'James Woodley, an Environmental Biologist and resident of Northampton County, North Carolina, an area severely affected by wood pellet production for Drax’s biomass burning, said: ‘Now that the forests are gone, so is the sense of community. Dust is everywhere, even people are breathing in dust and becoming sick from it. When Enviva [a Drax pellet supplier] moved to our community, and to other poor communities in the Southeastern US, the company promised to bring hope to the hopeless, to reduce poverty, but what they ended up bringing was truckloads of logs, daily, constantly barrelling through.’'
Effectively none of these business are actually profitable and would be insolvent without government help/cronyism. This money is pretty much wasted on these polluting businesses and is money that could be applied elsewhere towards the environment.
I cannot find the source at the moment but at least in the UK they are basically importing wood chips from US, Canada, Malaysia, etc. just to keep the existing "bio mass" incinerators burning.