Renewable Technologies And Environmental Injustice: Subsidizing Bioenergy, Promoting Inequity

Dozens of developed countries massively subsidize biomass-crop growing/ incineration, touting it as clean, renewable, and helping to alleviate climate change. Using a case study of a contemporary, state-of-the-art facility to incinerate Miscanthus-giganteus biomass, this article shows that bioenergy projects are (1) not clean, given overwhelming particulate and nitrogen-oxide releases; (2) disproportionately sited in EIJ situations, near communities of color, tribal communities, or low-income communities who are harmed both medically and economically; (3) likely to impose ecological and environmental burdens on EIJ communities because of possible biomass-crop invasiveness; and (4) misrepresented by biomass promoters who take advantage of lucrative, taxpayer-funded federal and state biomass subsidies.