A 12 EZ RE the washington post.thursday, november 11 , 2021
COP
BY MICHAEL BIRNBAUMGLASGOW, Scotland — The
European Union brags that its
climate ambitions are more ag-
gressive than anywhere else in the
world. There’s just one problem: If
the world behaved like Europe, it
would be burning an awful lot of
wood.
Europe gets 60 percent of its
renewable energy from biomass
fuels, a process that uses wood
scraps, organic waste and crops to
generate heat and electricity in
specially designed power plants.
U.N. rules allow the European
Union to write off the emissions as
carbon-neutral, so long as sustain-
able guidelines are met, even
though burning the fuel can re-
lease more warming gases into the
atmosphere than coal does.
The E.U.’s reliance on wood-
burning energy to meet its climate
goals — which include cutting
greenhouse gas emissions 55 per-
cent by 2030 — is a measure of the
difficulty of making the transition
to clean energy even on a conti-
nent where politicians have
shown political will and enjoy sig-
nificant public support for their
green agenda. For now, much of
Europe’s emissions reductions are
being achieved by burning bio-
mass instead of coal — and then
not counting the resulting green-
house gases, which critics say they
should.
That contributes to the gap de-
tailed in a Washington Post inves-
tigation published Sunday that
found that many countries are sig-
nificantly underreporting their
emissions to the United Nations,
leading to a massive undercount
of what is actually released into
the atmosphere.
At the U.N. climate conference
underway in Glasgow, the bloc’s
top climate official, Frans Tim-
mermans, a devoted environmen-
talist, doubled down on biomass
this week, saying Europe needed it
as a substitute for worse alterna-
tives.
“To be perfectly blunt with you,
biomass will have to be part of our
energy mix if we want to remove
our dependency on fossil fuels,”
Timmermans told reporters. “I do
admit that it’s quite complicated
to get this right.”
Europe is not alone in relying
on biofuels. They are also part of
President Biden’s climate agenda,
including the Build Back Better
Act being discussed in Congress.
Biofuel is also hardly the only
element of Europe’s climate strat-
egy. It has covered its landscape
with solar panels and windmills. It
plans to phase out new gasoline
and diesel cars by 2035. It has a
carbon-trading market — essen-
tially a tax on carbon emissions —
that is rapidly driving coal-fired
energy out of existence. Its new
plan to sharply cut emissions by
2030 is a feat it says will put it on
track to be carbon-neutral by
2050.
And it has pledged $25 billion a
year toward helping poorer coun-
tries reduce their emissions, far
more than the United States,
which has offered $11 billion —
most of it still dependent on con-
gressional approval.“We are now entering the core
of the discussion, the concrete leg-
islation that needs to be changed,”
said Pascal Canfin, chairman of
the environment committee in the
European Parliament and an ally
of French President Emmanuel
Macron. “I don’t see anywhere else
in the world where you have this
scope of laws being changed.”
But Europe’s dependence on
biomass adds an asterisk to its
green credentials, critics say. Un-
der U.N. rules that tally emissions,
when industry cuts down trees,
that is counted as emissions from
land use, which doesn’t factor in
what actually happens to the
wood in the end. It’s not counted
as emissions when it’s burned —
even though biomass fuel can emit
a plume of greenhouse gases just
as potent as coal’s.
That’s to avoid double-counting
the emissions. Critics call it a loop-
hole. The biomass industry says
the current rules make sense.“This accounting framework is
based on long standing peer re-
viewed science,” Taylor Fitts, a
spokesman for the U.S. Industrial
Pellet Association, said in an
email. “Counting at the smoke-
stack would also result in an array
of incentives for unsustainable
harvesting and deforestation.”
Fitts said the industry followed
strict rules to ensure that it was
replanting trees and following es-
tablished guidelines to make its
products sustainable.
“Sustainability is crucial for our
industry to deliver actual climate
benefits, so it is rightly the most
highly regulated among the entire
forest products sector,” he said.
Timmermans said Europe
would “try to use the biomass that
is not at odds with our environ-
mental and climate objectives.”
Excluding emissions from bio-
mass can make a big difference.
According to their official num-
bers, the E.U. and Britain togetherreduced energy-related emissions
by 26 percent between 1990 and- Adding emissions from bio-
mass makes the reduction 15 per-
cent over the same period, accord-
ing to an analysis last month from
Chatham House, a British policy
think tank. Britain — which left
the E.U. in 2020 — is a major
consumer of biomass pellets, so
the post-Brexit E.U. figures for bio-
mass are likely to be somewhat
smaller.
The dendrological sleight of
hand was the subject of extensive
discussion over the summer as
Europeans considered a proposal
to eliminate forest wood as an
acceptable source of sustainable
biomass. After pressure from
countries that rely heavily on bio-
mass for their energy, including
Sweden and Finland, the sustain-
ability rules were left largely un-
changed.
Advocates of biomass say that
the greenhouse gas accounting is
sound because forests can be re-
planted, ultimately recapturing
the carbon that is released into the
atmosphere when wood and other
organic materials are burned. And
they say low-quality or dead wood
in forests can be culled in a sus-
tainable manner to make the fuel.
Byproducts of other industrial
processes, such as sawdust, can be
turned into energy without fur-
ther touching forests. An E.U.
study released this year found that
about half of the wood-based bio-
mass used for energy came from
industry byproducts and recycled
wood: About 37 percent came
from treetops, branches and other
tree parts, and only 14 percent
probably came from whole trees.
There was little European bio-
mass industry before 2009, when
new E.U. subsidies started to en-
courage the use of the fuel. Coal
power plants can be converted to
burn biomass pellets relatively
easily, making the switch attrac-
tive.
Timmermans said he wanted to
tighten the rule book to make sure
the climate accounting is sound.
Right now, Europe generally de-
pends on the assurances of bio-
mass suppliers — many of whom
are in the southeastern United
States — to manufacture the pel-
lets sustainably, including by re-
planting trees.
“Even a little bit of mistake on
the energy side has this gigantic
effect on the world’s forests,” said
Tim Searchinger, a senior re-
search scholar at Princeton Uni-
versity’s Center for Policy Re-
search on Energy and the Environ-
ment. He was among more than
500 scholars to sign a letter this
year calling for an end to biomass
subsidies and a change to how the
emissions are tallied.
For now, biomass appears to be
firmly entrenched in Europe’s sus-
tainable system. Climate analysts
say the bottom line isn’t good for
emissions.
“We need to cut emissions pret-
ty radically now, and burning bio-
fuels is still putting carbon into
the atmosphere,” said Pieter de
Pous, a senior policy adviser at
E3G, a European think tank that
focuses on climate policy.
[email protected]E.U.’s big climate ambitions have scent of wood smoke
Ian Forsyth/Bloomberg News
Wood chips at a biomass plant in Teesside, England. Both the European Union and Britain rely heavily on the burning of wood scraps and
other biomass to generate heat and electricity. But the emissions — which can surpass those of coal — are not counted under current rules.Thursday, November 11 at 12:00 p.m.
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