NEWS In The Guardian: EU must not burn the world’s forests for ‘renewable’ energy

Decem­ber 14, 2017 — The Guardian

A flaw in Europe’s clean ener­gy plan allows fuel from felled trees to qual­i­fy as renew­able ener­gy when in fact this would accel­er­ate cli­mate change and dev­as­tate forests

The Euro­pean Union is mov­ing to enact a direc­tive to dou­ble Europe’s cur­rent renew­able ener­gy by 2030. This is admirable, but a crit­i­cal flaw in the present ver­sion would accel­er­ate cli­mate change, allow­ing coun­tries, pow­er plants and fac­to­ries to claim that cut­ting down trees and burn­ing them for ener­gy ful­ly qual­i­fies as renew­able energy.

Even a small part of Europe’s ener­gy requires a large quan­ti­ty of trees and to avoid pro­found harm to the cli­mate and forests world­wide the Euro­pean coun­cil and par­lia­ment must fix this flaw.

Euro­pean pro­duc­ers of wood prod­ucts have for decades gen­er­at­ed elec­tric­i­ty and heat as ben­e­fi­cial by-prod­ucts, using wood wastes and lim­it­ed for­est residues. Most of this mate­r­i­al would decom­pose and release car­bon diox­ide in a few years any­way, so using them to dis­place fos­sil fuels can reduce the car­bon diox­ide added to the atmos­phere in a few years too.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the direc­tive mov­ing through par­lia­ment would go beyond wastes and residues and cred­it coun­tries and com­pa­nies for cut­ting down addi­tion­al trees sim­ply to burn them for ener­gy. To do so has fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent con­se­quences because the car­bon released into the air would oth­er­wise stay locked up in forests.

The rea­son­ing seems to be that so long as forests re-grow, they will even­tu­al­ly reab­sorb the car­bon released. Yet even then, the net effect – as many stud­ies have shown – will typ­i­cal­ly be to increase glob­al warm­ing for decades to cen­turies, even when wood replaces coal, oil or nat­ur­al gas.

The rea­sons begin with the inher­ent inef­fi­cien­cies in har­vest­ing wood. Typ­i­cal­ly, around one third or more of each tree is con­tained in roots and small branch­es that are prop­er­ly left in the for­est to pro­tect soils, and most of which decom­pose, emit­ting car­bon. The wood that is burned releas­es even more car­bon than coal per unit of ener­gy gen­er­at­ed, and burns at a low­er tem­per­a­ture, pro­duc­ing less elec­tric­i­ty – turn­ing wood into com­pressed pel­lets increas­es effi­cien­cy but uses ener­gy and cre­ates large addi­tion­al emissions.

A pow­er plant burn­ing wood chips will typ­i­cal­ly emit one and a half times the car­bon diox­ide of a plant burn­ing coal and at least three times the car­bon diox­ide emit­ted by a pow­er plant burn­ing nat­ur­al gas.

Although regrow­ing trees absorb car­bon, trees grow slow­ly, and for some years a regrow­ing for­est absorbs less car­bon than if the for­est were left unharvested.

Even­tu­al­ly, the new for­est grows faster and the car­bon it absorbs, plus the reduc­tion in fos­sil fuels, can pay back the “car­bon debt”, but that takes decades to cen­turies, depend­ing on the for­est type and use. We con­ser­v­a­tive­ly esti­mate that using delib­er­ate­ly har­vest­ed wood instead of fos­sil fuels will release at least twice as much car­bon diox­ide to the air by 2050 per kilo­watt hour. Doing so turns a poten­tial reduc­tion in emis­sions from solar or wind into a large increase.

Time mat­ters. Plac­ing an addi­tion­al car­bon load in the atmos­phere for decades means per­ma­nent dam­age due to more rapid melt­ing of per­mafrost and glac­i­ers, and more pack­ing of heat and acid­i­ty into the world’s oceans. At a crit­i­cal moment when coun­tries need to be “buy­ing time” against cli­mate change, this approach amounts to sell­ing the world’s lim­it­ed time to com­bat cli­mate change under mis­tak­en claims of improvement.

