Europe’s Green-Fuel Search Turns to America’s Forests

Loggers here are clear-cutting a wetland forest with decades-old trees.

Behind the move: an environmental push.

The push isn’t in North Carolina but in Europe, where governments are trying to reduce fossil-fuel use and carbon-dioxide emissions. Under pressure, some of the Continent’s coal-burning power plants are switching to wood.

But Europe doesn’t have enough forests to chop for fuel, and in those it does have, many restrictions apply. So Europe’s power plants are devouring wood from the U.S., where forests are bigger and restrictions fewer.

This dynamic is bringing jobs to some American communities hard hit by mill closures. It is also upsetting conservationists, who say cutting forests for power is hardly an environmental plus.

“The logging industry around here was dead a few years ago,” said Paul Burby, owner of a firm called Carolina East Forest Products that hired subcontractors to cut the trees after paying a landowner for rights. “Now that Europe is using all these pellets, we can barely keep up.”

The logging is perfectly legal in North Carolina and generally so elsewhere in the U.S. South. In much of Europe, it wouldn’t be.

The U.K., for example, requires loggers to get permits for any large-scale tree-cutting. They must leave buffers of standing trees along wetlands, and they generally can’t clear-cut wetlands unless the purpose is to restore habitat that was altered by tree planting, said a spokesman for the U.K. Forestry Commission.

Italy and Lithuania make some areas off-limits for clear-cutting, meaning cutting all of the trees in an area rather than selectively taking the mature ones. Switzerland and Slovenia completely prohibit clear-cutting. It is a common logging practice in the U.S.

U.S. wood thus allows EU countries to skirt Europe’s environmental rules on logging but meet its environmental rules on energy.

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