"Pulp Fiction: Warming the Planet"

"As the world tries to shift away from fossil fuels, the energy industry is turning to what seems to be an endless supply of renewable energy: wood. In England and across Europe, wood has become the renewable of choice, with forests — many of them in the U.S. — being razed to help feed surging demand. But as this five-month Climate Central investigation reveals, renewable energy doesn’t necessarily mean clean energy. Burning trees as fuel in power plants is heating the atmosphere more quickly than coal."

"SELBY, U.K. - The heavy power lines and narrow roads between the steam-billowing towers of three of England’s biggest power plants traverse an energy industry in upheaval. Shuttered coal mines are flanked by emerald pastures. Towering wind turbines and solar arrays have taken root in windblown cereal fields.

In the middle of the transition is the Drax Power Station — Western Europe’s largest coal power plant, as big and powerful as many nuclear stations. The 4-gigawatt facility was built in the 1970s and ‘80s in this bucolic Yorkshire parish to burn the fruits of a local coal-mining boom. Droves of miners arrived in double-decker bus loads at a region known as Megawatt Valley.

'We used to sit on the doorstep — me and the kids — singing, ‘Hi ho, hi ho,’' said Pamela Ross, a former mine administrative worker and union rep. In the dining room of a converted farmhouse between castle remnants and two village thoroughfares, where she has lived since 1988, she rifled through yellowing government documents and photos of mine groundbreakings, lamenting the wheezing of what once was a strapping local industry. 'We have hundreds of years of coal still underground,' she said. 'But it’s likely to stay there.'"

John Upton reports for Climate Central October 20, 2015, in the first part of a multipart series.

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Part Two

Part Three