The effect on the world’s forests, car­bon and bio­di­ver­si­ty is like­ly to be large because even though Europe is a large pro­duc­er of wood, its har­vest could only sup­ply about 6% of its pri­ma­ry ener­gy. For more than a decade, the increased use of bio­mass has been sup­ply­ing rough­ly half of Europe’s increase in renew­able ener­gy. To sup­ply even one third of the addi­tion­al renew­able ener­gy like­ly required by 2030, Europe would need to burn an amount of wood greater than its total har­vest today. This would turn a like­ly 6% decrease in ener­gy emis­sions by 2050 under the direc­tive through solar and wind into at least a 6% increase.

Europe’s own demand for wood would degrade forests around the world, but if oth­er coun­tries fol­low Europe’s exam­ple, the impacts would be even more dan­ger­ous. Instead of encour­ag­ing Indone­sia and Brazil to pre­serve their trop­i­cal forests – Europe’s present posi­tion – the mes­sage of this direc­tive is “cut your forests so long as some­one burns them for ener­gy”. Once coun­tries are invest­ed in such efforts, fix­ing the error may become impos­si­ble. To sup­ply just an addi­tion­al 3% of glob­al ener­gy with wood, the world needs to dou­ble its com­mer­cial wood har­vests at great costs to car­bon and wildlife.

Nei­ther a require­ment that forests be man­aged sus­tain­ably nor any oth­er “safe­guards” in the var­i­ous work­ing drafts would stop this. For exam­ple, the direc­tive would ban wood if har­vests under­mined “the long-term pro­duc­tiv­i­ty capac­i­ty of the for­est”. Although that sounds good, pre­serv­ing the capac­i­ty of trees to grow back still leaves more car­bon in the air for at least decades. Restrict­ing wood har­vests to coun­tries with net grow­ing forests – anoth­er idea – would still take car­bon that forests would oth­er­wise add to their stor­age and instead put it in the air with­out mean­ing­ful glob­al limits.

The solu­tion is to restrict eli­gi­ble for­est bio­mass to its tra­di­tion­al sources of residues and waste. Leg­is­la­tors will like­ly be able to vote on such an amend­ment in the parliament’s plenary.

By 1850, the use of wood for bioen­er­gy helped dri­ve the near defor­esta­tion of west­ern Europe even at a time when Euro­peans con­sumed rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle ener­gy. Although coal helped to save the forests of Europe, the solu­tion is not to go back to burn­ing forests. As sci­en­tists, we col­lec­tive­ly have played key roles in the IPCC, in advis­ing Euro­pean gov­ern­ments, and in for­est and cli­mate research. We encour­age Euro­pean leg­is­la­tors and oth­er pol­i­cy­mak­ers to amend the present direc­tive because the fate of much of the world’s forests is lit­er­al­ly at stake.

Prof John Bed­ding­ton, Oxford Mar­tin School, for­mer chief sci­en­tist to the UK gov­ern­ment; Prof Steven Berry, Yale Uni­ver­si­ty; Prof Ken Caldeira*, Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and Carnegie Insti­tu­tion for Sci­ence; Wolf­gang Cramer*, research direc­tor (CNRS), Mediter­ranean Insti­tute of marine and ter­res­tri­al bio­di­ver­si­ty and ecol­o­gy; Felix Creutzig*, chair Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Eco­nom­ics of Human Set­tle­ment atBerlin Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty and leader at the Mer­ca­tor Research Insti­tute on Glob­al Com­mons and Cli­mate Change; Prof Dan Kam­men*, Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Berke­ley, direc­tor Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Ener­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry; Prof Eric Lam­bin Uni­ver­sité catholique de Lou­vain and Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty; Prof Simon Levin, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, recip­i­ent US Nation­al Medal of Sci­ence; Prof Wolf­gang Lucht*, Hum­boldt Uni­ver­si­ty and co-chair of Pots­dam Insti­tute for Cli­mate Research; Prof Georgina Mace FRS*, Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don; Prof William Moomaw*, Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty; Prof Peter Raven, direc­tor emer­i­tus Mis­souri Botan­i­cal Soci­ety, recip­i­ent US Nation­al Medal of Sci­ence; Tim Searchinger, research schol­ar, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty and senior fel­low, World Resources Insti­tute; Prof Nils Chris­t­ian Stenseth, Uni­ver­si­ty of Oslo, past pres­i­dent of the Nor­we­gian Acad­e­my of Sci­ence and Let­ters; Prof Jean Pas­cal van Yper­se­le, Uni­ver­sité Catholique de Lou­vain, for­mer IPCC vice-chair (2008–2015).

