by Sallust
As everyone must now know, it doesn’t matter where the energy comes from in the great rush to Net Zero, only that the source must preferably be invisible to British consumers and voters. It seems that hundreds of acres of forest are being torn down in North Carolina to produce wood-pellets that are then poured into the gaping hungry furnaces of the UK’s Drax power station.
The Mail has the story:
Some 280 acres of once pristine and ecologically-important wetland forest – a mix of oak, maple, hickory, cypress and pine – have disappeared, torn out as if by a marauding monster. All that’s left is a bleak expanse of boggy pools of water and pulverised pieces of wood.
It’s eerily reminiscent of photographs of No Man’s Land at the Battle of the Somme – only with the addition of several large piles of logs that the men who harvested the lumber from this remote north-eastern corner of North Carolina in November 2023 couldn’t even be bothered to take with them and left to rot.
According to scientists and environmentalists, the idea that new trees will replace the old ones felled any time soon is a load of nonsense:
They point out that burning wood is even dirtier in terms of carbon dioxide than coal and, more important, that it takes decades – 60 or 70 years in the case of hardwood forests – for a new tree to absorb the CO2 lost by burning the old one.
That’s precious time, they say, that a warming planet simply doesn’t have, and hardly anyone’s idea of ‘sustainable’ energy.
However, that hasn’t stopped successive UK governments, the world’s most enthusiastic convert to the wonders of wood pellets, from giving billions of pounds in renewable energy subsidies to biomass operators.
Needless to say, the heroic leader of the vanguard to turn Britain into a Net Zero paradise of impoverished and frozen people is out in front to help drive this ultimate example of greenwashing:
This week, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband became the latest politician to keep this astonishing arrangement – described by opponents as Britain’s “biggest green hoax” – on the road when he approved a new funding arrangement giving the vast Drax power station in North Yorkshire (the country’s largest) around £2 billion over four years to keep burning biomass.
Miliband, the architect of the Government’s drive to Net Zero, has been implicated in the Drax scandal since 2008 when he was appointed Secretary of State for the newly created Department of Energy and Climate Change by then Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Although the new deal cuts Drax’s subsidies in half, given all the Starmer Government has promised about tackling global warming, environmentalists had been hoping for Drax to lose all its subsidy.
Drax, which ironically shares its name with a James Bond villain who set out to destroy the planet, burns the equivalent of 27 million trees every year and – because wood is much dirtier even than coal – is Britain’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, last year producing nearly 12 million tons of the planet-warming gas.
The Mail’s Tom Leonard inspected the site in person with a local guide:
There were no signs of new trees growing, or anyone trying to re-plant, even on one site that was logged three years ago. “This is ground zero for clearcuts – you see them appearing all the time and it’s really sad,” said my companion, who asked me not to use his name as “these people can be mean”.
He used to go out regularly looking for new clearcut sites and then follow the lorries taking away lumber and chipped wood so that he could say with confidence that it had gone to an Enviva pellet plant.
Since it started importing huge quantities of pellets in 2012, Drax has relied on America’s South for most of them, not only because it has vast tracts of forest close to coastal ports for easy export but also because these conservative states impose few of the regulations that protect woodland in the UK and the rest of Europe.
Logging companies traditionally cut down only the biggest trees as they are most suitable for the building and furniture industries, leaving the smaller ones to keep growing. They also left the ecologically-precious ‘wetland hardwood’ varieties such as cypress because they were too gnarled to become planks or tables.
It doesn’t matter what your position on climate change is. The story here is the sheer hypocrisy:
Everyone I spoke to in North Carolina admitted they were slightly shocked that “tree-loving” and climate change-aware Britain, of all countries, had facilitated the biomass industry –adopting renewable energy accounting rules that didn’t account either for the forests being lost in the US or the carbon emissions from burning the wood.
Derb Carter, a senior lawyer at the Southern Environmental Law Centre, told me he had repeatedly visited the UK to explain the situation to government officials.
“There was this assumption that surely the US regulates how forests are managed to protect the public interest,” he said. The Brits were “surprised”, he said, when he explained that in southern states like North Carolina, there was nothing of the sort.
He was disappointed by Ed Miliband’s verdict on Drax this week, saying: “This is not a good decision for our climate and certainly not for our forests over here.”
“We had hoped that a new government would have taken a really hard look at this. When you’re basically cutting forests and hauling them across the ocean to burn instead of coal, it makes no sense.”
