Greenies are up in arms over another environmental scandal of their own making. A TV documentary, shown on Britain’s left-wing Channel 4, has been shocked to discover that old hardwood forests in the U.S. are being chopped down, exported to the UK and burned for what is laughably being billed as “green” energy.
According to the Ecologist:
Huge areas of hardwood forest in the state of Virginia are being chainsawed to create ‘biomass’ energy in Britain as the government attempts to reach targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in efforts to tackle climate change, an investigation by Channel 4 Dispatches has found.
A key part of government efforts to hit its green energy targets is to switch from generating electricity from burning coal to burning wood – or so-called biomass. It’s a policy that is costing taxpayers more than £700 million per year through a levy on their electricity bills.
Well, fancy that. Enviro-loons caught once again killing the planet in order to save it.
Oscar Wilde would have called this “the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass”.
I call it: “Groundhog Day.” This happens all the time because environmental destruction is not a bug in the Climate Industrial Complex – it’s a feature.
The U.S.-hardwood-for-UK-biomass scandal is a perfect example of the havoc wrought on nature by misguided enviros trying to reach targets in worthless accords.
At £80 per MW/hr, Drax’s biomass energy is two-and-a-half times more expensive than coal – a cost passed on to customers. Last year Drax soaked up £340 million in ‘green’ subsidies that were added to British consumers’ power bills – a sum set of rocket still further. Without these subsidies, its biomass operation would collapse.
He revealed that, far from using just “eco-friendly” pellets (supposedly left over from things like housebuilding), Drax’s supplier is clear-cutting swathes of hardwood forest which will take years to recover.
In a promotional video for Bloomberg Business last month, the only pellet source that managing director Andy Koss mentioned was the sawdust. He said: ‘We take the sawdust that’s left over from sawmills that are cutting the big trees that go into house-building.’
In fact, according to Drax’s own website, last year sawdust made up just 9.5 percent of its pellets. A much bigger source is American hardwood trees – such as oak, sweetgum, cypress, maple, and beech – supplied by US firm Enviva, which sells Drax a million tons of pellets a year, a quarter of the plant’s 2014 supply. Drax claims the wood it is supplied with is ‘sustainable’.
However, the Dogwood Alliance, a US environmental group, has investigated Enviva operations on the ground several times and found evidence to the contrary.
Drax is proud of its green credentials and claims that it uses sawdust from sawmills and ‘waste wood’ or ‘leftovers’ – branches and smaller sections – discarded by commercial logging operations
Late last month, Dogwood campaigner Adam Macon traveled with colleagues to the Enviva pellet plant at Ahoskie, North Carolina, where he saw piles of hardwood trunks 40 feet high being fed into the plant’s hopper – the start of the process where the trees are pulped and turned into pellets. These could not be described as ‘leftovers’.
Yet four years on, nothing has been done to correct this crying scandal.
Britain’s ‘Conservative’ government remains so wedded to green ideology and EU-driven renewables targets that actually considers its biomass policy something to boast about.
As it told the Ecologist:
A spokesman for the Government’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy told Channel 4: “Between 1990 and 2016, the UK reduced its emissions by over 40 percent. We have the most stringent biomass sustainability provisions in Europe.
“Environmentally friendly, low carbon bioenergy can help the UK to transition to a more diverse energy mix, increase our energy security, keep costs down for consumers and help us to meet our 2050 carbon targets.”
So the only place we’re likely to get any sense on this issue is Donald Trump’s United States.
People of America: from North Carolina to Virginia and beyond, your precious, beautiful, biodiverse, picturesque hardwood forests are being felled to be shipped across the pond to provide overpriced, eco-unfriendly energy which is causing old people to die in fuel poverty while the squishy fake-conservative government responsible for this outrage crows about how magnificently green it is being.
I’m not suggesting that the time has come quite yet to redirect your warheads from Pyongyang to London, necessarily.
But I do think a few stiff words from President Trump might be appropriate, if and when the British government finally deigns to give him the state visit he so richly deserves.
Remember what Britain did to the White House in 1812, America. Don’t let the Brits get away with doing it again to your cherished woodland…
Read more at Breitbart
A typical mature tree will absorb 48 pounds of carbon dioxide a year. The small saplings that grow after a forest has been cut will take decades to reach that level. If the land is used for something else, then the “bio fuel” has the same effect of pumping oil out of the ground. What is worse is the forests are being destroyed to fight a non-existent problem.
The concept of goal replacement is at work here. A simple fictional example of goal replacement is a man who takes up weight lifting so he can be more attractive to women. However, he really gets into weight lifting and no longer has time to date due to his weight lifting schedule. Those who were once concerned about forests, the elderly and poor have had the goal of climate change action replace what they once cared about.
I’m not about to condone clear-cutting forests in order to fix a non-existent problem. It is known that we would strip the planet bare trying to replace nukes and fossil fuels .
What rarely gets mentioned about generating stations is their inherent inefficiency. Less than half the fuel value burned becomes electricity. Most of the heat is lost through condensing steam back to water, and heat out the stack.
If you need to heat a building, it is possible to achieve 90% efficiency if the fuel is burned in a stove, furnace or an outside wood boiler. Corn stoves and wood pellet stoves have similar efficiency per pound of fuel.
I cringe thinking about electricity being generated with natural gas. 50% of it is wasted. Coal use is restricted because it produces more carbon dioxide than gas? Stupid. Natural gas is the ideal domestic fuel, and we’re wasting it, trying to please idealists who refuse to be satisfied.