Taxpayers Subsidising Carbon Emissions, Highlights New LEA Paper On Wood Chip Burning

21st January 2024

Christopher Snowdon has produced a report for The Institute for Economic Affairs about the use of wood chip for heating and energy.

The government heavily subsidises dirty and expensive wood chip burning despite net zero goal.

Burning wood produces more carbon dioxide than burning fossil fuels, including coal and gas.

British biomass power plants burn the equivalent of 27 million trees in wood pellets per year, or 14 per cent of wood pellets burnt globally.

The biomass energy industry is only viable due to taxpayer subsidies, estimated to reach £11 billion by 2027.

Father of the House Sir Peter Bottomley MP says "Government subsidies must end."

The government is undermining efforts to tackle climate change by subsidising the burning of wood pellets for electricity, according to a new briefing paper from the free market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs. Media reports indicate the government could announce plans as soon as this week to extend the subsidies by three years.

Since 2005, several British power plants have been converted from coal to biomass, requiring millions of tonnes of imported wood pellets. This wood chip burning is Britain's least green energy source, producing more carbon emissions per megawatt hour produced than coal and pollutants such as sulphur dioxide.

However, biomass smokestack emissions are officially credited to the country where the trees are grown, primarily the United States and Canada. This means wood burning is officially considered ‘zero carbon' in the United Kingdom and attracts large taxpayer subsidies. Critics have labelled this situation an ‘accounting trick'.

Christopher Snowdon, report author and the IEA's Head of Lifestyle Economics, writes, "Current carbon accounting practices create perverse incentives and allow governments to boast about reductions in carbon dioxide emissions that only exist on paper. It is difficult to imagine the British government permitting, let alone subsidising, the incineration of imported wood chips to generate electricity if the emissions were counted on its own balance sheet."

The wood-burning emissions are meant to be recaptured through tree planting. However, the time it will take for new trees to absorb emissions from the burnt trees is estimated to be between 44 and 104 years. This lag is too slow to help the government's net zero by 2050 target. The burnt wood chips are also meant to be waste products, but there is evidence that primary forests are being cut down for wood pellets.

Biomass is expensive compared to wind, solar, gas and nuclear. It also risks becoming even more costly with proposals for further subsidies linked to carbon capture technology. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has said carbon capture is ‘unproven at scale'.

The briefing concludes by highlighting the greener and cheaper alternatives to biomass, including natural gas in the medium term and nuclear power plants in the longer term.

Sir Peter Bottomley, MP for Worthing West said, "Burning wood for energy will make global warming worse for decades to come. Anyone who claims biomass at-scale can be ‘renewable' is ignorant at best, fraudulent at worst. Government subsidies must end.

"Over the last two years over one hundred backbench MPs have, through signing letters or applications for debates, indicated that they have severe reservations about biomass. Christopher Snowdon offers a sensible and judicious contribution to this important discussion.

"We should leave trees in the ground and instead focus on increasing tree cover and backing wind, solar and nuclear energy - genuinely clean technologies that will create jobs, end our reliance on expensive fossil fuels, and cut our emissions."

Read the full report HERE
Pdf 9 Pages

https://iea.org.uk/

Wikipedia
The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) is a right-wing, free market think tank[7] registered as a UK charity.[8] Associated with the New Right,[5][6] the IEA describes itself as an "educational research institute"[9] and says that it seeks to "further the dissemination of free-market thinking" by "analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems".[9][10] The IEA was established to promote free-market responses to economic challenges by targeting influential academics and journalists, as well as students, in order to propagate these ideas widely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Economic_Affairs