Mr Carter believes the fact that the environmental destruction happens out of sight – and therefore out of mind – has been very useful for Drax in winning British acquiescence.
“It’s a lot harder to burn your own forest than someone else’s,” he says. “People are going to be a lot more tolerant if the wood pellets just show up on a ship and you don’t see the trees being cut and don’t see the forest being lost.”
Just like buying solar panels and batteries from China, where the coal power stations providing the energy to manufacture them are conveniently out of sight, and allowing China to gain a chokehold on the UK renewables sector.
The North Carolina story is worth reading in full.
“Everyone I spoke to in North Carolina admitted they were slightly shocked that “tree-loving” and climate change-aware Britain, of all countries, had facilitated the biomass industry”
Is no-one in North Carolina facilitating the biomass industry? Do the trees just walk onto the ships?
There are but a few that facilitate cutting, chipping transporting and loading on to ships compared to the everyone who was “shocked that “tree-loving” and climate change-aware Britain, of all countries, had facilitated the biomass industry –adopting renewable energy accounting rules that didn’t account either for the forests being lost in the US or the carbon emissions from burning the wood.”
In other words, the rape of the world in pursuit the climate agenda is more important than anything else when it comes to people like you. Do I have that about right?
Furthermore, those “few” are making a bundle on the North Caroline ecosystems they are leading into a chainsaw massacre.
Yes, and the tragic despoilation / devastation of pristine native eucalyptus and rainforest species forests and landscapes in Australia through greedy, taxpayer subsidised development of windmills concentration camps is Green hypocrisy at its shameless, unapologetic worst.
A small WUWT consolation concerning ‘those few making a bundle’. DRAX supplier Enviva went bankrupt in 2024 owing more than $1.3 billion. They tried, but failed, to make a bundle off DRAX.
How ’bout those that did make a bundle? Were there any?
How big is the carbon foot print of the pellets? It has to be a lot.
Heavy machines with big Diesel engines are used to harvest timber and take it to the pellet plant. Is some of the wood used to generate steam for manufacture and drying the pellets?
The dry pellets are then taken to the cargo ship by trucks with big Diesel engines. The cargo ship uses fossil fuels from its big marine engines. The pellets from the cargo ship are transported to the power plants by trucks with big Diesel engines. The wood ash from the steam boilers has to be taken to a land fill by trucks with big Diesel engines.
To the foot print should be added the CO2 that trees could have fixed.
That, and it’s pretty well known that Drax sits on top of a now shuttered coal mine.
The lunatics are in charge of asylum.
Actually the chips are hauled from ports on the East and West coasts of England in DIESEL HEADED trains. A couple trundle through my local station every day.
Unfortunately there is now no option but to keep Draco running as we have blown up every one of our coal fired stations in a ludicrous excess of green zeal.
Et Zero is the slow motion suicide of the British evonomy.
Strewth Nick you rise early.
Did you like my reply to Brian Catt?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/02/15/was-1-5c-a-climate-propaganda-whoopsie/#comment-4038217
All the best,
Bill Johnston
http://www.bomwatch.com.au
Hi Bill,
Yes, surface flux balance is the way to go, with rainfall as a constraint on evaporation.
I was going to check on some temp gradients, but the NOAA site is down
Why not ask DT to kick the loggers out, make that abomination illegal?
EZ, Since I have selectively had logged (under independent forester supervision—never trust the logger) the three hardwood woodlots (~30, ~40, ~80 acres) on my biggish Wisconsin dairy farm about every 15 years for the past nearly 45, there is a simple answer. Except on federal land, logging is a purely state/local regulated process. I suspect WUWT professional forester Zorzin can confirm that generally. So DT has no say.
I am presently logging my 80 acre summer home property in Lake George watershed. The forester had to jump through hoops to get permission to log. Only 30% of harvestable trees may be taken. No mud or debris can go down into the lake. My loggers are 4th generation. The last time this property was logged was over 60 years ago so many of the trees have voids at their bases which cuts the value. Large Hemlock is going to Canada for structural lumber while veneer logs are going to Japan. Quite an operation . My everyday logger says he wants to retire on this job in 2 years which is when we figure it will be completed .The terrain is quite rugged.
Base voids says maybe should have been selectively logged much sooner. I had a gigantic red oak with that problem. No logger would touch it because of terrain reasons until it finally just fell over.
