- Burning wood to create electrical energy– “biomass energy”– is significantly being pursued as a sustainable replacement for burning coal in countries like the U.K., Japan, and South Korea– despite the fact that its emissions aren’t carbon neutral in practice.
- On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, press reporter Justin Catanoso talks to Rachel Donald about the single biggest emitter of CO2 in the U.K., biomass company Drax, which is attempting to open 2 wood pellet plants in the state of California.
- Catanoso discusses how years of examination assisted him reveal a complex web of public relations messaging that obscures the reality that replanting trees after cutting them down and burning them is not in practice carbon neutral or sustainable and seriously damages international biodiversity and forests.
- “When those trees get removed, that carbon gets launched. Which comes before we process this wood and ship it … then we burn it and do not count those emissions. This is simply [an] imponderable policy,” he states on this episode.
Justin Catanoso is no complete stranger to wood pellet plants, as he lives near 4 of them in the U.S. state of North Carolina, where biomass giant Enviva has a number of centers. While that business declared Chapter 11 personal bankruptcy this year, it stays the single biggest manufacturer of wood pellets worldwide.
This company is among numerous (together with Drax in the U.K.) looking for to broaden its worldwide stake in the shift to renewable resource– a classification of energy generation that market and regulators firmly insist burning biomass belongs in. A current analysis reveals it’s not sustainable and includes more carbon to the environment than coal and gas. Due to complex language in the Kyoto Protocol treaty that extended the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, numerous countries and the European Union still permit the burning of wood pellets to be counted as such, and therefore made eligible for aids, too. This is a remarkable issue for worldwide efforts to slow the biodiversity and environment crises, Catanoso states.
Listen to the discussion here:
“In my location of North Carolina, which is the mid-Atlantic, we will have the environment of northern Florida in about 15 years. That’s how quick our environment is altering here,” Catanoso states. “It’s upon us, and we are not pulling the levers quickly enough. To slow this down and reducing trees, calling it carbon neutral … that’s simply among those loopholes that is simply entirely manufactured.”
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Banner image:Wood pellets with combustion chamber in the background. Image by AntonioGravante through Envato.
