The Dirty Business of Clean Energy: The U.K. Power Company Polluting Small Towns Across the U.S
Based on dubious carbon accounting, Drax, which runs the U.K.’s biggest power plant, is rapidly expanding its wood pellet operations across America.
In 2014, an industrial facility producing wood pellets opened so close to her house in Gloster, Mississippi, that she could overhear conversations between managers and staffers as they worked and smell the fumes the plant pumped into the air.
Dobbins, a 59-year-old mother of two, relies on an oxygen tank to breathe, as do her sister and her brother-in-law, who also live in the town. Her husband Neal depended on an oxygen tank as well, but passed away in 2017, just as Dobbins was experiencing an acute health crisis that led to her diagnosis with heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. She tears up when discussing how her own hospitalization left her unable to care for her husband of 36 years before he died.
“I was on life support,” said Dobbins, who wore a tracheotomy tube with a speaking valve. “I couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk. And through all this, my husband was sick and I didn’t even know it.”
