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Biomass fuel today a global disaster and boondoggle
By Bjorn Lomborg |
May 22, 2013, Wednesday
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WE are all brought up to recycle paper to save trees. Indeed, environmentalism was born with a call to preserve the forests.
But now, in the name of saving the planet from climate change, some environmentalists are proposing an immense global campaign to cut down and burn trees and scrub in order to reduce fossil-fuel use.
Biomass is experiencing a revival, because it is considered CO2-neutral. The conventional wisdom is that burning wood only releases the carbon sucked up while the tree was growing, and hence the net climate effect is zero. But a growing number of voices challenge this view.
The European Environment Agency's Scientific Committee has called it a "mistaken assumption" based on "a serious accounting error," because if a forest is cut down to burn wood, it will take a long time for new growth to absorb the CO2 emissions. The climate effect could be a net increase in emissions if forests are cleared to create energy-crop plantations.
Environmentalists' plan to obtain 20-50 percent of all energy from biomass could mean a tripling of current biomass consumption, placing its production in direct competition with that of food for a growing global population, while depleting water supplies, cutting down forests, and reducing biodiversity.
An academic paper published last year makes the point clear in its title: "Large-scale bioenergy from additional harvest of forest biomass is neither sustainable nor greenhouse gas neutral." Its authors point out that while the Industrial Revolution caused climate change, reliance on coal was actually good for forests, because our forebears stopped raiding forests for wood. This is one of the major reasons that forests in Europe and the United States have recovered - and it is why many forests in developing countries are threatened.
The developed world's re-enchantment with biomass could take it down a similar road.
In Denmark, a group of researchers estimated by how much various crops would reduce CO2 emissions.
For example, burning a hectare of harvested willow on a field previously used for barley prevents 30 tons of CO2 annually when replacing coal. This is the amount that proud green-energy producers will showcase when switching to biomass.
But burning the willow releases 22 tons of CO2. Of course, all of that CO2 was soaked up from the atmosphere the year before; but, had we just left the barley where it was, it, too, would have soaked up quite a bit, lowering the reduction relative to coal to 20 tons.
And, in a market system, almost all of the barley production simply moves to a previously unfarmed area. Clearing the existing biomass there emits an extra 16 tons of CO2 per year on average.
We need to confront the next biomass boondoggle.
Bjorn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, founded and directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2013.www.project-syndicate.org. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
But now, in the name of saving the planet from climate change, some environmentalists are proposing an immense global campaign to cut down and burn trees and scrub in order to reduce fossil-fuel use.
Biomass is experiencing a revival, because it is considered CO2-neutral. The conventional wisdom is that burning wood only releases the carbon sucked up while the tree was growing, and hence the net climate effect is zero. But a growing number of voices challenge this view.
The European Environment Agency's Scientific Committee has called it a "mistaken assumption" based on "a serious accounting error," because if a forest is cut down to burn wood, it will take a long time for new growth to absorb the CO2 emissions. The climate effect could be a net increase in emissions if forests are cleared to create energy-crop plantations.
Environmentalists' plan to obtain 20-50 percent of all energy from biomass could mean a tripling of current biomass consumption, placing its production in direct competition with that of food for a growing global population, while depleting water supplies, cutting down forests, and reducing biodiversity.
An academic paper published last year makes the point clear in its title: "Large-scale bioenergy from additional harvest of forest biomass is neither sustainable nor greenhouse gas neutral." Its authors point out that while the Industrial Revolution caused climate change, reliance on coal was actually good for forests, because our forebears stopped raiding forests for wood. This is one of the major reasons that forests in Europe and the United States have recovered - and it is why many forests in developing countries are threatened.
The developed world's re-enchantment with biomass could take it down a similar road.
In Denmark, a group of researchers estimated by how much various crops would reduce CO2 emissions.
For example, burning a hectare of harvested willow on a field previously used for barley prevents 30 tons of CO2 annually when replacing coal. This is the amount that proud green-energy producers will showcase when switching to biomass.
But burning the willow releases 22 tons of CO2. Of course, all of that CO2 was soaked up from the atmosphere the year before; but, had we just left the barley where it was, it, too, would have soaked up quite a bit, lowering the reduction relative to coal to 20 tons.
And, in a market system, almost all of the barley production simply moves to a previously unfarmed area. Clearing the existing biomass there emits an extra 16 tons of CO2 per year on average.
We need to confront the next biomass boondoggle.
Bjorn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, founded and directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2013.www.project-syndicate.org. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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