Green energy is ruined?

I recently saw this article shared on Facebook with a huge amount of likes and shares. The basic premise of the argument is that green energy in Europe is a scam and is emitting more than fossil fuel equivalents. This clearly seems problematic from the outset, and reading through this made me quite unsure about the place of social media in green energy debates. The ‘clickbait’ nature of the title fails to show the bigger picture. ‘Europe’s green energy policy is a disaster for the environment’ is something of an overstatement, as the actual article only talks about biomass burning, and glazes over the swathes of ‘good’ renewable energy being invested in, especially in western Europe and Scandinavia.

Now onto the meat and gravy of the article. The pivotal statement is that burning wood releases carbon into the atmosphere, at a greater level than the amount of carbon sequestered by the trees over their lifecycle. Whilst this may be true for wood, some biomass is produced via non-wood products, and has a much more carbon-neutral production. As for the wood itself, this comes into an interesting distinction – wood from afforestation has been found to be low emitting, lower than the emissions of fossil fuels. Similarly, waste wood, salvage wood and ‘pre-commercial thinnings’ are also low emitting. So the only types of wood that are high emitting are sawn wood, coarse dead wood and tree stumps. The article fails to attempt to find out how much of the latter group is being used for biomass production, and this could undermine the entire argument. Now, I’m happy to be proven wrong with sufficient evidence but it seems to me at the moment that New Scientist is clutching at straws to trip up Europe’s green energy policy for the sake of a shocking headline. This is particularly evident through the sheer number of people sharing and responding to the article with shock on social media, and this engrains a lack of trust in environmental government practices which (may) be unjustified. With so many delegates and climate scientists working on policies to reduce emissions, I cannot see how something that is made out to be so shocking, has been overlooked. The net emissions of bio power are likely lower than fossil fuel equivalents, and whilst some aspects of the burning may be high emitting, these probably do not take up the majority of the biomass generation.

If for some reason the biomass issue has been occurring, then official documents of the European Commission do acknowledge the high emissions of certain aspects of bio power, and so I am sure steps are being taken to minimise the amount of high emission bio power generation.

However, I am confident that there is no ‘grand scam’ taking place, and with the efforts of so many countries building wind and solar farms, and countries like Iceland already producing most of their energy sustainably, I believe that our governments do truly want to reduce emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change. I have witnessed the positive outlook on European energy policies through my blog and research for it, and if the future of green power was not looking so good, I would probably cut this article some more slack – but this is not the case. Sadly, all it takes is a few articles such as these to go viral, and the hard work and huge investments of so many are overlooked.