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.
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