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If it involves destroying trees, we know it’s a Green trying to save them:
Government’s plan to reach ‘net zero’ by 2050 by removing carbon from the atmosphere relies on BURNING the equivalent of 120 million trees a year just to ‘balance the books’, report claims
DailyMail
The UK government‘s plan to reach ‘net zero’ by 2050 by removing carbon from the atmosphere relies on burning the equivalent of almost 120 million trees a year, a new report claims.
The government’s Net Zero Strategy, released in October 2021, aims to capture up to 58 million tonnes of CO2 from the burning of biomass and piping it under the North Sea.
But to create this much carbon, a whopping 32,534,939 tonnes of wood pellets would need to be burned every year, according to a report by The Telegraph — the equivalent of 119,834,572 trees.
The UK plan assumes trees are carbon neutral, though some of these forests are shipped from America, and probably not via sailing ships. Who can forget how in 2015 Drax, Britain’s biggest power station, received more than £450 million in subsidies for burning biomass, which was […]
Building the future one log at a time.
Thanks to climate activists, coal deposits underground are safe but Europe’s old forests are being converted to industrial plantations and wood pellets
Pierre Gosselin of NoTricksZone thinks the media, which raged over Brazil’s Amazonian forest fires may be finally noticing their own man-made disaster.
The ARD’s “Das Erste” reports how satellite images show deforestation has risen 49% since 2016 in Sweden, Finland and the Baltic countries. The reason: “Because of the CO2 targets.
Who needs massive hardwoods anyway?
For “CO2-neutral” wood pellets
Where once massive hardwoods once stood now grows tiny fir trees. The harvested trees, the report says, were used for wood pellets – a form of renewable green energy. The trees, the pellet industry says, will grow back.
Not only are the forests taking a hit, but so is the wildlife that once inhabited in them. According to Ms. Steinberg, bird life has fallen some 25%. “It’s wasted. Now we have to start all over again.”
The problem is particularly severe in Estonia where one sixth of the forest has been razed since just 2001 to feed the worlds […]
It’s like someone read all the major skeptic blogs in the world and turned them into a documentary.
The new Michael Moore documentary: Planet of The Humans
1 – unapologetically exposes Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Robert Kennedy, etc. for being con artists and hypocrites, 2 – crucifies the Sierra Club and their ilk for being disingenuous and primarily in it for the money and influence, and 3 – also carefully documents how wind, solar and biofuels are scams. — John Droz, jr.
h/t Thanks to Peter D, AndyG, Michael S, Colin, Willie, and Jim Simpson who enjoyed this “even the credits”.
Richard Branson will allegedly spend $3 billion to fight global warming! Then Branson, sitting next to @AlGore, is asked “Is Al Gore a prophet?” Branson replies “How do you spell “prophet””? [Profit!!!] Everyone laughs! — @tan123
HaroutDSDZ: It’s the moment when Winston Smith realizes that O’Brien is not a revolutionary but a loyal member of Ingsoc… Covering article by genuine environmentalist –
Over the last 10 years, everyone from celebrity influencers including Elon Musk, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Al Gore, to major technology brands including Apple, have repeatedly claimed that renewables like solar panels and wind […]
Go Coal. Wood-fired electricity produces *more* CO2 for the next hundred years…
h/t NoTricksZone
Any day now the giant tree-eating-machine called Drax will be shifting back to coal as Greens and politicians realize they’ve made a planet killing mistake. Lordy! At the moment, Drax is supposed to be saving the world and making electricity for the UK by burning trees cut down and shipped from the US.
This temple to carbon neutrality happens to be the largest plant in the UK . It generates about 7% of all the megawatts used there. But a new study by Sterman et al, suggests the Drax plan is backfiring badly.
When is carbon neutrality not neutral? When the carbon debt is not paid off in our lifetimes…
Burning forests instead of coal deposits raises CO2, and in so many ways: Wood is a less efficient fuel. Megawatt for megawatt, wood produces more CO2 than coal. In terms of efficiencies, the combustion efficiency of wood is 25% compared to coal at 35%. Processing losses to supply wood are around 27%, while losses to supply coal are 11%. (NEA 2011, IEA 2016, Roder 2015) This is the slow road to carbon neutrality. It takes […]
Green Utopia
We’re trying to control the weather by limiting a universal molecule intrinsic to life on Earth. What could possibly go wrong? Loopholes, for starters. Only this isn’t a loophole — it’s an obvious outcome of “carbon neutrality”. The only thing that could have stopped wood from replacing coal is if the tidal-windy-solar idea had been competitive, reliable and batteries were really cheap. Or, if we all went nuclear.
So carbon neutral means conserving black coal deposits underground and mowing down thousands of square kilometers of forests. Don’t think Greenpeace saw that coming. Carbon Loophole: Why is wood burning counted as green energy?
