% biomass energy, which is much dirtier than coal and dirtier than natural gas. Biomass creates more greenhouse gases, and its toxic emissions cause asthma, cancer, lung disease and other illnesses in the communities where it is generated.
Burning wood from forests to fuel power plants isn’t clean, renewable, carbon neutral or sustainable. It is extremely expensive and inefficient. By increasing greenhouse gas emissions and destroying trees that drawdown or sequester and store carbon, it fuels the climate crisis. It devastates habitat for wildlife that call forests home. It eats up subsidies that could otherwise fund cleaner renewable options, such as wind and solar.
Climate scientists worldwide have repeatedly written to leaders asking them to protect forests, not to cut them down and burn them for energy.
The biomass energy industry incentivizes deforestation. Sonoma Clean Power should withdraw its support for bioenergy as soon as possible — for people’s health, for wildlife and for the climate.
JENNY BLAKER
Cotati
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/opinion/mondays-letters-to-the-editor-579/
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