It is a disaster for forests, wildlife and efforts to tackle climate change. The US Environmental Protection Agency has decided that wood is a renewable energy source, which means it will now qualify for support from programmes supposed to reduce carbon emissions.
The US forestry industry, which already exports wood pellets to Europe for burning in power stations, has long been clamouring for this policy change so it can sell even more wood for energy. On 23 April, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt l. Except it isn’t.
There are quite a few things wrong with using wood as a fuel. First, it is a very bad one. It contains about half as much energy per kilogram as coal, for instance, so you have to burn a lot more of it to achieve the same results.
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“As a way of producing energy it’s crazy,” says Tim Searchinger of Princeton University. “England was basically deforested in the 1600s to produce a tiny, tiny fraction of the energy it consumes today. What allowed the forests to come back was coal.”
Wood pollution
Burning wood is also bad for the environment. It is highly polluting – trendy wood burners are choking our cities by releasing harmful microscopic particles into the air – and it requires cutting down huge numbers of trees each year, which damages precious wildlife habitat.
This damage is already happening because the European Union – which regards wood burning as carbon neutral – is using ever more wood. It is the biggest source of “renewable” energy in the EU. Now matters could get even worse as the US follows suit.
There is strong evidence that the use of wood increases carbon emissions overall. Cutting down existing trees puts extra carbon into the atmosphere – from the burned wood itself, the rotting roots left in the ground and the energy used to dry, process and transport the wood. In theory, regrown forests should soak this up over a few decades, but there is no guarantee that forests will be left to regrow.
Many companies that burn wood for energy claim they burn only waste wood, which can reduce emissions compared with leaving that wood to rot. But a recent report concluded that the definition of waste wood is so poor that whole trees are being felled and counted as waste.
What makes Pruitt’s policy particular harmful is that the US was, for once, beating Europe on an environmental issue. Now, with wood burning set to rise on each side of the Atlantic, they are both as bad as each other.
