Tag: EU

UN forest accounting loophole allows CO2 underreporting

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The CO2 Forest Accounting Loophole

  • Emissions accounting helps determine whether or not nations are on target to achieve their voluntary Paris Agreement reduction goals. Ideally, the global community’s CO2 pledges, adjusted downward over time, would, taken together, help keep the world from heating up by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 from a 1900 baseline.
  • But scientists are raising the alarm that this goal may already be beyond reach. One reason: a carbon accounting loophole within UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines accepting the burning of wood pellets (biomass) as a carbon neutral replacement for coal — with wood now used in many European Union and United Kingdom power plants.
  • Scientists warn, however, that their research shows that replacing coal with wood pellets in power plants is not carbon neutral. That’s partly because burning wood, which is celebrated by governments as a renewable and sustainable energy resource, is less efficient than coal burning, so it actually produces more CO2 emissions than coal.
  • Also, while wood burning and tree replanting over hundreds of years will end up carbon neutral, that doesn’t help right now. Over a short timeframe, at a historical moment when we require aggressive greenhouse gas reductions, wood burning is adding to global emissions. Analysts say that this loophole needs to be closed, and soon, to avoid further climate chaos.

https://news.mongabay.com/2018/05/un-forest-accounting-loophole-allows-co2-underreporting-by-eu-uk-us/

Where I live they are generating 800MW of power using biomass.

The Biomass Scam

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The EU is behind the biomass scam where coal is replaced with wood and wood produces more CO2 than coal.

The EU was also behind the diesel scam which has made the air filthier.

“The British government pushed to weaken EU controls on biomass energy in December, even though the technology will undermine efforts to contain global warming for up to half a century, according to research released today.

Despite its imminent Brexit, the UK successfully rewrote a proposal to almost quadruple the potential size of wood burning plants before they had to meet efficiency criteria, according to documents obtained by Unearthed, and shared exclusively with Climate Home News.

The win for Whitehall’s lobby offensive – in alliance with Poland and Spain – was pushed through in a ministerial revision to the renewable energy directive in December.

Shortly before it was approved, a group of high profile climate scientists warned the directive’s biomass articles were “a critical flaw” in the proposal, and would accelerate climate change.

This was because the proposal tolerated the cutting down and burning of whole trees, a process that releases more CO2 into the atmosphere than replanted trees can absorb for decades, if not centuries.”

 

“Because burned pellets emit carbon at a faster speed than decomposing forest material, the paper finds that burning them creates more net emissions – when measured against their “alternative fate” as decomposing twigs and branches.

Mary Booth, the report’s author and director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, a campaign group opposed to biomass, told CHN that counting biomass smokestack emissions – which tend to be greater than coal per megawatt-hour – was a more representative way of tallying net emissions than current assumptions of carbon neutrality.

“Scenarios that hold down greenhouse gas emissions to avoiding dangerous temperature rise require CO2 emissions to peak in the next ten to twenty years,” she said. “However, this analysis shows that wood-burning power plants burning green chips and wood pellets will inject a lot of extra CO2 into the atmosphere just in [that] period when it is most urgent to reduce emissions.”

The paper finds that cumulative net emissions from residue pellet-burning will also increase over a 40–50 year period, though less steeply.”

http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/02/21/documents-reveal-uk-push-water-eu-biomass-regulations/

 

Europeans Are Stupid

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Europe’s energy policies are worse than stupid.

“At the end of last year, Sir John Beddington, a former chief scientific adviser to the British government, lifted the lid on the scandal at the heart of the EU’s renewable policies. According to Sir John, since the EU’s first renewables directive in 2008, the growth of bioenergy — much of it sourced from North American woods and forests — has provided around half the expansion of renewable energy. To supply even one third of the additional renewable energy needed to meet Europe’s new 2030 target will require an amount of wood roughly equivalent to the combined harvest in the U.S. and Canada. The fiction currently being peddled is that Europe is only burning wood residues — the bits of trees left over from other uses — but new EU rules agreed to last week by the European Parliament will expand the definition of bioenergy to include trees specifically harvested to be burnt in power stations.”

They love CO2 in Europe.

‘Green’ Biodiesel Has Increased Emissions

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What a shocker.

The use of supposedly ‘green’ biodiesel to hit EU renewable energy targets has actually significantly increased greenhouse gas emissions, a new study finds.

By 2020, continued use of biodiesel derived from vegetable oil will increase total EU transport emissions by almost four per cent compared with using its fossil fuel alternative, according to analysis by Transport & Environment, a green group.

That is roughly equivalent to putting an extra 12 million cars to the road, it says.

Countries across Europe have blended small percentages of biofuels into petrol and diesel in recent years in an attempt to cut emissions and to hit the EU’s renewable energy directive (RED), which requires 10 per cent of transport energy to come from renewable sources by 2020.

But Transport & Environment says the EU’s own studies show that producing biodiesel from food crops – in particular soy and palm oil – is significantly worse for the environment than producing regular diesel.