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What Now For Drax?
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The COP jamboree has made a decision to ban deforestation by 2030. Among the signatories are the USA and Canada and Drax gets the vast majority of its so-called "biomass" (i.e. freshly felled timber) from those two countries. Will there be an exception to the tree felling embargo to enable Drax to continue burning wood (in the same way as its emissions are excluded form the UK's total). Around 250 square miles (about half the area of Bedfordshire) of trees are felled each year to feed Drax. What will they burn there after 2030?
The COP jamboree has made a decision to ban deforestation by 2030. Among the signatories are the USA and Canada and Drax gets the vast majority of its so-called "biomass" (i.e. freshly felled timber) from those two countries. Will there be an exception to the tree felling embargo to enable Drax to continue burning wood (in the same way as its emissions are excluded form the UK's total). Around 250 square miles (about half the area of Bedfordshire) of trees are felled each year to feed Drax. What will they burn there after 2030?
Answers
This whole ridiculous Drax charade must surely end now. You can't stand up and talk about re forestation when ship loads of trees are being hacked down every day to feed this ridiculous biomass cobras. That's where Greta and co should be the gates of drax!
17:51 Tue 02nd Nov 2021
The latest Private Eye is (as usual) very good on this:
Among the many vested interests poring over the government's new "Net Zero Strategy" document are the tree-burning electricity generators, with the world's largest – Drax in Yorkshire, subsidised at £2m a day – to the fore.
We first highlighted the shocking carbon-accounting fallacy involved in classifying Drax as "green" in 2012, before it started (Eyes 1325 and passim ad nauseam), thus far to no avail. However, clamour is growing ever louder from scientists worldwide to stop classifying the burning of mature trees as anything other than the massive source of avoidable CO2 emissions that it is. Ministers have it under review for a new "biomass strategy" coming next year, which is the fig leaf behind which every mention of biomass-burning in the main document hides.
Good news? We are indeed promised a more rigorous approach to the definition of "sustainability" for sources of biomass. By any genuine reckoning, the game should be up for the tree-burning racket. On the other hand, the Net Zero Strategy continues to dangle the spurious prospect of "negative emissions" via burying the substantial CO2 output from biomass-burning under the ground and carefully counting that as a gain, but not counting the emissions in the first place – by which shameless sleight of hand, "negative emissions" are conjured up.
Pending the new 2022 strategy, both Drax and, lamentably, the government simply parrot the fact that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declares that "sustainable biomass is crucial to achieving global climate targets".
That may be true of a limited category of low-grade biomass fuels, but categorically not the high-grade biomass that Drax et al use as their main source of fuel: their sophisticated boilers can't use anything less (Eye 1379). A great deal hangs on the government turning away from a decade of false carbon accounting in its 2022 strategy.
Among the many vested interests poring over the government's new "Net Zero Strategy" document are the tree-burning electricity generators, with the world's largest – Drax in Yorkshire, subsidised at £2m a day – to the fore.
We first highlighted the shocking carbon-accounting fallacy involved in classifying Drax as "green" in 2012, before it started (Eyes 1325 and passim ad nauseam), thus far to no avail. However, clamour is growing ever louder from scientists worldwide to stop classifying the burning of mature trees as anything other than the massive source of avoidable CO2 emissions that it is. Ministers have it under review for a new "biomass strategy" coming next year, which is the fig leaf behind which every mention of biomass-burning in the main document hides.
Good news? We are indeed promised a more rigorous approach to the definition of "sustainability" for sources of biomass. By any genuine reckoning, the game should be up for the tree-burning racket. On the other hand, the Net Zero Strategy continues to dangle the spurious prospect of "negative emissions" via burying the substantial CO2 output from biomass-burning under the ground and carefully counting that as a gain, but not counting the emissions in the first place – by which shameless sleight of hand, "negative emissions" are conjured up.
Pending the new 2022 strategy, both Drax and, lamentably, the government simply parrot the fact that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declares that "sustainable biomass is crucial to achieving global climate targets".
That may be true of a limited category of low-grade biomass fuels, but categorically not the high-grade biomass that Drax et al use as their main source of fuel: their sophisticated boilers can't use anything less (Eye 1379). A great deal hangs on the government turning away from a decade of false carbon accounting in its 2022 strategy.
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