Most things the UK CCC suggests are likely to be a bad idea, but that’s another story. If this is all they can think of, they’re scraping the barrel. How long does the list of experts trashing tree burning policies have to get before the government takes any notice?
A suggestion by the UK Committee on Climate Change to burn more wood and plant replacement trees as a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels has drawn criticism from think tank Chatham House (reports OilPrice.com), which says this is hardly the best approach to reducing emissions.
“Expanding forest cover is undoubtedly a good thing, if you’re leaving them standing,” energy expert Duncan Brack told the Daily Telegraph.
However, Brack, who served as special adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, suggested that burning wood for heating was not the most sustainable way forward.
Calling wood burning a carbon neutral process is “highly dubious,” Brack added.
These claims, according to the Telegraph’s environment editor, Emma Gatten, rest on the assumption that the carbon footprint of chopping down trees and burning them is offset by planting new trees to replace them.
This assumption excludes the fact that older trees absorb more carbon and that it takes time to replace a forest.
“You can leave trees standing and they will continue to absorb carbon for decades,” Brack says. “But the biomass industry implicitly assumes that forests at some point reach a saturation point for carbon intake and can be harvested and simply replaced.”
The benefit of planting trees to mitigate the effects of climate change has been put to the test on a wider scale as well.
A study released last year found that reforestation could work, but it had to be done at a massive scale.
Full report here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
January 25, 2020 at 06:18AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 