In the name of saving carbon, our politicians have just taken a disastrously wrong decision on the issue of biofuels. They have agreed to subsidise power stations which burn biofuels, so paving the way for a massive expansion in the amount of wood and palm oil which are used in the UK.
Greenpeace – along with the RSPB and Friends of the Earth – have just produced a report (Dirtier than Coal?) which demonstrates just what a bad decision this is. It shows that burning whole trees will increase greenhouse gas emissions by at least 49% compared to coal over a 40 year period. Yet despite this we are going to subsidise a massive expansion of precisely this activity.
The problem is that it takes trees – even assuming they are replaced – a long time to recapture the carbon which is emitted when they are burned for fuel. Moreover the desire to have a quick growing simple product means that increasing amounts of land will be given over to biologically deserted monoculture plantations. We have seen the adverse effect of these on our own hills and are moving away from this approach, but this will encourage exactly that same sterile development in other countries on a dramatically larger scale.
With all the potential conversions of power stations from coal to biomass we will need to import more than five times as much wood as the UK harvests domestically each year. So we will be encouraging deforestation in other countries to keep our lights on. And to add insult to injury, the Green Investment Bank, intended to support the development of a low carbon economy here in the UK, has announced that it will be making a £100 million loan to Drax to help convert half its boilers to burning biomass.
It may be too late to stop this disastrous turn in government policy, but it isn’t too late to put pressure on the companies involved to turn their backs on biomass and on the Green Investment Bank not to fund large scale biomass. Biofuelwatch are co-ordinating a protest at the Drax AGM on 24th April and you can write to the GIB calling on them to stop funding biomass. You can also follow developments on the Biofuelwatch Facebook page. The battle may be lost, but the war isn’t over yet.
This is a shorter version of an article I wrote for the One World Column
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