Hello and welcome to Just Have Another Think - a new bi-weekly addition to the Just Have a
Think channel, with a sharper focus on the ecological, environmental and social issues
that we all face as a consequence of the climate emergency we're now in the midst of. Now if,
like me, you read a lot of articles and watch a lot of videos about the climate
then no doubt at some point you'll have become aware of the term 'Biomass'. And if you listen
to many of the governments around the world then you'll hear it being championed as a major factor
in reaching carbon neutrality by 2050. But how carbon neutral is it? Well to answer that question
it's worth having a think about how biomass came to be a thing in the first place. One of
the inventions that came out of the industrial revolution was the automated printing press.
It notched up the speed and efficiency of printing by several orders of magnitude,
and it had huge benefits to society, allowing far more folks in far-flung areas
to be kept up to date with the latest news and read the popular books at the time.
But it also massively increased the demand for paper, which by then was mostly being made from
trees. That meant that owning a pulp or paper mill suddenly became a very lucrative business indeed.
And one of the biggest beneficiaries of that was the already well-established sawmills. Sawmill
owners had always burnt their own offcuts and sawdust to heat their own workshops and homes,
but as the volume of this waste product began to grow rapidly the more astute among them spotted an
opportunity to make some easy extra cash on the side by pressing their waste into wood pellets
and selling them as a heating fuel stock to homes in the surrounding area, especially in
the United States. Essentially, that was the birth of the biomass industry. Business ticked
over very nicely in the US, and by the middle of the 20th century wood pellets were being used in
the wood stoves and backyard smokers of millions of American families. As the decades rolled on it
wasn't just the waste product of sawmills that continued to drive the industry. Developers
and speculators had moved in on the market and were stripping large areas of land to make way
for monocrop tree plantations specifically for fast harvesting and conversion into wood pellets
in brand new purpose-built production facilities. And they weren't just being sold to domestic
households either. They found their way into the boilers of some of the country's electricity
grid power generators as well. It wasn't an altogether successful financial gamble though.
Burning wood to produce electricity is expensive, and many plants proved to be uncompetitive,
even with government subsidies in the form of supplemental green energy payments.
As a result, towards the end of last century, the biomass industry in America began to slow down.
Meanwhile, over here on this side of the pond, in 2009 the European Union
implemented something called the European Renewable Energy Directive, which alongside
solar, wind and hydro power, and against the very strong advice of over 800 scientists,
was enthusiastically promoting biomass, mainly in the form of wood pellets, as a carbon neutral
energy source. That directive vastly accelerated wood consumption in Europe. In fact between the
year 2000 and 2017 it more than doubled. That gave the European Union a bit of a problem, because
most European forestry is quite heavily protected by very clear strictures. So the EU started
looking for ways to make up the deficit of wood fuel production that its CO2 reduction data needed
in order to keep the United Nations happy. And that's when they fell into the warm and welcoming
arms of the struggling US biomass industry, who were more than happy to send their wood pellets
across the Atlantic in vast quantities. Some countries outside of Europe started
taking a lead from the EU and began building biomass energy infrastructures of their own,
most notably South Korea, becoming the world's third largest importer of wood pellets in 2018
after the United Kingdom and Denmark. They mostly import from Southeast Asia, but they also get
pellets from Russia, the USA and even the ancient forests of British Columbia in Canada. Michelle
Connolly, who directs the British Columbia based organization Conservation North, said
international demand for wood pellets is driving increased logging in British Columbia forests,
including the last remnant patches of old growth inland rainforest - a globally rare ecosystem.
Logging forest that has such massive stores of carbon and harbours for biodiversity means goodbye
to any hope of climate mitigation or nature preservation, because the wood pellet industry
vacuums up everything in the ecosystem. The growth of biomass in South Korea has been driven by heavy
government subsidy amounting to nearly 40 per cent of total renewable energy subsidies issued between
2014 and 2018 - the highest among all renewable energy sources, according to research by Seoul
based organization Solutions For Our Climate. Their managing director Ju Xing Kim said "Data
from the plant operators themselves show that biomass plants can emit even more air pollution
per megawatt hour than coal plants, yet the Korean government is increasingly dependent on bioenergy
to meet our renewable energy goals, stunting the growth of vital zero emissions technologies
like solar power". International carbon accounting rules state that carbon losses from forest
harvesting have to be reported in the land sector section of the carbon audit for the country where
they were felled. That means harvested forest wood can't be reported as a CO2 emission, even if it
does get burnt. Instead it gets counted simply as a reduction in that country's forest carbon
uptake. And because that number is then already recorded in the overall report for that country,
the rules say that the energy sector emissions for CO2 from burning the resulting biomass
have to be counted as zero, otherwise the carbon loss will be counted twice.
