The American Southeast is the home of one of the most biodiverse, ecologically crucial—and heavily damaged—forests on the continent. In 2009, an unintended loophole in EU policy led to over a billion in annual subsidies for Drax Power station, a British coal plant switching to "renewable" energy from wood. Those subsidies has have financed the clear-cutting of huge tracts of Southern forests that would otherwise have been left undisturbed.
Now, both Drax and and landowners in forests themselves are locked in a race: Drax, to secure total vertical integration of the Southern Appalachian forests before its subsidies expire; the landowners, to stop it.
This is the story of the dark consequences of green policy, and of people trying to roll them back before the forest collapses.