My terrain is also rugged, as the three woodlots are where the uplands are too steep for even nonerosion farm pasturage. BUT, my trusty 4WD tractor, chainsaw plus logging chains, and Brushhog cut trails thru all three woodlots for hunting (ATV is so much easier than dragging a big whitetail Buck out) more than sufficient for logging. Only took a couple of years of very hard weekend work. So as long as loggers only go in dead winter when the ground is frozen, no erosion problems.
Sadly, this story is not new news, yet for several years has not had the slightest impact in the UK. And greater DRAX emissions than from the coal mine it sits over is not the whole DRAX emissions story. You have harvesting, drying, pelletizing, and transport emissions also—all from fossil fuels.
There are also circulating two related false myths that attempt to pretend DRAX is OK when it isn’t.
Rud,
Your valuable comments, on this topic and generally, reflect an input that few people have had, namely, top management of nationally important corporations. I have had similar experience but on smaller scale, in Australia. This management experience might allow a better perspective about national problems. People can debate that. It is also possible that people are employed at the top of corporations because they have already demonstrated proficiency in matters relevant to national problems.
I have not seen such people causing national problems through activism for a cause. I regard maximising profits as a duty, not as a cause. The typical demonstrated intelligence and problem solving ability of activists, particularly on environmental issues, is woeful and low, the main skills being cunning and being devious while disregarding many factors of the problem with special pleadings.
The voting public might not appreciate the importance of your views. They seldom show that they understand or align with mine on climate change. Geoff S
TY.
For reference, I graduated from the joint program at Harvard Law/ Business a year behind Mitt Romney—but with better academic standing. Rose to become the top global rainmaker at BCG after 15 years. Quit to become the only corporate ‘intrapreneur’ and then equivalent of Chief Strategy Officer at former client Motorola before its regrettable demise—foreseeing which but unable to stop is why I left for entrepreneurship to keep reputation intact. Seen a lot, done a lot, just like you. I my case, globally.
Of course, the global part also eventually cost me my marriage.
From the pictures supplied it is impossible to determine what sort of wood is going where and for what purpose. In the picture of the log yard there is a commercial chipper in the lower right corner but it not in use at the time of the picture and it right next to the slash pile. The merch timber is in front of the loaders and the rest appears to be pecker poles, only good for 2×4 or less. Looks like a bog standard logging yard to me. It’s obviously an east coast operation, west coast doesn’t cut the merch that short before transport.
regarding 1., I don’t see anything in the pictures here that indicates what happened to the logs.
If Georgia Pacific can earn more money by making pellets from logs than they can get from making lumber or plywood, then obviously they would do that, but it would raise an interesting question: Exactly how much is the UK paying for pellets?
regarding 2., there is only one stand of virgin timer in North Carolina. It is the Joyce Kilmer forest. What I can see in the photos, the trees look like they’re 40 to 50 years old. So the land was logged before, and it will be logged again.
If you click through to the story in the Daily Mail, you can see that they identify the location of the logged site as being on Harvey Point Road, in Hertford, NC. If you go to Google maps and look at the aerial images, you can see the trees are planted in rows. If you use Google Earth, you can look at the images from 1985 and see that the land was all agricultural fields, and the trees have grown since then, presumably when fields were retired — probably from tobacco.
The greatest thing about Ed Miliband
is that he is not an American
This is how he got the nickname “flywheel”, which I origially thought was Babylon Bee satire:
The Cost Of Miliband’s Flywheels – Watts Up With That?
Nah, nah nah …
The best is that Ed Miliband is a pom and way..yyy over there! We have enough over here without him, whatever…
b
His dad was a Hungarian Jewish communist, Given refuge in Britain post WWII.
And his dad hated the country that gave him refuge. Which may have influenced Ed’s thinking (not that there’s much evidence of him ever doing any useful ‘thinking’).
To try and understand this madness better we visited the Drax power station a few years ago when in the UK. Our guide was an ex-coal miner from the Selby coalfield right under the station (that’s why it was built there…). He now has to refer to coal as ‘that black stuff”.
We had some UK guests at our B&B in New Zealand…they were livid about the constant train traffic 24/7 from the special (diesel) trains with airtight carriages hauling the pellets from the port on the east coast to Drax right beside their home.
I suppose the only good news is that it only gets $1 million a day now in subsidies to save the planet.
