The colored communities in the Southeastern United States have been repeatedly been discriminated against, whether it is social, political, or environmental racism, they’ve experienced it all. As the biomass facilities and plantations move into the rural south, these people of color are once again facing another form of extreme environmental racism. A report by the Biomass Accountability Project shows how Georgia has placed a majority of their biomass facilities (7 of 12) in black majority communities, with 3 of the 4 proposed plants also going to colored communities. These facilities bring few jobs (about 20 per facility) and produce a lot of pollution / by product that harms local communities. African Americans are about 3 times more likely to die of asthma than Caucasians and children are 5 times more likely to die from the same causes. This is unacceptable to our stakeholder group and we demand that this burden of biomass energy production be equally shared among the entire US population, new technology be used to clean the pollution before it gets to our communities, or research new renewable resources since biomass energy accounts for 50% of all renewable energy in the US, but only accounts for less than 5% of our total energy consumption.
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