Katherine and Krystal travelled all the way from Mississippi to attend the May 1st Drax Annual General Meeting in London last week.
Katherine Egland is a lifelong human rights campaigner with a particular interest in climate and ecological justice, having lost two close family friends who drowned during Hurricane Katrina (2005), and having witnessed the effects of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the Mississippi waters just a few blocks from her home.
Krystal Martin is a resident of Gloster, Mississippi, where Drax is likely to appeal a state government (MDEQ) decision not to allow it to further expand its massive Amite BioEnergy wood pellet manufacturing facility there.
In the UK, for the past 20 years, the North Yorkshire Drax power station has been gradually converting from burning coal to burning supposedly sustainable “biomass” or wood pellets, thus creating what they like to claim is ‘renewable energy’.
But critics have discovered that Drax is sourcing wood from primary forests in British Columbia and even protected areas of Estonia, as well as from important areas of biodiversity in the southern US. In 2023, Drax burned the equivalent of around 27 million trees, which represents a huge amount of clear felling along with substantial emissions of carbon dioxide.
Because trees ‘grow back’, international carbon accounting rules class wood biomass as ‘carbon neutral’. But this assumes that they are planted like for like, and that we can wait at least half a century, which scientists warn we haven’t got, for them to begin reaching a point of equivalent reabsorption.
Despite IPCC guidelines which warn that bioenergy should not be classed as neutral or sustainable, the UK government has been handing over huge ‘renewables’ subsidies to Drax – £690m in 2023 (or almost £2 million per day) – making up a large portion of Drax’s operating profit of £796 million that year.
These subsidies (more than half a billion pounds in 2022 too) came from Green Levy surcharges (around 10-15%) on our energy bills, so we are directly funding this destructive industry in the name of climate action.
In February, the government announced a partial extension until 2031 for these subsidies (which were originally due to end in 2027). The announcement did at least include a commitment to review the planned tens of billions of pounds subsidies for development of Bio Energy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) – a technology which is widely viewed as an unreliable, untested and uncosted “future fix” for current emissions.
The power station is by a substantial margin the UK’s largest single carbon emitter, but even if government subsidies for the Yorkshire plant were time-limited or reduced, the reality is that Drax’s core business is in cutting down trees, turning them into wood pellets and not only turning them into energy for the UK but always searching for new markets e.g. Japanese power stations, or “sustainable” Aviation Fuels.
Krystal has seen first-hand how Drax’s business has affected her community. Since the Gloster wood pellet plant arrived nearly a decade ago, more and more residents of this rural town have had health problems of the sort normally associated with air pollution. Krystal’s mother started hospital treatment in 2020 for respiratory issues, neighbours have had to start using oxygen cylinders after COPD diagnoses, and several have now died.
Rates of cancer and heart disease are way above average along with childhood asthma, and almost every household in this small rural community (Gloster’s population is just under 900) has a family member who is suffering from pollution-associated disease.
It’s often difficult in these sorts of cases to evidence a direct causal link, but epidemiologists Dr Jackie Walker and Dr Cristina Nica from Brown University have been researching with in-home air monitors for the past year, and preliminary results showed night-time pollutant levels way above EPA standards, as well as considerable random noise pollution (known to cause stress which affects cardio-vascular function).
What is known is that Drax has violated Environmental Protection Agency pollution levels in Gloster more than eleven thousand times. In 2020 the Mississippi Dept of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) fined the plant 2.5 million dollars over Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) emissions – one of the largest Clean Air Act penalties ever awarded by the State. Since then, even more dangerous Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAP) were found to be more than 50% above permitted levels and another huge fine is expected. But Drax received 2.8 million dollars in State grants to build the facility, and are fully exempt from income, property and franchise taxes, along with around 1.5 million dollars in sales and use tax relief.
Krystal Martin came all the way from Mississippi with a question for Drax, expecting at least that the corporation would respect her right as a shareholder proxy to deliver it. She missed one grand-daughter’s dance performance and another’s basketball game to come to London. But security staff at first said she had to leave the building because her bag contained a mobile phone and laptop (with her notes). Then they relented and confiscated her bag instead, but by the time this had all been dealt with, she had missed a lot of the meeting. Then, using the protests (which they characterised as “aggressive”) as an excuse, the Board simply closed the meeting and ejected everyone. Her question would have been to ask whether, given the latest evidence of harm on the local community, Drax would still be appealing the 5-2 MDEQ decision to prevent expansion at Amite BioEnergy.
One of the protesters on Thursday lay down in the entrance doorway and delivered a speech accusing Drax of racism for building its processing plants amongst poor and dispossessed communities, most often comprising high numbers of People of Colour. Gloster is one of those deprived rural towns – a place with high unemployment and poor public services – but it has a strong sense of community, powerful voices such as Krystal’s, working as an educator in a town with no school, and the will to take on a huge corporation and fight hard for social, climate and environmental justice. On Thursday Gloster was backed by the Green party, Axe Drax, Stop Burning Trees and BiofuelWatch among others, and the Drax board heard their message loud and clear.
In a statement released the next day, Drax CEO Will Gardiner (whose pay packet rose more than £2m last year to a total £5.4m) blamed recent accusations and protest activity for creating an “extreme environment”, and said Drax is “seeking to make a positive contribution to the lives and livelihoods” of the communities they operate within. He also claimed the door is “always open, to civil and constructive discussion”. The women from Mississippi are still waiting.