Maybe Trump needs to make the UK the 51st state instead of Canada…
No thanks to both. Said as someone who owned a summer ‘cottage’ in Canada for several decades, and has several close UK friends. We have enough to do dealing with wanna be 51st state DC, Puerto Rico, and wanna be country California.
Nah.
Trump has SOME standards.
(Unlike most of his detractors).
Really? Trump is a loose cannon with no real plan or idea and a hopeless grasp of anything outside of McDonalds. He will – as any random monkey does – do some good and also a lot of harm.
He is showing clear signs of dementia as well.
Biden was pathetic. Haris was invisible. Trump is out of control. Even his handlers in Russia can’t make sense out of him.
Oh well., It will all resolve itself one way or another – probably in WWIII,
But at least you got your light-bulbs back.
Really? Trump obviously spent several years planning and setting up for his clean up.
You really are not paying attention.
Fun second reply. I did not know about airtight wood pellet train carriages to DRAX, so just did some quick research. Turns out that just like improperly stored dairy hay spontaneous combustion barn fires, improperly stored wood pellets will absorb atmospheric moisture, start to oxidize and heat, and then can spontaneously combust from high surface area to volume—just like hay. The spontaneous combustion moisture threshold is only about 15% by weight for both. In the US they now everywhere require airtight wood pellet steel storage containers for pellet burning wood stoves. Insurance mandated. Insurance cancelled if you leave the wood pellets in an opened plastic purchase bag.
Glad my daughter’s family did NOT opt for wood pellets in the fancy modern Swedish wood stove for their newish Evergreen Colorado home living room (carefully glass shielded on wood floor base, stone ‘tile’ insulated walls, and doubled insulated stove pipe just like at my Wisconsin dairy farm. (My daughter learned well.) Architect recommended, they rejected.
They burn only short cut (11 inch rather than standard 18 inch) split dead aspen firewood from the state forest partly adjoining their 8 acres, a compromise between hardwoods (they have none) and softwoods (they have lots). SiL Max, my grandsons, and I put in two facecords in a pleasant afternoon during my Thanksgiving week with them. The boys of course used the sleds for sledding on the new 10 inches of powder the day I arrived, between cut wood log hauling trips. Max cut and split, I stacked under the purpose designed sheltering south facing overhanging eve (Bavaria inspired, where my daughter was born). Was a fair work tradeoff, as he still runs mountain marathons at 7500 feet while old man gramps lives at sea level and never did a marathon.
Forgot to add something non Wisconsin part time dairy farmers might not know, just for added fun WUWT detail here.
The standard ‘retail’ chainsaw has an 18 inch usable bar length (electric ‘toys’ are less). (Longer bars/chains of course exist for ‘pros’, up to about 60 inches—heavy monsters requiring real skill). So the standard firewood cut is 18 inches—one usable bar length easily measured in the woods plus or minus.
SiL Max has a standard 18 inch Stihl (same as the better of my two chainsaws at the Wisconsin dairy farm—older second is for putting ‘slave labor’ to work cutting splitting firewood during invited deer hunting season). He solved the fancy Swedish stove short bolt length problem by just putting a big black magic marker line on both sides of the bar at the 11 inch from bar tip length. Problem solved cheap, still in the woods easy special cut length marking. My daughter married very well.
There’s nothing more humiliating for a bloke than to turn up for a firewood cutting day with some mates and toting a pussified 14-inch chainsaw.
And then it wouldn’t start 🙁
My Dad considered my skinny uni prof husband effete and useless until he tuned the chainsaw that had never worked properly.
For me, length of firewood is about 15.5 inches because that is the height of a 5 gallon plastic paint bucket. I use those to carry into the house from the storage shed.
I have a 7 year-old Blaze King catalytic burner stove. My saw is a Stihl, smaller than the last one. Four years ago I got a smallish electric splitter. It is a blue Bilt Hard 6.5 Ton, with small wheels. Not really meant to be portable but I can still move it. {I’m getting too old for the heavy-duty stuff I could do 40 years ago. }
As for Drax — the word abomination fits.
The system has allowed multi-offspring landowners to split the property from which they had only a little income to make something of their inheritance. Not that I approve of the choice.
Both hydro and biomass must be removed from the list of renewable/green energy. Pictures of the clear cuts being created to ship wood pellets to Britain need to be plastered all across the US. The CAGW crowd are liars.
