The damage to the woody biomass industry that was inflicted in response to the study conducted by the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences is slowly starting to be smoothed over, but the study and the subsequent media coverage did little to assure those against using woody biomass to produce power that it is an environmentally safe practice.

What I can't understand, is when most studies are done about renewable fuels or power, researchers tend to use the worst possible scenarios, such as the clear-cutting of forests to produce power or the planting of every available acre of farmland in the world to produce corn for ethanol. Then they compare that to fossil fuels and never take into account the effects of a blown-out off-shore oil rig or an explosion in a coal mine (much less the detrimental health effects of just working in a coal mine). I've never seen anyone compare the environmental impacts of a biomass power plant that relies on wood waste with the extraction of oil from the tar sands in Canada.

I bring this up because I just read a Q and A in the New York Times where Tom Zeller Jr. interviewed John H. Hagen the president of the Manomet Center about the recent study. When asked if the headlines such as "Manomet: Biomass Isn't Green" captured the essence of the study, Hagen said they didn't, and then went on to explain why it's difficult to reduce life-cycle analysis studies into sound bites.

"To further complicate the story, while our life-cycle analysis looked at greenhouse gas emissions from production and transport of both biomass and fossil fuels, we couldn't evaluate every possible environmental impact of energy production, such as broken blowout preventers 5,000 feet under water or mountaintop removals to access coal," Hagen said. "Rarely (maybe never) does society really weigh the full array of costs and benefits of our decisions."
The problem is that many researchers spend a lot of time drilling into the biomass life cycle but little to determine the life-cycle analysis of fossil fuels. In the case of corn-based ethanol, the researchers even went so far as to include indirect impacts, trying to blame U.S. farmers for land-use in other countries.
In the end is it any wonder that to the main stream media, who do not regularly cover the industry, biomass looks like it's worse than fossil fuels when these studies are published even through that's not the truth.

I believe renewable energy sources should be held to a higher standard than fossil fuels, but let's compare apples with apples so both can at least start out on a level playing field.

Although Manomet seems content to blame the media, I think they should shoulder some of the responsibility for the misleading headlines about biomass themselves.