A power company that has received £6bn in UK green subsidies has kept burning wood from some of the world’s most precious forests, the BBC has found.
Papers obtained by Panorama show Drax took timber from rare forests in Canada it had claimed were “no go areas”.
It comes as the government decides whether to give the firm’s Yorkshire site billions more in environmental subsidies funded by energy bill payers.
Drax helps the UK government meet its climate targets because, on paper at least, the power station is treated as emission-free. This is because international carbon accounting rules state that greenhouse gas emissions from burning wood are counted in the country where the trees are felled as opposed to where they are burned.
Such bullshit. All the emissions happen here, but they don’t get counted here.
Rishi, you can’t creative accounting your way out a climate catastrophe. The CO2 bill still gets paid and the working class will eat you if there’s no food left.
Private Eye has been reporting on this for years - burning old-growth forests and calling it renewable.
We really need to reconsider the place for biomass. It may be “renewable” in that we can produce it. But the production and consumption of biomass is often anything but environmentally friendly.
I was once on a convention in Switzerland like 15 years ago where they showed off wood pellets. They had a little wooden cube there that was like 15x15x15cm and it said: this is how much reneweble wood regrows every second in our country. It was supposed to be reassuring and nice. But i thought it’s pretty much the opposite.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It comes as the government decides whether to give the firm’s Yorkshire site billions more in environmental subsidies funded by energy bill payers.
Its owner, Drax, receives money from energy bill payers because the electricity produced from burning pellets is classified as renewable and treated as emission-free.
In fact, the power station emits about 12 million tonnes of carbon a year, but under international rules the UK doesn’t have to count these emissions.
“Old-growth forests in British Columbia are almost gone because of 70 years of logging to feed sawmills and pulp mills, and Drax is helping push our remaining ones off the cliff, along with our native biodiversity,” she says.
Drax says that it decided in October 2023 to stop sourcing wood from old-growth priority deferral areas, and that “work to implement this decision through the supply chain is ongoing”.
Previously, the government’s scientific advisors on the Climate Change Committee - an independent non-departmental public body - warned that subsidies for burning wood pellets should not be extended beyond 2027.
The original article contains 1,111 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