No such thing as renewable/green energy anyway. Nuclear comes very close and hydro only creates a mess in the construction phase (still have images imbedded in my mind of the dead caribou floating in some river due to the huge James Bay hydroelectric project in northern Quebec) but eventually the wildlife adjusts.
All so called ‘renewable energy’ is nuclear energy from the sun, just harvested in the most inefficient way possible
We should inform the US and UK Greenpeace that the Drax is massacring the southern forests. In the UK the protesters could block the trains taking the pellets to the power plants.
Or maybe just open the cars to the air.
That would be silly and would cause UK energy grid to shut down.
North Carolina doesn’t need those trees, anyway. They can use all of that cleared land to install the solar panels that North Carolina state law demands. But if it’s boggy, it’s a wetland and as to be avoided. Never mind.
Just so you know, the DRAX subsidy also triggers other tax subsidies stateside “for the jobs”. The ghost fleet of wood pellet ships goes unnoticed by green reporters and editors along with the fossil fuel use for all the heavy equipment for harvesting, hauling, and shipping. I think we need better green accounting for the price of protecting each and every tree in the UK. Call it Green Colonialism too.
The global experiment on powering civilization (heating, cooking, and light) with wood had failed. By 1800, coal was supplanting wood, and exceeded wood by 1850.
Today, the globe requires over 600 EJ of energy while biomass can produce less than 30 EJ – MAXIMUM. That is not a guess, it is a well-known reality (https://e360.yale.edu/features/carbon-loophole-why-is-wood-burning-counted-as-green-energy ).
Allowing delusional Europeans (or, anyone else) to denude our landscape and the forests of central Europe is worse than useless. It is a prescription for an environmental and ecological disaster.
Milliband apparently is a milli-mind. One glance at the attached global biomass energy production graphic (Our World in Energy) makes clear that the Gaussian logistic is fully asymptotic. There is no where for biomass to go that is UP. The USA and Brazil are the major producers and both have exhausted their land availability for biomass. UK – Fire that moron.
His boss is a robotic moron, who has surrounded himself with an entire Cabinet of morons. They all need to go.
Burning wood and calling that green is false. But wood is a reliable source of power, which the UK desperately needs, so that’s the good news..
They might as well paint coal green before burning it, then calling that green energy.
I just completed my blog’s daily reading list for tomorrow and had to reject this article because I believe it exaggerated the clear cutting in NC. For unknown reasons, the Daily Sceptic has become less reliable this year. I can’t recall many misleading articles last year.
Honest Climate Science and Energy
There is too much confusion over this subject, and contradictory data, to say it is all clear cutting.
For biomass energy companies, “waste wood” is any tree that is not straight. Or maybe it’s not dense enough to be processed into lumber. Braches on a straight tree that can be used for lumber are also called waste wood. The percentage of waste wood in pellets depends on the source of the information. This seems like a nuclear secret.
According to most (probably biased?) industry reports, a significant majority, around 85% of wood pellets are made from scrap wood, specifically byproducts from sawmills and other wood processing operations like sawdust, wood chips, and bark, which are considered waste materials in the lumber industry.
A simple visual scan of Envira wood pellet processing yards proves the ‘waste/scrap’ materials’ assertion is simply NOT true. There are four underlying economic reasons.
Finally, to educate yourself on the forest products industry, realize that bark is a low value byproduct ordinarily just burned along with natgas in special furnaces to produce supplemental process heat in pulp and plywood mills . I am intimately familiar with both, the former both softwood and hardwood. They were my clients.
It appears you are neither.
(1) I clearly stated there is a large range of claims about the use of waste wood.
(2) I said the definition of waste wood is flexible
(3) I said the industry claim of 85% is probably biased.
With all the conflicting claims, I have no reason to assume you are THE EXPERT and everyone else is wrong. Especially when your claim seems to be based on “A simple visual scan of Envira wood pellet processing yards”, which is far from being an accurate measurement.
I stand by my claims (1), (2) and (3).
You have not refuted them
You have not convinced me that you are THE EXPERT on this subject and almost everyone else is wrong or lying. You have not worked in the industry and have no inside information for us.
Insulting me makes your claim of being an expert less persuasive.
Envira had 66% of the US wood pellet export market, not 100%
Enviva claims that most of its wood pellets are made from waste wood, but an anonymous whistleblower says that the company actually uses mostly whole trees.
