Wood pellet stoves are not green energy, turns out

[TheVat]

https://archive.ph/N5MCX

(screenshot, paywall-free version of NY Times article)

(you have to scroll past the "interactive" pictorial at the top, which doesn't transfer the pics to the screenshot, so there's just a bunch of isolated sentences on a field of green)

(...) But today, as demand surges amid a Russian energy crunch, whole trees are being harvested for power. And evidence is mounting that Europe’s bet on wood to address climate change has not paid off.

Forests in Finland and Estonia, for example, once seen as key assets for reducing carbon from the air, are now the source of so much logging that government scientists consider them carbon emitters. In Hungary, the government waived conservation rules last month to allow increased logging in old-growth forests.

And while European nations can count wood power toward their clean-energy targets, the E.U. scientific research agency said last year that burning wood released more carbon dioxide than would have been emitted had that energy come from fossil fuels.

“People buy wood pellets thinking they’re the sustainable choice, but in reality, they’re driving the destruction of Europe’s last wild forests,” said David Gehl of the Environmental Investigation Agency, a Washington-based advocacy group that has studied wood use in Central Europe.

[Ken Fabian]

9 hours ago, TheVat said:

“People buy wood pellets thinking they’re the sustainable choice, but in reality, they’re driving the destruction of Europe’s last wild forests,” said David Gehl of the Environmental Investigation Agency, a Washington-based advocacy group that has studied wood use in Central Europe.

I'm not sure that domestic use is the biggest issue, rather it is burning wood pellets in power stations. It hasn't been increased domestic demand driving greatly increased forest harvesting; it doesn't help to lump them together.

I see wood burning in power stations - like gas - as a compromise mainstream politics supporting specific commercial interests insisted on to support building renewable energy. Much was made of the dependable, reliability of burning of fuels as a the lower cost alternative to investments in things like pumped hydro and the industry successfully made themselves into an "essential" ingredient of a transition to low emissions; that it was supply of the "low cost reliability" element - natural gas - that failed makes it more important to those commercial interests to persuade the public that we are witnessing a profound failure of renewables and that this conflict induced fossil fuel energy crisis be rebranded in the public - and the policy maker - mind as a green energy crisis.

Most of the "crisis" is soaring prices; I doubt overall supply of gas has diminished that much. These companies (apart from Russian ones) are making staggering hyper profits out of things going wrong in the world but fiercely resist bringing their prices down to merely very good profits to ease that sense of urgent crisis or prevent economies crashing and burning. It is the sense of crisis that lets them push for increasing overall supply and dependence and get government backing to do it. Climate concerns do count in this; this crisis is being used as an opportunity to sideline them. I boggle at the audacity - and the success - of blaming climate and emissions reductions as the cause of current woes and massive expansion of fossil fuel supply as the solution.

Most Green parties have opposed large scale forest harvesting for wood burning and tended to promote things like pumped hydro - batteries really only finding a viable place quite recently - along with (less helpfully) energy frugality, with the unwillingness of the rest of mainstream politics to commit to climate action and need for blameshifting a large part of the framing of the issue as green "you care so much, you fix it" and blaming of green politics for the failures "not like that!". Promotion of energy efficiency and frugality was turned back against climate action advocacy as "they want to take us back to the stone age" memes. Alarmist economic fear - of losing prosperity by going without fossil fuels - remains one of the most potent messages deniers and fossil fuels supporter have.

The sense of urgent crisis is temporarily overwhelming longer term climate concerns but I don't know those concerns or growth of renewables will ultimately be prevented but it can be slowed. I'd have thought the fossil fuel industry would be at risk of losing their social license - promising energy reliability and low costs and not delivering, making hyper profits out of economic instability, total disregard for climate consequences - but at this point they seem to be laughing their way to the bank, with a little bit of the windfall set aside for ongoing favorable political influence and publicity.

In Australia our variant of this gas supply crisis has come from our gas industry focus on exports - much on fixed price contracts but still a lot at global market prices. Domestic supplies are at the "will be cheaper this way" global price; the projects and gas production were and are so large that it seemed like assuring domestic supply required no special planning - like trickle down - so none was done. Record flooding (with attribution studies showing they were worse because of global warming) put some coal mines out of action so coal plants shut off and more gas was needed, for which no planning was made, with Winter starting with a cold snap, that wasn't anticipated - like a cold snap in Winter was something no-one could anticipate!

Even as the Australian electricity market operator (AEMO) calls for greater investment in renewables (including storage) as the longer term solution to price volatility and reliability the ongoing fossil fuel influence is getting politicians and governments to approve more mines and drill sites and make more dependence on fossil fuels the solution. It is incredibly frustrating - and dismaying.

Edited September 8, 2022 by Ken Fabian