That means the producers can treat biomass as being equivalent to zero emissions technologies
like wind and solar. One of the biggest windfall bonuses that this skewed regulation brings for
South Korea is that their utilities are often able to co-fire wood pellets with coal in their older
power plants, which allows those plants to collect renewable energy subsidies. South Korea already
has some of the most polluted air in the world. In 2019 their government passed emergency powers
to combat what it called the 'social disaster of air pollution', leading to the temporary closure
of a quarter of its coal-fired power plants. Here in the UK, the scientific community has
been lobbying hard for constraints to be put on the use of forest wood as a renewable fuel.
In fact the European Union's own team of advisors, The European Academy Science Advisory Council,
warned the then EU president Jean-Claude Juncker in January 2018 that the legal mandate to record
forest biomass fired energy as contributing to the EU renewable energy targets has had the
perverse effect of creating a demand for trees to be felled in Europe or elsewhere in order to burn
them for energy thus releasing the carbon into the atmosphere which would otherwise stay locked up in
the forest and simultaneously drastically reducing the carbon sink strength of the forest ecosystems.
Now of course the biomass industry takes great exception to this. In recent years
they've pointed out all sorts of reasons why burning trees is a perfectly benign activity,
so it's probably worth taking a quick look at their arguments. Their first strategy
was to suggest that a large slow growing tree had equal carbon neutrality to a comparatively small
and extremely fast growing corn plant. Corn can be refined into liquid biofuels like corn ethanol
with the biomass portion of the fuels net emissions being considered as carbon neutral
because yearly crop regrowth and carbon uptake are assumed to offset the CO2 emitted by the fuel
consumption the year before. The biomass industry argued that it's exactly the same principle
with wood pellets. Environmental scientists point out though that even the most optimistic
proponent of tree harvesting for energy couldn't realistically justify this claim because trees
obviously take decades to grow and we haven't got decades to wait. The second suggestion from
the biomass industry was that they only use the 'tatty', useless parts of trees
that get left over as mill waste to make wood pellets. They say this scrap stuff would only
be left to decompose anyway so burning it to make fuel wouldn't result in any net increase
in overall CO2 emissions. But those environmental scientists came back again. This time with some
rather inconvenient documented proof from on the ground operatives and investigators showing that
there was in fact widespread clear cutting of timber specifically for use as pellet feedstock.
They also observed that, no matter where the source timber comes from, burning wood emits
CO2 into the atmosphere immediately, whereas leaving the wood scraps on the floor to decompose
allows their carbon content to oxidize into the atmosphere extremely slowly over the course of
many years. So burning them still speeds up the release of carbon dioxide just at a time when the
world needs to slow that process right down to a grinding halt. To counter that one the industry
claimed that as long as they were planting and growing more timber than they were cutting down
then they'd be harvesting sustainably, which according to these scientists is also a fallacy.
In order to justify calling their product carbon neutral then for every square metre of forest
the biomass producers cut down, they'd have to find an even bigger area of newly planted forests
somewhere else. In reality, carbon stores in forests are decreasing not increasing
on a global basis. And there's simply no massive regrowth program anywhere on the planet
that's large enough to compensate for this allegedly sustainable timber harvesting.
Now just for full disclosure, I don't speak from a country with a sparkling track record
of carefully managing biomass combustion either. The UK is a very enthusiastic proponent of
shoehorning as much of this officially carbon neutral fuel into our energy mix as possible.
Our largest power station, Drax, which has a capacity of 4 000 megawatts supplying more than
4 million homes across the country, now runs four of its six enormous boilers on biomass
and receives the best part of a billion pounds a year in renewable energy subsidies for doing so.
Mary Booth, the director of the US-based Partnership for Policy Integrity
or PFPI - an organization that's been fighting these international legal loopholes for many
years - said in an interview in 2020 "The big lie that burning forests for fuel is carbon neutral
has taken hold around the world, signalling capture of renewable energy policy making
by the industrial forestry complex. We hope the courts will recognize that because burning wood
for energy threatens forests air quality and the climate governments should not promote it
as a zero-carbon renewable energy". If all this strikes you as a bit bonkers,
then take a few minutes to write to your elected representative to find out what they know about
it and whether they're campaigning in government on your behalf. Just a little bit more midweek
food for thought for you. As always, thanks very much for listening, and I'll see you on Sunday