With biomass energy’s risks, wind and solar should be prioritized

To the editor: What could be the holy messiah of clean energy and wildfire prevention? According to Noah Haggerty’s article, our savior seems to be biomass energy (“California needs biomass energy to meet its wildfire goals. Its projects keep going south,” Sept. 30). But this article doesn’t mention the mountains of research that warn against the harms of carbon capture and storage to the atmosphere, ecosystems and the people whom such practices are meant to serve.

Crucially, the mere processing of biomass material — via clearing forests, chopping trees into wood chips and transporting materials over long distances — emits alarming quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. In combination with the high-energy combustion and gasification of the biomass, the “carbon-neutral” or “carbon-negative” claims lose their ground as the net atmospheric carbon emissions trump those that they propose to sequester.

Instead, public funding should prioritize research-backed renewable energy sources like solar and wind to resolve emissions and public health crises.

Jojo Pak, Berkeley