The term "renewable" is being debated when referring to biomass, a report from National Public Radio (NPR) says.
Biomass, which refers to trees or other organic matter that is burned for fuel, produced more electrical energy in 2015 than solar panels, the report says, but its sustainability is being refuted by researchers.
"It's absolutely true that we're becoming, as a whole, a lot more skeptical of biomass's ability to deliver large amounts of electricity in a sustainable fashion," said John Coequyt, director of federal and international climate campaigns with the Sierra Club, in the report.
The main point of discussion is how sustainable logging is defined. The report says that the industry and many forestry experts claim that biomass plants burn mostly forest and farm leftovers, but according to Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University, some operations are simply cutting down trees to use as feedstock.
Searchinger, along with 65 other scientists, is currently fighting an amendment in Congress' new energy bill that calls biomass "carbon neutral." This claim comes from the idea that new trees would be planted in the old one's place, creating a new plant to remove carbon, the report says.
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