In its recent Energy Plan, the New Brunswick government proposed that the NB Power Belledune power plant should switch from burning coal to burning wood pellets. The federal government has mandated that all coal-fired electricity plants stop burning coal by 2030.
However generating electricity from forest-based biomass is a false climate solution. Burning wood for heat is one thing but burning it to generate electricity is incredibly inefficient.
Research has shown that burning wood pellets generates more carbon emissions at the smokestack than coal. It also creates many toxic particles harmful for the health of surrounding communities.
Two years ago, more than 500 scientists sent an open letter to world leaders calling on them to not burn forests to make energy.
How can governments get away with claiming that biomass-generated electricity is renewable and carbon neutral? It’s a scam.
International carbon accounting rules state that carbon losses from forest harvesting have to be reported in the land sector section of the carbon audit for the country where the trees were cut.
Every time a hectare of forest is cut, that counts as a reduction of forest carbon uptake. The harvested forest wood, if it’s burned, can’t be reported as a CO2 emission, because that would be counting it twice.
So the country or province that burns trees reports that as zero carbon emissions. That means that producers can treat biomass as being equivalent to zero emissions technologies, like wind and solar. Scam!
Scientists and environmental activists everywhere are lobbying hard for constraints to be put on the use of forest wood as a renewable fuel.
In November, CRED-NB signed a letter to federal Energy and Natural Resources minister Wilkinson, with 26 other climate groups across Canada, calling on the federal government to take immediate action on biomass. These are some of our demands:
• Work with other levels of government to ensure forests are off-limits to wood pellet production for export.
• End all subsidies to the utility-scale wood pellet industry
• Redirect funding to Indigenous land use, stewardship or restoration projects and real climate solutions such as wind and solar power.
• Support value-added jobs that provide more substantial and stable economic opportunities
locally.
• Encourage utilities to take a public stance against burning forest biomass as an energy replacement for burning coal.
• Advocate on the international stage for an update to carbon accounting mechanisms that closes loopholes which falsely represent industrial logging and utility-scale exported biomass as carbon neutral.