Essay by Eric Worrall
In the 16th Century, coal saved the forests of Britain and Europe from total extinction. My question, who or what will save the forests this time?
EU votes to keep woody biomass as renewable energy, ignores climate risk
by Justin Catanoso on 16 September 2022
- Despite growing public opposition, the European Parliament voted this week not to declassify woody biomass as renewable energy. The forest biomass industry quickly declared victory, while supporters of native forests announced their plan to continue the fight — even in court.
- The EU likely renewed its commitment to burning wood as a source of energy largely to help meet its target of cutting EU carbon emissions by 55% by 2030, something it likely couldn’t achieve without woody biomass (which a carbon accounting loophole counts as carbon neutral, equivalent to wind and solar power).
- Scientific evidence shows that burning wood pellets is a major source of carbon at the smokestack. The European Union also likely continued its embrace of biomass this week as it looks down the barrel of Russian threats to cut off natural gas supplies this winter over the EU’s opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
- While the EU decision maintains that whole trees won’t be subsidized for burning, that natural forests will be protected, and that there will be limits to logging old growth and primary forests, these provisions include legal loopholes and were not backed with monitoring or enforcement commitments. No dates were set for biomass burning phase down.
For three years, European forest advocates have courted public opinion and lobbied the EU parliament to stop spending billions annually to subsidize the burning of wood for energy — a process ultimately dirtier than coal — and to reject the EU’s official designation of woody biomass as a renewable, zero-emissions energy source on par with wind and solar.
The relentless campaign grew steadily in strength, with recent opinion polls showing most Europeans in favor of protecting their shrinking natural forests over seeing them harvested to make wood pellets to burn in converted coal power plants. A growing portion of parliament too began speaking out against woody biomass burning.
So it was this week that the European Parliament voted in Brussels for amendments to its Renewable Energy Directive (RED) that are the first-ever ostensibly aimed at protecting natural forests and limiting biomass subsidies. But it was the bioenergy industry claiming victory on Wednesday, not forest advocates.
With the EU legally mandated to phase out coal by 2030, the parliament voted down an amendment to declassify woody biomass as a renewable energy source, which the bioenergy industry immediately applauded. With that continued designation, carbon emissions from biomass go legally uncounted by EU countries at the smokestack — as if they don’t exist.
…
The population of Britain in the 16 century (3-4 million people) and Europe (70-78 million) were a tiny fraction of today’s population, yet people back in the 16th century still managed to devastate all but the most remote and inaccessible forests, in their search for fuel and building materials.
How long will today’s European forests survive, now that British and European politicians want to reject coal, and are subsidising the chopping down of trees?
Only the discovery and exploitation of coal saved the forests of the 16th century from total extinction. Trees simply don’t grow fast enough to replace timber lost to large scale energy exploitation, even for 16th century needs, let alone today’s needs.
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The greens are daft.
Those trees need decades to grow back; according to the CO2 Apocalypts civilisation would be gone by that time. So biomass is as non-renewable as coal.
Biomass burns trees that took 40 – 100 years to grow and reduces them to CO2, black carbon soot and ash in a single day. DRAX power station burns 38,350 tonnes of wood a day (green wood…19,175 Tonnes dry). 14,000,000 (7,000,000 dry) tonnes of wood per year. If it takes a century to sink the carbon into replacement tree growth, DRAX will burn 7,000,000,000 (billion) dry tonnes of wood releasing 25,690,000,000 tonnes of CO2 before the carbon from the first year’s 25,690,000 tonnage has been taken up by carbon sinks
The numbers I always remember and use are:
They are not seriously burning Green/wet wood in Drax are they, I did always wonder about that, when or where is the wood dried before it goes into the fire.
The now defunct and disappeared UK based renewable energy forum I liked to watch had plenty to say about folks who burned wood.
Properly seasoned or Dry Wood was Good, the words they used for Wet Wood Burners were, very often, not printable.