 

Those marked * have been lead authors on IPCC reports.

 

For more on Pro­fes­sor Kam­men and the Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Ener­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry’s work on bio­mass, click here and search ‘bio­mass’

 

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If you would like to sign on to this open let­ter o amend a Renew­able Ener­gy Direc­tive under debate so that the direc­tive does not encour­age the burn­ing of wood har­vest­ed just for that purpose. 

 

The let­ter close­ly tracks the fol­low­ing edi­to­r­i­al recent­ly pub­lished in the Guardian by sev­er­al promi­nent sci­en­tists and econ­o­mists. https://www.the​guardian​.com/​e​n​v​i​r​o​n​m​e​nt/2017/dec/14/eu-must-not-burn-the-worlds-forests-for-renew­able-ener­gy

 

Europe is cur­rent­ly con­sid­er­ing a renew­able ener­gy direc­tive that would raise the require­ments to use renew­able ener­gy from a lev­el of rough­ly 17% of final ener­gy demand today to a lev­el of 27–35% by 2030.   While this tar­get is laud­able, the direc­tive counts as ful­ly qual­i­fy­ing renew­able ener­gy the use of wood har­vest­ed for that pur­pose, and not mere­ly residues and waste. The pre­vi­ous renew­able ener­gy direc­tive has already led Euro­pean pow­er plants, fac­tor­ing and heat­ing instal­la­tions to shift to wood, import­ing much of that in the form of wood pel­lets from the U.S. and Cana­da. Many aca­d­e­m­ic papers have cal­cu­lat­ed that any wood har­vest­ed for burn­ing, even if trees are allowed to regrow, would result in increas­es in green­house gas emis­sions for decades to cen­turies even com­pared to the use of fos­sil fuels.
The major con­se­quences of the new direc­tive result from the sheer scope of the poten­tial wood require­ments. Although bio­mass has been sup­ply­ing around half of Europe’s growth in renew­able ener­gy (from 11% in 2007 to  around 17% today), if wood bio­mass sup­plied even one third of the future required growth by 2030, the direc­tive would require an amount of wood greater than all annu­al Euro­pean wood har­vest, which also rough­ly equals all annu­al U.S. and Cana­di­an wood har­vests combined.
The direc­tive will be vot­ed on prob­a­bly the third week in Jan­u­ary in the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment, and there will be an amend­ment to restrict for­est bio­mass to residues and wastes. There have been pre­vi­ous let­ters by 100 or more sci­en­tists on this issue to Euro­pean lead­ers, and we are hop­ing for more this time. If you are a sci­en­tists and would like to sign on, please also con­sid­er encour­ag­ing oth­er sci­en­tists you know as well.
If you would like to sign on, please send an email either to Greg Davies or Zuzana Buri­alo­va at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty at gd3@​princeton.​edu or z.​burivalova@​princeton.​edu, who will be keep­ing track.
The final sign-on date will be Jan­u­ary 5, 2018.
THE TEXT OF THE LETTER:

 

SCIENTIST EU FOREST BIOMASS SIGN-ON LETTER

 

To Mem­bers of the Euro­pean Parliament,

As the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment com­mend­ably moves to expand the renew­able ener­gy direc­tive, we strong­ly urge mem­bers of Par­lia­ment to amend the present direc­tive to avoid expan­sive harm to the world’s forests and the accel­er­a­tion of cli­mate change. The flaw in the direc­tive lies in pro­vi­sions that would let coun­tries, pow­er plants and fac­to­ries claim cred­it toward renew­able ener­gy tar­gets for delib­er­ate­ly cut­ting down trees to burn them for ener­gy. The solu­tion should be to restrict the for­est bio­mass eli­gi­ble under the direc­tive to residues and wastes.

