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The California legislature voted yes on SB 867, a $10 billion climate bond for the November 2024 ballot that would provide critical funds for habitat conservation and climate resilience for communities. EPFW took action and urged state legislators to vote yes on SB 867.

California’s birds, natural resources, and green spaces are threatened by habitat loss and the impacts of climate change. The state planned to make cuts to conservation, restoration, and climate programs when we need them the most.

Funding from a voter-enacted climate bond would:

Restore more habitat for resident and migratory birds in the Salton Sea, Central Valley, and public wildlife refuges

Ensure access to clean drinking water, green space, and recreational opportunities for more communities

Save lives and protect people from climate impacts such as floods, wildfires, and extreme heat events by investing in forest and coastal resilience

Without SB 867, efforts to tackle climate change and protect our natural treasures would have seen drastic cuts, putting California’s communities and wildlife at risk.

The Sierra Nevada AmeriCorps Program (SNAP) is the backbone of the workforce for Sierra Nevada Alliance. EPFW signed on to a letter urging Congress to help protect national funding for AmeriCorps and preserve one of our most vital programs.

Congress was working on the federal budget and AmeriCorps was in serious jeopardy of elimination in its 30th anniversary year. We contacted our lawmakers and told them now is the time to invest in AmeriCorps, not cut it!

AmeriCorps is one of the best investments the federal government can make in local communities, yielding $17 in benefits to our country for every $1 invested by Congress.

But, the House had a FY25 Labor-HHS Appropriations bill that proposed to eliminate all funding for AmeriCorps State and National, AmeriCorps NCCC, state service commissions, and AmeriCorps education awards. If adopted by the full Congress, this proposal would have been the end of AmeriCorps, depriving community-based organizations of the resources and people power they need to tackle our most pressing local challenges.

These proposed cuts came during a difficult time when demand for AmeriCorps is greater than the funding available. In fact, what is needed is more funding – not less. Without increased funding in FY25, more than 27,000 AmeriCorps and 6,000 AmeriCorps Seniors positions would be eliminated next year. The House bill would have served a death knell, eliminating at least 71,000 AmeriCorps positions.

Congress is facing some challenging decisions about spending priorities and that is why we urged them to support AmeriCorps. There is an explosion of needs in our country and now is the time to invest in AmeriCorps, not cut it.

It may at first strike many observers as farfetched: The notion that burning wood to generate electricity is actually more climate-polluting than fossil fuels—even including coal.

But the energy density of wood is less than coal. So compared to coal a great deal of wood, by volume, must be burned to generate an equivalent number of kilowatts. Even biomass electricity giants such as Drax Group don't really dispute this.

Rather, the industry rests its "green electricity" claim on the fact that trees grow back, which is highly misleading.

California's forests are in the crosshairs. Drax is eyeing them as a new frontier for sourcing the raw material needed to make wood pellets to burn to generate electricity. The U.K.-based company's local booster is Golden State Natural Resources (GSNR), a California nonprofit whose board consists of rural county supervisors. GSNR is promoting and fundraising for the construction of two enormous pellet plants in California.

EPFW contacted key officials to make sure they understand that burning trees instead of fossil fuels for electricity will increase carbon emissions— worsening climate chaos.

Most trees take decades to grow to maturity and, roughly speaking, centuries to reach "old-growth" status. While that many years roll by after an area is logged, most of the CO2 emitted from the initial wood burning stays in the atmosphere, causing global heating. Meanwhile, more trees have been felled and burned, adding more CO2 to the atmosphere.

For reabsorption of all the initially released CO2 to occur would require a halt to new emissions until regrowth could catch up. But civilization doesn't have decades to hang on for such a scenario to magically occur. The reality we thus confront is an ongoing "carbon debt."

Moreover, none of this fully takes into account the carbon emitted from cutting and transporting trees to pellet mills, manufacturing the pellets, transporting them by ground and sea to their destinations for burning, and more.

It also does not account for the immense damage to forest ecosystems, soils, wildlife, and water quality from cutting down carbon-absorbing forests.

Perhaps more surprising than the science of wood-vs.-coal CO2 emissions per kilowatt, massive accounting errors have led to the official view in the European Union (E.U.) that biomass electricity is "green." In essence that error consists in counting emissions only in the countries where the wood was sourced (principally the U.S. and Canada), not where it was burned (the U.K.).

The E.U. has a strong incentive to meet its emissions targets under the Paris Agreement of 2015.

Drax, regarded as a "zero-emission" company, is the largest CO2 emitter in the U.K.'s power sector even though less than five percent of U.K. power is generated from biomass. At the same time, biomass accounts for some 20 percent of U.K. power sector emissions. Drax in 2022 emitted over 12 million tons of carbon dioxide.

We can and must stop this highly climate-damaging scheme, which also threatens all the other values of forest ecosystems. We have an immediate opportunity to stop Drax—an upcoming assessment, now overdue, by the U.S. Treasury Department as to whether the popular Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) will direct funds to construction of these proposed new biomass facilities.

We got in touch with key decisionmakers to urge them to urge them to stop the biomass industry from receiving public subsidies to build forest-destroying pellet mills in California.

The cold hard truth hasn't changed and the distraction of biomass electricity won't change it: We must relinquish fossil fuels as quickly as possible while aggressively developing truly green energy such as solar and wind, coupled with conservation and energy efficiency.

This remains the real way forward.