## It would be 25% more than that if some ‘Acid Rain’ was allowed to fall on the trees
The Scandinavians had it sussed and were simultaneously bemused and saddened by the crazed antics of the UK
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/1403483/British-acid-rain-helps-our-trees-says-Norway.html
Never mind, I see below the wood is pellitized and dried before shipping.
Yes, which also means that the fuel source requires additional energy to dry the wood expeditiously and further additional energy to reduce it and compress it to pellets…And package it…transport it to port…ship it overseas…transport it to the powerhouse…And feed it into the fuel hoppers before it is transferred from semisolid mass to heat energy to generate electricity…
And then a miracle occurs…
The trees harvested in America’s south for Drax are yellow pines.
It does not take so long to regrow yellow pines.
At 20 years, they are usable.
At 40 years, they would be considered pine.
Well before yellow pines reach 100 years they start dying.
Yellow pines are a typical fast growing conifer that slower growing hardwoods, e.g., oak replace as a forest matures.
It’s not especially the Biomass you can see that matters, it’s what’s in the soil that’s important.
Because it controls the weather.
There are fast growing varieties than can be harvested in much shorter timescales such as eucalyptus but these will not be grown in wonderful forests full of wildlife. It will be grown like an arable crop on a short cycle and as a mono crop – no range of species. Everything the ecofascists do makes the environment worse.
Maybe Brazil should turn the tables an express concern about deforestation in Europe.
Brazil only ranks number one for deforestation because it is so big, with most of it being forest.
Atmospheric moisture over land is so important for moisture divergence from ocean to land. There needs to be more than 35mm precipitable water for convective instability and more than 45mm for cyclic instability.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2022/08/20/2200Z/wind/surface/level/overlay=total_precipitable_water/orthographic=75.61,12.76,343/loc=79.262,23.900
Land biomass, particularly trees, are vital for retaining the moisture that allows the water column to build once the solar intensity increases in spring. Without the atmospheric moisture, the land becomes a permanent low level divergent zone during the warming phase and remains dry.
The easiest way to produce deserts is to remove the biomass. Even if it is a high rainfall region, removing trees will start the process of desertification.
The worst possible climate action would be to place solar panels over large tracts of land.
I support managed forestry but it needs to ensure good health of the biomass. One thing that CO2 certainly improves is forest productivity.
I agree entirely Rick, in their desperate pursuit of CO2 emissions and virtue signaling the EU allowed biomass to be renewable, when it was the worst possible result for genuine carbon pollution, as distinct from beneficial CO2 emissions.
That’s true, even in N America, much of the summer precip comes from moisture released by the land/forest (but certainly aided by ocean moisture at times).
Any idea on how much CO2 is emitted per kwh of electricty by burning wood compared to burning coal?
(It would also be good to think about how much CO2 could be saved if the wood was used in construction thus reducing the need for concrete).
And of course, it isn’t just the burning.
How about clear felling American forests, grinding the trees into pellets, drying them, trucking them to a port, loading them into freighters, sailing across to Liverpool, unloading the ships into rail trucks, across the UK to Drax, unloading again and conveying to vast containers with controlled temperature and moisture levels (to prevent self-ignition) before conveying to the furnaces.
A little CO2 produced in these tiny processes?
Hmmmm. I thought there might be.
But, there again. Growing food crops for ethanol? Corn? Palm Oil? Any environmental issues? Any effect on food prices?
You couldn’t make this nonsense up. A bright ten year old would realise this is weapons grade stupidity.
But our Beloved Leaders get hot about how much this will save the Planet!
And how it will keep those nice brown envelopes dropping on their doormats.
I’m certain they’re using electric chainsaws.
Charged from natgas turbine generators.
Connected to a tesla battery
If we had any sense we would be more concerned with politicians/bureaucrats than we are with CO2.
Time’s long overdue to march on our parliaments with pitchforks and torches!
