As the battle around the phasing out of fossil fuels shifts gears (hint, delegates: think phase out and all fossil fuels), ECO insists that there be a truly ambitious energy transformation package in the final decision text which includes tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030. The pledge announced yesterday is not good enough.
Yet not all ‘renewable’ energy is created equal. Whilst some (like wind and solar) offer genuine solutions to cutting emissions, air pollution and household costs, others are simply dangerous.
One touted ‘solution’, hiding in plain sight, is particularly devious. This imposter is large-scale centralised bioenergy, often generated by cutting down huge swaths of forests. This is not the same industry as your friendly 19th century woodcutter. Under an invisibility cloak of flawed UNFCCC guidelines together with dodgy claims about carbon neutrality, bioenergy receives vast sums of subsidies.
But burning biomass, and especially biomass from forests and plantations for liquid biofuels, emits at least as much carbon as coal per unit of energy — carbon that can take decades to be reabsorbed from the atmosphere when (or if!) the biomass grows back. The result is further warming of the atmosphere.
What’s more, the ability of forests to fight climate change is compromised by burning biomass, and, compared to wind and solar, many of its forms are land hungry and terrible for biodiversity.
Moving away from fossil fuels could save millions of lives thanks to improvements in air quality. But co-firing coal and biomass or replacing fossil fuels with biomass can perpetuate pollutant emissions. Truly clean energy will reduce illness and premature death – not lock us into more of the same. In case ECO hasn’t been clear up to this point: biomass isn’t clean.
The renewable energy pledge must become part of the final decision text and explicitly provide guardrails for people and for nature and exclude clean energy imposters, and the GST must include language that makes it clear that we can’t burn our way out of the climate crisis.
Stop burning forests for energy!