The big fraud:

It takes more than 30 tractor-trailer loads of wood a day to feed Nova Scotia Power’s Port Hawkesbury biomass plant when it’s running.

But according to the province’s new cap-and-trade carbon-pricing plan, nothing comes out of the facility’s stacks.

The plan classifies biomass as a carbon-neutral way to create electricity or heat.

The province is taking its cue from federal government policy, along with that of the United States and European Union.

All are attempting to meet promises they made at a much-touted 2015 summit in Paris to reduce carbon emissions to a level that would ideally slow global warming.

The problem is that a tremendous amount of greenhouse gases come out of a biomass plant – often more per unit of electricity than if you’d burned coal.

“It’s an accounting fiction,” John Sterman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s System Dynamics Group, said of the carbon neutrality of biomass.

“I’d go so far as to call it an accounting fraud.”

Last January, Sterman released a model for analyzing the life-cycle carbon emission of biomass.

He joined a chorus of scientists warning that in the rush to be seen to be doing something to reduce carbon emissions by subsidizing biomass, the western world will actually make them worse.

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