Western Europe has already lost about 97 percent of its original forests. But European power companies, under pressure to clean up their climate pollution and switch to renewable sources of energy, are increasingly looking to burn wood fuel instead of coal in their power plants. Without enough wood at home, European utilities are looking to America for wood fuel—to the rich forests of the Southeastern U.S. Their exploding appetite for wood from our southern forests stems from misguided EU energy policies that allow power plants to burn wood—known as forest biomass—as a low-carbon alternative to coal.
These policies assume that all biomass is carbon neutral, so when power plants burn wood instead of coal, they don’t have to count any of their carbon emissions. Trouble is, the latest science shows this assumption is false. Burning trees and other large-diameter wood for electricity is actually dirtier than coal. Yet the U.S. EPA is apparently on the verge of making the same math mistake the EU did—opening an accounting loophole that puts our forests, as well as the Obama Administration’s own efforts to cut carbon pollution, at risk.
A group of 78 leading scientists wrote a letter last week to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy, challenging the EPA’s carbon math and warning the agency not to repeat the EU’s mistake. In a November 2014 memo, the EPA appeared to agree with industry claims that because trees grow back, burning biomass will help utilities reduce their carbon emissions. Some forms of biomass, such as sawdust and chips from sawmills, and small branches and limbs from forestry operations, could work as low-carbon alternatives. But in its memo, the agency suggested that it would allow even the burning of whole trees for electricity—provided they were “sustainably derived.”
Sustainable forestry is great, and NRDC has long advocated for it—but even the most sustainably managed forest can’t turn trees into a clean source of energy. No matter what efforts the forestry industry makes to reduce the soil erosion, habitat loss, and the other harmful impacts that result from poor forest management, burning trees to produce electricity still increases carbon pollution. In a nutshell, here’s why:
- Wood is much less energy dense than coal, so you have to burn a lot more of it to produce the same amount of electricity. As a result, burning wood produces higher emissions than coal (about 40 percent higher) for every unit of energy you generate;
- Trees take a long time to grow back. Even with immediate replanting, it can take many decades or even centuries before a forest can remove the emissions created from burning it in the first place;
- Cutting forests eliminates an important carbon “sink” that would otherwise continue capturing carbon from the atmosphere. Our forests currently absorb 15 percent of our carbon emissions each year.
The EPA needs to get the math right on forests, to avoid undermining its own efforts to reduce carbon pollution from power plants and putting forests around the world at risk. If American utilities start burning trees and other large diameter wood on a wide scale like their European counterparts, we could accelerate climate change, instead of dialing it down. The real answer is to scale up the use of modern, truly clean resources like energy efficiency, solar, wind, and geothermal, not to burn our forests as fuel.
It’s time for the EPA to heed the scientific community’s warning and use a carbon accounting system that accurately measures the impacts of burning trees and other biomass fuels. Trees are not a low carbon fuel, and failing to account for this fact puts our forests, our climate, and our communities at risk.
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"Now that we are spending more time at home, we are noticing the large number of delivery vans and lorries driving through cities," said Netherlands environment minister Stientje van Veldhoven, announcing plans to ban all but zero-emission deliveries in 14 cities.
"The agreements we are setting down will ensure that it will be a matter of course that within a few years, supermarket shelves will be stocked, waste will be collected, and packages will arrive on time, yet without any exhaust fumes and CO2 emissions," she added.
She expects 30 cities to announce zero emission urban logistics by this summer. City councils must give four years' notice before imposing bans as part of government plans for emission-free road traffic by 2050. The city bans aim to save 1 megaton of CO2 each year by 2030.
Help to Change
To encourage transport organizations to go carbon-free, the government is offering grants of more than US$5,900 to help businesses buy or lease electric vehicles. There will be additional measures to help small businesses make the change.
The Netherlands claims it is the first country in the world to give its cities the freedom to implement zero-emission zones. Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht already have "milieuzones" where some types of vehicles are banned.
Tilburg, one of the first wave of cities imposing the Dutch ban, will not allow fossil-fuelled vehicles on streets within its outer ring road and plans to roll out a network of city-wide electric vehicle charging stations before the ban comes into effect in 2025.
"Such initiatives are imperative to improve air quality. The transport of the future must be emission-free, sustainable, and clean," said Tilburg city alderman Oscar Dusschooten.
Europe Takes Action
Research by Renault shows that many other European cities are heading in the same direction as the Netherlands, starting with Low Emission Zones of which Germany's "Umweltzone" were pioneers. More than 100 communes in Italy have introduced "Zonas a traffico limitato."
Madrid's "zona de baja emisión" bans diesel vehicles built before 2006 and petrol vehicles from before 2000 from central areas of the city. Barcelona has similar restrictions and the law will require all towns of more than 50,000 inhabitants to follow suit.
Perhaps the most stringent restrictions apply in London's Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), which charges trucks and large vehicles up to US$137 a day to enter the central area if they do not comply with Euro 6 emissions standards. From October, the ULEZ is being expanded.
Cities are responsible for around 75% of CO2 emissions from global final energy use, according to the green thinktank REN21 - and much of these come from transport. Globally, transport accounts for 24% of world CO2 emissions.
The Rise of Online Shopping
Part of the reason for traffic in urban areas is the increase in delivery vehicles, as online shopping continues to grow. Retailer ecommerce sales are expected to pass $5billion in 2022, according to eMarketer.
The World Economic Forum's report The Future of the Last-Mile Ecosystem, published in January 2020, estimates that e-commerce will increase the number of delivery vehicles on the roads of the world's 100 largest cities by 36% by 2030.
If all those vehicles burn fossil fuels, the report says emissions will increase by 32%. But switching to all-electric delivery vehicles would cut emissions by 30% from current levels as well as reducing costs by 25%, the report says.
Other solutions explored in the report include introducing goods trams to handle deliveries alongside their passenger-carrying counterparts and increased use of parcel lockers to reduce the number of doorstep deliveries.
Reposted with permission from the World Economic Forum.