By Matt Dias, Special for CalMatters<\/p>\n
This commentary was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n Guest Commentary written by<\/p>\n Re: Biomass is a money pit that won\u2019t solve California\u2019s energy or wildfire problems<\/a><\/p>\n Shaye Wolf is right about one thing: California has affordable clean energy options like solar and wind. But her op-ed ignores an urgent, critical reality on the ground: we are in a wildfire crisis and California is drowning in hazardous forest waste with nowhere to put it.<\/p>\n Biomass\u00a0energy is not about cutting healthy forests or replacing solar and wind. It\u2019s about the fact that California is in a wildfire emergency, and the state faces a dangerous accumulation of forest fuels with limited safe disposal options. Policy decisions must reflect this operational and public-safety reality, not just theoretical comparisons among energy sources.<\/p>\n Evaluating\u00a0biomass\u00a0solely on cost per megawatt-hour or facility-level emissions misunderstands its role in a fire-prone landscape. The relevant policy choice is not\u00a0biomass\u00a0versus other renewables, but whether unavoidable forest material is handled through controlled, regulated facilities or disposed of through open burning, piling, or unsafe accumulation near communities and infrastructure.<\/p>\n This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\tCopy HTML<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Matt Dias, Special for CalMatters This commentary was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":365456,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[11455,3200,1872,192,79,6399],"class_list":["post-365455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-air-pollution","tag-commentary","tag-energy","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-wildfires"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365455\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}