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antrky t1_jadfc1a wrote

Reply to comment by ChrisRR in Britain breaks 'green grid' record with latest 100 per cent clean power milestone by Wagamaga

Good documentary on BBC panorama about how we are essentially cutting down virgin trees in Canada, turning them into pellets, shipping them half way round the world, and burning them in the U.K. as “renewable” energy.

We are also subsidising the company doing this to the tune of 1.7million pounds a day. They posted profits of £700million this year

Drax power station

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QggOne t1_jadubaf wrote

There was also the Cash-For-Ash scandal in Northern Ireland. The NI executive gave a lot of subsidies for wood pellet burning.

The subsidies at one point significantly exceeded the price of buying wood pellets. This led to people burning wood pellets in empty farmhouses to make large amounts of money.

Coincidentally, a lot of those who made money out of this, were NI political party donors.

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Djeikup t1_jaemp5l wrote

Sounds like they were ahead of their times with "cryptomining".

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Mr_MacGrubber t1_jadntom wrote

I live near Baton Rouge, Louisiana and there are a couple of gigantic “silos” that hold pelletized wood going to the UK. They are domes and have the nib things on the top so it looks like a pair of huge tits. Haha

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Muzle84 t1_jadv59x wrote

Milk of Human Kindness. Stay Strong!

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SILENTSAM69 t1_jadt4w2 wrote

Poor documentary really since they don't understand how this actually is far greener than burning fossil fuels. It plays into the ignorance of the population who think planting trees helps sequester CO2.

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judokid78 t1_jae8685 wrote

Well trees do sequester CO2; all be it momentarily until they decompose. But that can be like a couple of hundred years depending on the tree and the environment it grows in.

While burning biomass is at best carbon neutral, shipping it around the world is probably the worst way to do it. The shipping and transportation industry is the largest source of CO2 emissions. Adding to that industry in the name of green energy is misleading at best. Burning locally sourced biomass like some farms do is much better.

Lastly virgin old-growth forests are our best carbon sinks; trees sequestering CO2. Cutting virgin trees to burn as fuel releases previously stored carbon as well as hindering that virgin forest's ability to store carbon.

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Yellow_Snow_Cones t1_jaejkc1 wrote

>Lastly virgin old-growth forests are our best carbon sinks

I thought it was the algae in the ocean that does the most scrubbing. Which isn't always good since it makes the ocean more acidic and it messed with shell fish's shells.

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judokid78 t1_jaetvaw wrote

Ok maybe not best. I think you're right about algae doing more scrubbing than our boreal forests.

But I will have to check on the acid thing. As far as I know atmospheric CO2 levels contribute more to ocean acidification.

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SILENTSAM69 t1_jae9zba wrote

I hate calling it green as it still causes general air pollution. Shipping it is a huge problem. Better to just use the other carbon free sources of energy like renewables, hydro, nuclear, or geothermal, than to burn biomass.

Technically no living organism is a sequestration. Maybe for a human time scale it is, but not the environmental time scale. We could be growing vegetation and treating it as nuclear waste. The best form of long storage being large heavy lawn dart style containers dropped into the north Pacific. Sadly people don't do that with nuclear waste because of public ignorance and the stigma against putting waste in the ocean.

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wietlems t1_jaeku3h wrote

If I have to believe John Oliver, it's more about companies making fake claims that they are preventing forestation from happening and adding that to their numbers.

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Alimbiquated t1_jaeks7d wrote

However, the documentary fails to specify what percentage of pellets are made this way. In fact most are made from sawmill waste, which is cheaper and available in enormous volume.

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