Fred Pearce, Yale, e360
The forests of North Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi — as well as those in Europe — are being destroyed to sustain a European fantasy about renewable energy…
Wood burning is booming from Britain to Romania. Much of the timber is sourced locally…
But Drax’s giant wood-burning boilers are fueled almost entirely by 6.5 million tons of wood pellets shipped annually across the Atlantic.
Drax Power, UK emits 23 million tons of “good” neutral carbon which used to be trees:
About 23 million tons […]
The Green movement have come full circle, from protecting forests and attacking coal, to preserving coal and destroying forests. The most interesting question for me (apart from wondering how long it can continue) is what the UK environmental movement is going to do with this. Do they care about forests? Do they care about the electricity bills inflicted on the poor? Do CO2 emissions matter?
In the UK, the Drax plant was once the largest coal fired power station. Now, thanks to £340 million in ‘green’ subsidies (and the rest) it makes electricity that is twice as expensive, produces more CO2, and apparently razes US forests to do it.
The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the UK Drax plant was paid by the British taxpayer to burn “millions of tons of wood pellets” which the company says are from ” dust and residues from sawmills”. But according to witnesses, environmentalists and workers, the wood is coming from US forests that are clearfelled to supply it. The Mail on Sunday has accounts from a senior forester in the firm in North Carolina that supplies Drax. He claims the company is clear-felling forests that aren’t suitable for logging, and that most […]
During the recent warmest decades on record, Earth suffered under the highest CO2 levels of the last 800,000 years. Life responded to this devastating situation by — flourishing. There are now some 4 billion tons more living matter on the planet than there was in 1993. What a calamity. (And what a lot of carbon credits.)
It has, naturally, got nothing to do with warmth and aerial fertilizer. The researchers tell us it due to that force of nature known as “good luck”. Remember, human CO2 emissions were pollution that was going to afflict life on Earth. After twenty years of predicting the loss of forests and species, it turned out that biology bloomed instead. Notch up another model “success”. The press release headline: Good luck reverses global forest loss. (What else would we expect from UNSW?)
To those who know basic biology — and that almost half the dry weight of plants is carbon, sucked straight out of the air — this is not so much good luck as one entirely foreseeable and foreseen consequence of rising CO2. Acquiring carbon is often a plant’s hardest task. When the sun comes up, a cornfield begins sucking, and by lunch time […]
The headline at Science Daily is that wildfires and other burns lead to climate change. The paper itself asks: “As such, particle burn-off of clouds may be a major underrecognized source of global warming.” For me what matters are the deaths in the here and now:
“We calculate that 5 to 10 percent of worldwide air pollution mortalities are due to biomass burning,” Jacobson said. “That means that it causes the premature deaths of about 250,000 people each year.”
This is similar to Indur Goklany’s conclusion in 2011:
Killing people with “concern”? Biofuels led to nearly 200,000 deaths (est) in 2010.
In a study published in Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Indur Goklany calculated the additional mortality burden of biofuels policies and found that nearly 200,000 people died in 2010 alone, because of efforts to use biofuels to reduce CO2 emissions.
Goklany (2011) estimated that the increase in the poverty headcount due to higher biofuel production between 2010 and 2004 implies 192,000 additional deaths and 6.7 million additional lost DALYs in 2010 alone.
He compared this death tally to the WHO figures for deaths attributed to global warming and finds […]
Have you wondered just exactly how much money you could pay for the feel-good factor of knowing that your electrons came from fashionable sources?
Thanks to the Victorian government we can get the hard numbers in the Victorian Auditor General’s Report.
In a nutshell, most alternatives are 2-3 times as expensive, except for solar which is 5 times the price.
(Luckily at the moment, renewables only produce 3 – 4 % of all energy in Victoria. Be grateful. You Victorians could be a lot poorer.) As it is, it cost Victorians $415,000 to tell you this, but it may be the most effective money spent on renewable energy in the last ten years. (Though oddly they didn’t produce this helpful comparative graph below. I did that for free.)
The Full PDF
In 2002 the State government of Victoria decided to aim for 10% renewable energy by 2010. You can see how well that worked out for them:
The light blue line (at 10%) was what they were aiming for.
The report is 48 pages. Basically it found that nobody thought too hard about how these aims would be done. Nobody assessed how useful it was to […]
A little under half (typically about 45%) of the dry weight of any plant is carbon, and almost all that “C” came from CO2 in the atmosphere. No wonder plants love more CO2.
Trees and bushes can grow out of cracks in rocks because they suck the carbon right out of the air. Likewise hydroponics is only possible because the building blocks come from liquid and aerial fertilizer.
CO2 is about the only “pollution” you can pump around plants and watch them grow faster, stronger, taller and indeed more resistant to most of the stresses that normally bother a plant.
8.2 out of 10 based on 24 ratings […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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