For decades, Euro­pean pro­duc­ers of paper and tim­ber prod­ucts have gen­er­at­ed elec­tric­i­ty and heat as ben­e­fi­cial by-prod­ucts using wood wastes and lim­it­ed for­est residues. Since most of these waste mate­ri­als would decom­pose and release car­bon diox­ide with­in a few years, using them to dis­place fos­sil fuels can reduce net car­bon diox­ide emis­sions to the atmos­phere in a few years as well. By con­trast, cut­ting down trees for bioen­er­gy releas­es car­bon that would oth­er­wise stay locked up in forests, and divert­ing wood oth­er­wise used for wood prod­ucts will cause more cut­ting else­where to replace them.

Even if forests are allowed to regrow, using wood delib­er­ate­ly har­vest­ed for burn­ing will increase car­bon in the atmos­phere and warm­ing for decades to cen­turies – as many stud­ies have shown – even when wood replaces coal, oil or nat­ur­al gas. The rea­sons are fun­da­men­tal and occur regard­less of whether for­est man­age­ment is “sus­tain­able.” Burn­ing wood is inef­fi­cient and there­fore emits far more car­bon than burn­ing fos­sil fuels for each kilo­watt hour of elec­tric­i­ty pro­duced. Har­vest­ing wood also prop­er­ly leaves some bio­mass behind to pro­tect soils, such as roots and small branch­es, which decom­pose and emit car­bon. The result is a large “car­bon debt.” Re-grow­ing trees and dis­place­ment of fos­sil fuels may even­tu­al­ly pay off this “car­bon debt’ but only over long peri­ods. Over­all, allow­ing the har­vest and burn­ing of wood under the direc­tive will trans­form large reduc­tions oth­er­wise achieved through solar and wind into large increas­es in car­bon in the atmos­phere by 2050.

Time mat­ters. Plac­ing an addi­tion­al car­bon load in the atmos­phere for decades means per­ma­nent dam­ages due to more rapid melt­ing of per­mafrost and glac­i­ers, and more pack­ing of heat and acid­i­ty into the world’s oceans. At a crit­i­cal moment when coun­tries need to be “buy­ing time” against cli­mate change, this approach amounts to “sell­ing” the world’s lim­it­ed time to com­bat cli­mate change.

The adverse impli­ca­tions not just for car­bon but for glob­al forests and bio­di­ver­si­ty are also large. More than 100% of Europe’s annu­al har­vest of wood would be need­ed to sup­ply just one third of the expand­ed renew­able ener­gy direc­tive. Because demand for wood and paper will remain, the result will be increased degra­da­tion of forests around the world. The exam­ple Europe would set for oth­er coun­tries would be even more dan­ger­ous. Europe has been prop­er­ly encour­ag­ing coun­tries such as Indone­sia and Brazil to pro­tect their forests, but the mes­sage of this direc­tive is “cut your forests so long as some­one burns them for ener­gy.” Once coun­tries invest in such efforts, fix­ing the error may become impos­si­ble. If the world moves to sup­ply just an addi­tion­al 3% of glob­al ener­gy with wood, it must dou­ble its com­mer­cial cut­tings of the world’s forests.

By 1850, the use of wood for bioen­er­gy helped dri­ve the near defor­esta­tion of west­ern Europe even when Euro­peans con­sumed far less ener­gy than they do today. Although coal helped to save the forests of Europe, the solu­tion to replac­ing coal is not to go back to burn­ing forests, but instead to replace fos­sil fuels with low car­bon sources, such as solar and wind. We urge Euro­pean leg­is­la­tors to amend the present direc­tive to restrict eli­gi­ble for­est bio­mass to appro­pri­ate­ly defined residues and wastes because the fate of much of the world’s forests and the cli­mate are lit­er­al­ly at stake.