The percentage of pellets from clear cut forests in NC is unknown. Also unknown is the quantity of new trees that had been planted in clear cut areas, or trees that were deliberately planted by Enviva for use by Enviva
The only consensus about wood pellets for power is almost everyone is against them except for the UK government Drax.
The UK gets wood pellets from the US, Canada, Latvia, the Netherlands, Estonia, and Brazil. The US is the largest supplier, accounting for 73% of imports in 2023.
Clear-cutting is used to harvest wood from Canadian forests to supply the United States, which is the biggest buyer of Canadian lumber
The countries with the highest deforestation rates include Nigeria, Bolivia, Cambodia, and the Philippines.
Despite an unknown amount of clear cutting in North Carolina, the amount of forest in the United States has been increasing, though there are some areas of declining urban tree cover
Richard Greene wrote, with bold highlighting added for good measure :
My irony meter just exploded … I’m going to be deaf for (at least) a week …
Drax is a biomass con, firmly entrenched in the UKs delusional energy-environmental-political drama, somewhat as a cynical replacement for the breakup of UK coal, but the harm, if any, is done there in Great Britain, not in North Carolina.
The area was denuded of trees, mostly pine and spruce, in several waves from the early 18th Century. Main use of the original pine was for tar and lumber. Later growth – mostly natural – changed over time to hardwoods. Tar heel was the nickname given to North Carolinians, carried over to University sports teams.
The last growth in much of the state was broadcast planted between 40 and 70 years ago. Most of the area is since protected as state and national forest, and exploited only by license and permit. Some of the land is still private, and can be logged out almost at will by the owner. A recent article by The Honest Broker, Roger Pielke, gives evidence that there isn’t enough burning and clearing maintenance going on in U.S. forests: https://open.substack.com/pub/rogerpielkejr/p/the-north-american-fire-deficit?r=o86ng&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
The recent hurricane and flood wiped out many thousands of acres of the mountaintop hardwood because of poor founding: Roots of 40 to 50 year old trees were too shallow, grown too fast, and without deep support for the amount of rain that fell during the hurricane and the entire week before landfall in Florida.
Almost all of the deadfall from the storm, and the demolition and clearing that has occurred as a result of the storm, has been or will be burned in open fires or in homeowners’ fireplaces for winter heat. This Drax private land logging is a tiny part of the forest in the state, and when burned in Britain, emits much less life giving carbon into the atmosphere than is emitted from the waste disposal of wood in North Carolina itself.
The Southern Environmental Law Center (not Centre, since it is a proper name), is an eco-lawfare front operating against energy concerns. If there was any money to be made by suing this Drax operation, it would have been done long ago. It isn’t big enough to worry about.
The picture above is a stock photo of wood pelletizing on a small scale. It was not in the original published article. There is no indication that I can find that it is even picturing a scene in North America, yet alone any place pertinent to or referenced in the article.
I didn’t see a reference in the piece above or the original that indicated if the author toured the logged area before or after the hurricane.
Biomass is only practical as a fuel if it is waste produced near where it is burned. Bagasse (sugar cane stalk) in some parts of Brazil is a good example of economic biomass use for electricity.
UK should put its coal miners and transporters back to work, put scrubbers on its antiquated coal plants, bring its industry back, frac the hell out of its natural gas reserves, reopen oil and gas in the North Sea, and work on throwing the government bums out on their bums – not all in that order.
Someone in North Carolina will still burn that wood.
UK coal has long been completely uneconomical.Yes we should frack, but above all we need nuclear – lots and lots of it,.
“Yes we should frack”
f you have the rock, the CapEx, the water, the sand, the hands, the fleet, the Ben Dover regulatory infrastructure required, then KYSO.
I’ve read up. You don’t. And actually we don’t either, any more…
Great! Agreed Leo! Your program is the proper one for the entire world.
No way will you get nuclear, except by charity, without an industrial economy. You won’t get that without oil and gas. Your “leaders” have p***ed it away!
All of us, in the places we laughingly call democracies, need to start electing public servants, instead of leaders.
If a people “elect” a Marxist wrecker, and do not rebel, they have signed their own death warrants.
Perhaps another Executive Order is needed to prohibit the export of wood for fuel based on preservation of forests for wildlife?
Denis. An EO forbidding the temperature from rising would be as effective.
Canute did a good one – let’s have an executive decree to hold back the ocean!
