The Natural Resources Defense Council continues to spread false and misleading claims about renewable wood bioenergy. The NRDC on Thursday published a blog post calling for “kicking biomass out of the clean energy club.” Here are a few of the false claims the NRDC made.
1: The NRDC falsely claims that forest bioenergy “has no role to play as we phase out our reliance on fossil fuels.”
FACT: Bioenergy is actively reducing fossil fuels around the world, from the EU to Japan. In the United Kingdom, Drax, once “the biggest polluter in western Europe,” has now “made a near-complete switch to renewable energy” by embracing wood bioenergy.
As CNN explains, Drax “used to spew out millions of tons of carbon dioxide a year by burning coal. But over the past eight years, it has overhauled its operations by converting four of its six coal-fired units to biomass.” Drax says it now generates at times up to 15% of the country’s renewable power.
2: The NRDC falsely claims that biomass power “isn’t a climate solution” because it emits more carbon dioxide than coal.
FACT: Switching from coal to wood bioenergy produces significant net carbon savings, helping mitigate global climate change in line with recommendations from the United Nations IPCC. As researchers at the University of Illinois have found, switching from coal to wood biomass reduces emissions by between 74 to 85 percent on a life cycle basis.
3: The NRDC falsely claims that wood bioenergy is not sustainable.
FACT: Demand for wood bioenergy protects forest acreage by encouraging landowners to plant more trees through market incentives, which grows the carbon sink and sucks more CO2 out of the atmosphere. When those incentives are lost, the health of US forests are threatened, and forests become parking lots, strip malls, or land for agriculture. In fact, researchers at the University of Georgia and the US Forest Service found that nationwide, the absence of demand for wood biomass could actually result in deforestation up to 15,000 square kilometers (5,791 square miles), roughly the size of the entire state of Connecticut. Conversely, increased demand for wood pellets retains thousands more square kilometers in natural timberland area, the report found.
It’s past time for the NRDC to quit spreading misinformation about sustainable wood bioenergy and listen to the views of international climate science authorities like the UN IPCC that have repeatedly stated that bioenergy is a critical tool in the fight against climate change.
Tags: NRDC