Potential energy crisis.
Power bill doubled. Energy bills this winter are going to be very grim.
What's going on,w ith bills right now?
The energy crisis has been on my mind a lot lately.
With winter approaching in the Northern Hemisphere, “winter approaches.”,
the consequences of Putin's war are moving even closer to our doorsteps.
Underwater explosions. Possible sabotage.
And though it may not bother him, I guess.
Many of us are in fact worried about whether we will be able to heat our homes.
Gas supplies would not be restored through the Nord Stream pipeline.
It's likely that Europe goes into a recession.
Amid growing concerns that we would run out of gas.
Demand for wood is significantly increasing.
In private homes as well as the industry.
Wood to burn as an energy source is supposed to come from timber
industry byproducts and waste or renewable sources like forests
that have been specifically planted or managed for logging.
But a recent report found that large numbers of trees are being harvested whole
from protected old growth forests in countries like Romania,
to satisfy our need for energy.
Can it really be that Europe is about to burn up
its last primary woodlands?
A major CO2 absorber and our key to mitigating climate change?
And what's even more peculiar is, that when I dug deeper into this question,
I started realizing, it's all connected to one very small and inconspicuous thing -
these little brown sticks, so-called “pellets”.
Wood pellets are often thought of as a renewable
and green energy source, a cornerstone of Europe's Green Deal.
Europe will it be the world's first climate neutral continent by 2050
But it turns out pellets aren't green and now the EU is facing a huge problem.
That's not simply a cold winter during an unprecedented energy crisis.
It's about not achieving the legally binding renewable energy commitments.
We are on a highway to climate hell.
And with them delaying or even interfering the whole world's
chance to fight the climate crisis.
The trouble began, as it often does, with good intentions.
So let's go back to 2009,
when the EU passed its European Renewable Energy Directive.
The goal was to encourage power plants and homeowners to move away from oil
and gas towards renewable energy sources like solar, hydro, wind and biomass.
Burning wood was not what the EU planned as its major green energy source,
but nevertheless, that's exactly what happened.
When do you started paying huge subsidies for biomass energy?
It fueled the comet-like rise of this industry.
In 2020, spending on biomass subsidies across the bloc was around €13 billion.
Wood pellets became the secret weapon of the EU's renewable energy strategy.
Countries like Italy,
which is the EU's biggest consumer of wood pellets, allow individual households
to reclaim up to 65% of the cost of installing a pellet stove.
In Germany it's up to 45%.
This type of thing has helped biomass
become so popular that the EU is expected to consume up
to 24.3 million metric tons of wood pellets this year.
Numbers like this put the EU top of the list of pellet consumers worldwide.
So, what exactly is it, this biofuel called “pellets”?
The EU defines precisely what a pellet should look like
cylindrical with a diameter not exceeding 25 millimeters
and in length not exceeding 100 millimeters.
And what is even more important for our story, what it should be made of:
“Agglomerates produced from co-products such as cutter shavings,
sawdust or chips, of the mechanical wood processing industry,
furniture making industry or other wood transforming activities.”
But at some point, waste wood stopped being the sole source of pellets.
The wood pellets, we might have thought were sustainable and green
had widely turned into nothing less than another source of harm to our planet.
And here's why:
No other EU country has as much virgin forest as Romania.
An estimated two thirds of Europe's last wild forests are found
in the Carpathian Mountains. But they are vanishing at an alarming
rate, even in national parks and Natura 2000 protected areas.
Photographs and drone footage from NGOs, like EuroNatur and AgentGreen
have shown clear cut areas and massive environmental destruction
in these protected forest.
The political situation is more than dubious.
The Romanian government's own logging management company
is also in charge of managing almost all the country's national parks.
Huge areas of virgin forest
have been lost in Romania's national parks over the last decades.
As a result of this absurd conflict of interest.
Mature and healthy trees, most of them centuries old and a vital
part of the ecosystem, are logged.
Simply to be ground into sawdust
and made into wood pellets with not a single additional use in between.
But this is not only happening in Romania, in other European countries like Estonia,
the evidence of destructive logging practices in protected forests has been found, too.
And despite popular protests, countries like Hungary have waived conservation
rules to allow more logging of ancient woodlands.
Even across the Atlantic, trees are being logged to fulfill the EU's need for wood.
Being clear cut, not for the benefit of the US, but to shift the product overseas.
In North Carolina, for example,
whole swathes of forest are being cut down to meet this insatiable demand.
I'm walking in what used to be a more than 60 year old forest.
Several more investigations showed that native hardwood and wetland forests in
the US had been cut down and assigned to Europe's renewable energy portfolio.
But cutting down the
lungs of our planet isn't the end of the story.
Instead of being green, biomass could actually be damaging the climate.
Research has revealed that burning wood can release
even more CO2 into the atmosphere than coal.
Why? Well, because of an easily forgettable thing called “carbon debt”.
People tend to assume the only negative impact of burning wood is that cut down
trees are no longer available to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
But what many people - and even EU law - fail to account for is
that as soon as a tree is burned, it also releases all that stored up carbon.
This newly released CO2 becomes known as the “carbon debt”.
And to ignore it is a serious oversight.
Now some would say, well, that's why we plant trees.
Yes, but it's not that easy.
Regrowth takes time.
Generally, it's assumed this debt repayment would take between 44 and 104 years,
depending on the type and number of trees planted to replace the burned ones.
So this was a lot.
Let's put it together.
First, we get subsidies for using wood pellets
to refrain from fossil fuels, which is totally fine.
But because the subsidies are so high, pellet production is skyrocketing.
And we started to cut down on our old virgin forests,
which is, of course, not sustainable at all.
And then we found out that it is not even green or clean.
By burning wood, we are producing even more CO2
than we would have by burning coal.
And that, ultimativley, makes the EU and its pellets
not a savior, but a hazard for the climate.
Which brings me to the question what is the EU's reaction to all that?
Some countries have already recognized the environmental costs
of using biomass in heating and power plants.
The government of the Netherlands, for example, has already implemented
a temporary stop of new biomass subsidies,
which became official policy in April 2022.
But there are also still supporters of biomass
like Finland's minister for Agriculture and Forestry,
who recently said he “fully promotes forest energy”.
However, in September 2022, a series of biomass amendments
were passed in the European Parliament, meaning certain types
of so-called primary woody biomass will no longer be classed as renewable.
This type of fuel is also going to be capped
and a face down implemented by 2030.
But the exact percentage of that face down hasn't been announced yet,
and there are numerous loopholes in the definition of “primary woody biomass”.
I can well understand the scientists and environmentalists
that are urging for concrete and fast decisions.
We have to act.
Because until truly renewable energy sources like solar and wind are widely
and cheaply available, we will continue to rely on biomass fuels like pellets.
Now, with the war and the energy crisis on top, we could easily
resign ourselves and simply say, “This makes everything worse”.
But couldn't this be quite the opposite and actually hold a chance for us?
The EU countries are bound by their pledges.
Remember: “Europe will be the world's first climate....”
With biomass, no longer being green, the need to invest
in truly clean energy sources has never been as strong as it is today.
This is maybe Europe's great chance to shift its subsidies to solar
and wind power to finally refrain from using fossil fuels
and to leave trees in the forest where they belong.
Do you want to support the NGOs we talked about, like EuroNatur and Agent Green?
Check out the links in the description below and learn more about the work.
See you next time.