No, they’re too full of it to burn.
Why would we need to save CO2?
Mother nature has optimised C3 plant life to thrive around 1,000 – 1,2000ppm atmospheric content. If there ever was an indicator as to what level CO2 should be at, it’s right there.
We don’t need to worry about CO2 emmissions, but that argument doesn’t seem to be very effective. Pointing out that it would be more environmentally friendly (as they define the term) to chop down large forests and burn coal might make someone stop to think.
When the forests are all gone and replaced with bird choppers and the European greens find out that the wind still doesn’t blow all the time and its dark for half the day, so no solar, there will be nothing left to save them from Russian gas cut offs. They will be begging the developing world for handouts.
The North Pole gets sunlight all day throughout June. But then no sunlight at all in December.
Humans are yet to devise a better store of energy than trees.
And to think, trees are free. /sarc
Fossil fuels are nature’s own battery. Nothing is better. See this ancient post on WUWT — not as ancient as the Carboniferous
Fire up all generators, fossil fuel and nuclear. Tell the politicians, administrators and bureaucrats to take a hike.
And stop banning energy sources in France
Don’t destroy any more dam
Don’t close any more reactor
Don’t remove any “fioul” (gazoline) heating
Don’t forbid normal cars
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you or can turnoff your heat. The word knot head comes to mind.
It’s the Golgafrinchan solution. Burn down the forest. https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchans
That was too solve a problem with inflation…
In 50 years, when people read of the AGW events, the reaction will be similar to our current thoughts of stoning or burning witches. Namely, “You have good to be kidding me!”
Then and now we should be stoning politicians.
The politicians will just point fingers at the alarmist climate scientists who fooled the politicians into doing really stupid things, like burning trees in a powerplant that is sitting right on top of a coal field.
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Hmph…You’d think greens would have learnt from whales nearly going extinct, until fossil fuels took over. Never hear any gratitude about that.
OMG! Just had an awful thought. Do whales fart?
Oh yes. Given their diet, it’s (apparently) particularly noxious.
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“…the European Parliament voted this week not to declassify woody biomass as renewable energy”.
Technically it is, but if you kill the hen laying the eggs, in this case wipe out the forests so that they are no longer “renewable”, then no. They go on to state that “whole trees won’t be subsidized for burning”, whatever that means, but I’m still not sure how this gets around the fact that burning pretty much anything will produce “carbon emissions”, so what then is the point?
Burning wood releases VIRTUOUS CO2 but burning coal produces ICKY CO2.
Technically, coal, oil and natural gas are renewable. Just takes a bit longer.
Don’t wait around for a cup of coffee!
Twenty years ago, more or less, I wrote an impassioned post to a biomass group asking them to understand the dangers of developing a global market for biomass. I had seen what happens around a population center in the third world from woodcutters supplying the firewood and charcoal markets.
It was only the availability of subsidized propane in Ecuador in the 70’s that halted the exponential destruction of forest and scrubland. Even still, the demand for firewood and charcoal for recreational use maintains consistent pressure on whatever they can find nearby.
Many proponents of biomass maintain that feedstock would be grown on farms or plantations. Maybe, but I doubt it would start until after “wild” sources have been exhausted. Global biomass suppliers would act the same as third world charcoal-burners but on a global, industrial scale. They’ve already demonstrated their proclivities with pulpwood and oil palm.
Climate hysteria has emptied the minds of former conservationists and ecologists. There was an old meme by those who wished to trigger these same tree-huggers, “Pave the Earth, Before It’s Too Late!”. Seemingly easily manipulated, I guess they came to agree with it.
My late father in law was a UN forester, back when the UN didn’t have ambitions to rule the world.
He used to work at the highest levels of government across the developing world. He knew Fidel and Raul Castro personally (hated them). He never gave to charities because he knew precisely where the money ended up, in the hands of criminals like them.