Ini­tial signers:

John Bed­ding­ton, Pro­fes­sor, Oxford Mar­tin School, for­mer Chief Sci­en­tist to the gov­ern­ment of the Unit­ed Kingdom

Steven Berry, Pro­fes­sor, Yale Uni­ver­si­ty, for­mer Chair­man, Depart­ment of Eco­nom­ics, fel­low Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Arts and Sci­ences, win­ner of the Frisch Medal of the Econo­met­ric Society.

Ken Caldeira – Pro­fes­sor, Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and Carnegie Insti­tu­tion for Sci­ence, Coor­di­nat­ing lead author or lead author of mul­ti­ple IPCC reports.

Wolf­gang Cramer, Research Direc­tor, CNRS, Mediter­ranean Insti­tute of marine and ter­res­tri­al Bio­di­ver­si­ty and Ecol­o­gy, Aix-en-Provence, mem­ber Académie d’A­gri­cul­ture de France France, Coor­di­nat­ing lead author and lead author of mul­ti­ple IPCC reports,

Felix Creutzig, Chair Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Eco­nom­ics of Human Set­tle­ment at Tech­nis­che Uni­ver­sität Berlin, Leader, leader Mer­ca­tor Research Insti­tute on Glob­al Com­mons and Cli­mate Change, Lead author of IPCC V Assess­ment Report and coor­di­na­tor of appen­dix on bioenergy.

Phil Duffy, Pres­i­dent, Woods Hole Research Cen­ter, for­mer Senior Advi­sor White Office of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Pol­i­cy, Con­tribut­ing author of mul­ti­ple IPCC reports

Dan Kam­men – Pro­fes­sor Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Berke­ley, Direc­tor Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Ener­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry, Coor­di­nat­ing lead author or lead author of mul­ti­ple IPCC reports.

Eric Lam­bin – Pro­fes­sor Uni­ver­sité catholique de Lou­vain and Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, mem­ber Euro­pean and U.S. Acad­e­mies of Sci­ence, 2014 lau­re­ate of Vol­vo Envi­ron­ment Prize

Simon Levin – Pro­fes­sor Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, Recip­i­ent, U.S. Nation­al Medal of Sci­ence, mem­ber U.S. Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sciences

Wolf­gang Lucht – Pro­fes­sor Hum­boldt Uni­ver­si­ty and Co-Chair of Pots­dam Insti­tute for Cli­mate Research, lead author of mul­ti­ple IPCC reports

Georgina Mace FRS, Pro­fes­sor, Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, Lead author IPCC report and Win­ner Inter­na­tion­al Cos­mos Prize

William Moomaw – Emer­i­tus Pro­fes­sor, Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty, Coor­di­nat­ing lead author or lead author of mul­ti­ple IPCC reports

Peter Raven – Direc­tor Emer­i­tus Mis­souri Botan­i­cal Soci­ety, Recip­i­ent U.S. Nation­al Medal of Sci­ence and for­mer Pres­i­dent of Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion for Advance­ment of Science

Tim Searchinger — Research Schol­ar, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty and Senior Fel­low, World Resources Institute

Nils Chr. Stenseth, Pro­fes­sor of Ecol­o­gy and Evo­lu­tion, Uni­ver­si­ty of Oslo, Past pres­i­dent of The Nor­we­gian Acad­e­my of Sci­ence and Let­ters, mem­ber Roy­al Nor­we­gian Soci­ety of Sci­ences and Let­ters, The Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ence (Wash­ing­ton), French Acad­e­my of Sci­ences, and Acad­e­mia Europaea

Jean Pas­cal van Yper­se­le, Pro­fes­sor, Uni­ver­sité catholique de Lou­vain, For­mer IPCC Vice-chair (2008–2015), mem­ber of the Roy­al Acad­e­my of Bel­gium, lead author or review edi­tor of mul­ti­ple IPCC reports

 

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