“BIOMASS” IS A GREENWASHING TERM DISGUISING THE FACT THAT WE ARE BURNING TREES, DESTROYING FORESTS TO GENERATE ELECTRICITY.
Cut down a forest and burn it. So far, this is not carbon neutral, except insofar as the forest will hopefully grow back. Soil erosion and soil degradation are never counted.
“The thing about biomass (dead trees) is that when it gets burned it releases, typically, more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than a coal-fired power plant does. So it is not in any way good for the climate. It is very destructive to the climate. There's a lot of fraudulent accounting that goes into calling it green or carbon neutral.”
--Julia Barnes
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HART HAGAN: Let's talk about biomass. Biomass is a word for generating energy mainly from burning trees. You cut down a tree. You burn it for fuel. The tree grows back. Isn't this renewable? How else are we going to get our fuel?
JULIA BARNES: Biomass is one of the big, deceptive industries because they are counting biomass as carbon neutral, oftentimes lying to the people who are consuming it saying that it comes from wood waste, when in fact that comes from clear-cutting whole forests.
I've walked in the clear cuts that were made to produce biomass. They're going into forests all over the US and elsewhere and extracting trees and oftentimes shipping them across the ocean, in big tankers to Europe, where it's then burned in biomass facilities and is counted as carbon neutral.
The thing about biomass is that when it gets burned it releases, typically, more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than a coal-fired power plant does. So it is not in any way good for the climate. It is very destructive to the climate.
There's a lot of fraudulent accounting that goes into calling it green or carbon neutral. One of the big problems is that they don't count the emissions that come from burning it because they're assuming that the forest will regrow and then that will somehow make up for it.
So they're releasing carbon dioxide now, in the present, huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the forest they have cut down. And they're assuming that in 20, 30 or 50 years that that's going to come back.
Somehow that makes it carbon neutral right now. That is just completely fraudulent. But the other thing is that they are not counting the emissions that come from the logging.
When you go in and clearcut a forest, there's compaction of the soil, the soil degrades and it starts to release large amounts of CO2. But then, there's also the fact that these trees that you've cut down there were maybe 20, or 30, or 50, or 100 years old.
Large trees sequester larger amounts of carbon than say, if you go in and replant that, with tiny saplings. That sapling is not sequestering anywhere near the amount of carbon that an intact forest would have been sequestering.
There's a myth around forestry in the idea that you can just keep taking from forests and they can keep growing back.
There are no forests that have survived more than three rounds of clearcuts. Every time you cut down trees, take them out and remove them from the forest, you are permanently removing nutrients from that ecosystem, that natural community.
Those nutrients aren't coming back. They are being exported out of the area. So normally dead trees would stay within the system. A tree would fall down and it would decay and it would become part of the soil and be eaten by various organisms. All of the nutrients would remain in the community. It would remain intact.
When you remove nutrients they are gone. The forest can't use the lost nutrients to keep regrowing and maintaining itself the way that it should. You're also wiping out the animals who lived there. And there’s huge destruction to the natural community any time you go in and clear cut.
HART HAGAN: And the older the forest, the more carbon rich the soils are going to be. When you take an old forest and all of a sudden wipe the slate clean, that carbon comes out because the trees are gone, also because of the roads and the erosion that results. We're not counting the carbon that comes out of the soil. We're not counting the carbon that comes out of the smokestack, whenever you burn the wood pellets that you shipped all the way to Europe.
JULIA BARNES: Biomass is a complete disaster for the natural world, and it should in no way be considered a renewable or green form of energy. But it is, which is an atrocity.