He pointed out to me that the ‘illegal loggers’ chopping down the Amazon were doing so to provide fuel for the local and farther flung community because they had nothing else to burn.
In much the same way as your experience, he called for importing fossil fuels to burn, but no government cared. They simply weren’t interested.
We truly are governed by incompetents and criminals.
“We truly are governed by incompetents and criminals.”
Yes, we are. And the chickens are coming home to roost for the general public.
The UN from the beginning was operated like a world government. UNEP, mostly the product of a Canadian oil company, Maurice Strong. It started slowly, but stretched its legs into almost all the UN programs.
The officials certainly were both bad and good. Most of the money goes into the back pockets of officials and the rest dribbles down to countries, states, and cities and towns.
Total BS! Name any way of producing energy and you will find ‘growing public opposition‘.
Made a lot of electricty with fission and never hurt anyone. Heated a few homes with wood.
Those who can do.
Some of the doers of the world harvest food from the land and some harvest trees from land that is not suitable for other purposes.
I have no idea what this means.
As I understand it, drax burns us wood, so no threat to UK forests.
Maybe all the EU should burn the us?
I believe you’re right. I don’t know who does the Green Accounting but when Drax claims zero CO2 emmissions for burning wood, the US really ought to complain. Drax emits CO2, the forrests in the US absorb it.
“Maybe all the EU should burn the us?”
Biden is doing his best to beat you to it.
Biden isn’t helping the US. His control group is doing it’s level best to chatter all around the issue, and then back up a step or two and say “See, things are better”.
Without eager “assistants”, or “managers” there would be no TV reports needed to stay in the public eye. Instead, we have mealy mouthed contracts with good pronunciation of the lousy policies and, except for a few highers up, struggle to read the teleprompter.
The maw of the beast is eternally hungry.
Also building materials for ships, particularly oak: “It’s estimated it took 6,000 trees to build the ship”.
Every major environmental disaster is the result of a government policy.
It’s really hard to feel even the slightest sympathy for these fools.
I’m surprised young green activists haven’t woken up to the problems of burning biomass. It’s a most non-environmentally friendly practice. Yet again climate change and environmentalism are confused as one and the same.
Yes to protecting the environment, but no to climate alarmism that is causing far more harm than good.
I’m not in the least surprised. Most of them haven’t the sense they were born with.
Not sure it’s that. I think they are institutionally blinkered into nimbyism and SEPism (SEP is Somebody Else’s Problem) so that, as long as it isn’t happening near to them, they simply don’t see it or care about it.
Biomass is in essence stored solar energy and is a byproduct of our forestry operations. The main product is high quality sawtimber. Low grade markets like biomass are needed to restore the health and productivity of our forests in the northeast. Unfortunately, biomass markets are diminishing here but the markets for firewood and wood pellets are booming as the cost of home heating oil and electric heat have skyrocketed. That helps but we still need markets for low grade timber not suitable for those markets. There are many insects and diseases that are devastating our forests: hemlock wooly adelgid, white pine needle cast, beech bark disease, defoliations by the spongy moth (formerly known as the gypsy moth), etc. In addition, there are other issues such as the spread of non-native invasive plants, deer over-browsing, and past destructive highgrade logging (cutting the best timber and leaving a junk forest behind). Many of those who criticize biomass markets are ignorant of these and other forest management issues. The wood chips that are sent to Europe are derived from well managed forests in the southeast. This helps our forest products industry. In the northeast, Massachusetts has pulled the plug on biomass in the latest “climate” bill. Instead, billions will be wasted subsidizing huge offshore wind farms that will be manufactured overseas and will probably drive the endangered right whale to extinction. In addition, toxic made in China solar farms have destroyed thousands of acres of forest here. But on the thousands of acres of forests where I have marked biomass improvement cuttings, the forests are thriving as growth rates as have greatly increased. Landowners also don’t like a lot of unsightly slash left after a timber harvest but with biomass markets that is not a problem. The best thing about biomass markets is the ability of foresters like me to mark the worst junk timber like huge ugly multi-forked white pine and have it cut. However, with diminishing markets for forest biomass, our forests will continue to decline here in the northeast. So, before you criticize biomass markets, educate yourself on forestry issues.
