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2022-10-04

It always struck me as a daft idea that felling and burning  "renewable" forests whilst promising to plant more and more trees wherever there is a "spare" patch of land and paying farmers to grow trees i.p.o. food is good, whilst just burning coal and gas is bad.

Even assuming that you grow as much wood as you burn (highly doubtful - trees take years longer to grow than to burn) you would still get the same amount of CO2 (or less!) into the atmosphere by not bothering and continuing to burn the coal and gas. Even the pollutant content would be worse from burning wood than from coal and gas. 

Why not just burn the coal or gas and keep the existing forests to take up the CO2? And think of the fuel (and CO2) that would be saved by not transporting the wood pellets half-way across the world.

OK I simplify, but I'm in the right ball-park. The BBC admits it all:

"The BBC report explains that although burning wood produces more greenhouse gases than burning coal, the electricity is classed as renewable because new trees are planted to replace the old ones and 'these new trees should recapture the carbon emitted by burning wood pellets'. However, 'recapturing' the carbon takes decades"

Only decades? Has anybody done the maths?

So the idea is a non-starter in the first place even on the green advocates' own terms.

And the balance sheet of CO2 production against absorption is in practice too complex to monitor and thus to control (prove me wrong!).

But of course it's worse ... the rules of the game are being flouted.

"Ecologist Michelle Connolly told Panorama the company was destroying forests that had taken thousands of years to develop"

The Daily Sceptic has the story.