While in office, former President Obama and his administration took a range of landmark steps to make combating climate change a priority. They invested in clean energy, strengthened methane emissions through stronger regulations, increased fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, and rolled out the Clean Power Plan, an effort to reduce carbon emissions from the power generation sector, among many other actions.
Most notably, the Obama Administration helped bring the world together to negotiate and sign the Paris Agreement, the first-ever global agreement setting the world on the path to a low-carbon future.
But apparently that record doesn’t mean much to the Partnership for Policy Integrity, whose director went on a Twitter tirade last week attacking a former Obama cabinet secretary who in 2016 reaffirmed the importance of renewable wood energy to help replace coal and other fossil fuels. What apparently set off the Partnership for Policy Integrity’s director was FFJ’s blog post laying out the many false and misleading aspects of their latest piece attacking wood biomass. As FFJ’s post notes, President Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture and former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack wrote in 2016:
“[T]he U.S. wood pellet industry increases our forested area, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and improves U.S. forest management practices.”
This isn’t a controversial statement — it also happens to be the position of the world’s leading climate science authority, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has repeatedly affirmed wood biomass as part of any strategy to mitigating climate change.
So the question turns to activist groups like the Partnership for Policy Integrity: If your position against renewable wood energy is directly contradicted by both the Obama Administration and the UN IPCC, isn’t it time to reconsider?