My personal view is that managed forestry is dying at a time when forest productivity is booming.
The consequence in Australia is intense, devastating wild fires burning enough fuel in a week that could have powered the entire country for a year. It is incredible waste.
In the State of Victoria we are permitted to enter state forests and collect fallen wood within 50m of forestry tracks. Most of the restrictions on private collection are related to health and safety. I am surprised by how few people actually get out in the forrest and collect wood.
It may change as the price of gas heating climbs but it remains a simple task with no obvious competition for the fallen wood.
There is, of course, very good reason for forestry management, but when the public are hoodwinked by being assured that burning wood pellet’s somehow releases less CO2 than burning anything else, then we know someone is telling porkies. And if they are telling porkies about that, what aren’t they telling us about their forestry management practices?
Honestly there really is an imposed division between ‘good’ CO2 (natural emitters) and ‘bad’ CO2 (hydrocarbons, domesticated animals, etc) – the green blob does actually believe this as one of the tenets of it’s faith. It’s a nightmare creation of city dwellers warped idea of ‘nature’.
So, who knew it, the loss of trees in Easter Island was all due to their Net Zero policy?!
“the European Parliament voted this week …”
That is the really scary part, the future of democratic nations relies on a handful of ignorant zealots who get elected, while normal sensible people have better things to do.
So true; we must just hope that Truss will turn the tables here at least a bit. I can’t say I am particularly hopeful, though.
As I said when Truss was selected for the job, don’t watch her, watch her Cabinet. Braverman, Badenoch and Rees-Mogg, all outspoken anti NetZero, and Steve Baker, a GWPF trustee in Northern Ireland.
Of the Cabinet members voting record on Climate Change I have checked, none have exhibited any meaningful support including Sharma and Kwarting. Both have largely voted against climate policies.
Good start.
The legislation caps then restricts burning of ‘primary woody biomass’ which means forests are quite safe from logging for fuel burning…
The major part of woody biomass is going to be derived from forest management – something I thought Watts readers were keen on?
How can that be guaranteed if there is no enforcement?
🤡
The woody biomass that is OK to burn is stamped Made In China and comes with a certificate of authenticity from the Bradford Exchange
Griff, is the amount of CO2 emissions from the boat bringing the biomass from states to UK more or less than the CO2 emmisions from biomass itself?
Don’t forget the amount of wood used to construct the navies of Europe from 16th to 19th centuries.
Just one The Great Micheal built for James IV (died 1513) took huge amounts of wood.
The chronicler Lindsay of Pitscottie wrote of the building of Michael that “all the woods of Fife except Falkland Wood, besides all the timber that was got out of Norway” went into her construction.
Account books add that timbers were purchased from other parts of Scotland as well as from France and the Baltic Sea.
For a ship of about 1000 tonnes
The hull of HMS Victory required trees from 60 acres/25 hectares about 2000 trees. There were 60 ships at the Battle of Trafalgar so ~120000 trees. The Royal navy had over 300 serving ships at the start of the 19th century, not all the size of Victory, but a huge number of trees none the less.
Thanks for the details.
Freeport, Maine used to have a corner in the town named for the huge logs that were brought through town to the harbor for transport to England. I think they were for masts.
The Royal Navy of that time preferred wood from South America and North America because the hardwoods were especially tough and resilient. Spanish ships built in South American ports were especially well regarded as prizes for that reason.
I call it Release of Sequestration. Why would they think this helps?
Crank up the fossil fuel engines in the forests, pellet plants, land-based transport, and long-haul seagoing vessels. Don’t hold back, we’ve got subsidy mining to attend to.