The U.S. has a healthy forest product industry. Other countries benefit greatly by trade. As more forests come under healthy free market management, Let UK set a tariff on imported forest products, including paper.
“He was disappointed by Ed Miliband’s verdict on Drax this week, saying: “This is not a good decision for our climate and certainly not for our forests over here.”
I’m sure it is unintentional on Mr Milliband’s part but Drax is an important source of conventional generation to offset and stabilise Mr. Milliband’s ‘cheap’ wind.
Certainly it would be even better using coal from Selby, but I don’t even know if that is possible never mind economical?
Hire some German coal mining engineers. There’s a lot of them. A part of the UK’s coal mining demise was because antiquated, labor-intensive mining techniques, false assessments of sunk cost, and anti-growth labor legislation. As much as we all like to say that it is uneconomic to mine coal in the UK, I’ve not heard the independent opinion of a modern mining engineer.
Then UK will have to consider a trade off: better to surrender to external economic dominance or rebuild UK industry and get rich enough to pay for better sources of energy?
The price of some items shows it has non trivial “CO2 content”.
That wood has cost representing gasoline for machines and for workers driving to work, and bunker oil for transportation over seas, etc.
The prices pays for that oil and probably some coal.
Well, gasoline (mixed with oil) for the chain saws, diesel fuel for the heavy equipment, trucks and trains.
Well poor old Ed, in between a rock and a hard place. With the UK surplus over peak demand in winter disappearing like snow off a dyke, plus pushing electric heat pumps and EV’s that leaves him with no choice but to support Drax despite him knowing it’s another Green scam. Much better to have admitted the mistake and converted it back to coal.
He cant convert back to coal. The EU will not allow it and the UK is still signed up to the EUs nucleår and renewables policies.
Well then “sign out” of the EU bullshit. The whole point of Brexit was to break those chains.
AS usual the Drax situation is completely misunderstood and misrepresented.
Drax was a massive coal fired power station built on top of a coal field.
At a given point te EU declared that coal was out and although Drax was viable and profitable it would not be allowed to continue (importing coal from US and eastern Europe).
At that point Drax approached the government with a plan to extend their co-firing of coal with organic waste – straw and woodchip – to convert their furnaces from coal to biomass. Not only was the government OK with this – EU regulations positively encouraged biofuel – but they would qualify for big subsidies. The minister of energy was of course Red Ed Miliband.
Drax duly spent billions on new furnace technology and wood chip handling and storage and converted from coal to wood on the understanding that the EU and the government were cool with it.
Of course the government reneged on most of te subsidies but they could not afford to close the UKs biggest power station.
Of course the misrepresentation that Drax is deforesting huge areas is about as silly as saying that the US de-maizing the mid west. Trees are grown for crops and the tree species are grown for the most rapid accretion of biomass. Probably poplar willow and other wetland spoecies
Drax tried to build a gas power station,m but in the end the economics are simply not there. Wind and solar are subsidised, Gas is taxed.
Don’t blame Drax. Blame the EU.
Blame the UK for not running away from stupid EU policies, which was the whole point of BREXIT.
The UK is like an abused dog who breaks his leash but stays with his abuser instead of running away.
No-one has yet convinced me that trees grow quicker then they burn.
I’ve said the same thing many times.
Who in their right mind thinks biomass as an energy SOURCE is “sustainable?!”
Because trees in particular burn FAR faster than they grow.
Does the whole world have to look like Haiti before the idiot politicians figure out that you can’t run modern civilization on wood fires?!
This has been going on for at least 20 YEARS.
“In 2004, North Carolina began producing a significant amount of wood pellets primarily for export to the UK, largely through the company Enviva, which has multiple facilities in the state and is considered the world’s largest producer of wood pellets; these pellets are used as fuel in power plants overseas, particularly in the UK, as part of their shift towards “renewable” energy sources. “
Planet warming gas
No.
Here’s the property:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/GzbM3yWjfeSS9cJF9
If you use street view you can see the house across the road that’s in the photo that illustrates the story.
The portion of the property that’s near the road had been clearcut in (or a little before) 1999 (you can see it in Google Earth). Here in the South, trees grow fast. If you scroll around on Harvey Point Road, you can see that on many lots the trees are in neat tidy rows. People grow trees as a crop.
This story is a big nothing.
The UK deforested itself. Can it be a surprise that it has no problem with the deforestation of the US?