Scientists Warn Against Fuzzy EU Carbon Math

Europe has a long history of playing fast and loose with its emission numbers, especially when it comes to carbon captured by forests. The EU considers burning biomass (read: wood chips) to be carbon neutral, under the logic that if felled forests are replanted, there’s “no harm, no foul” in the long run. That’s a problematic assumption, though, for a long list of reasons. For one, the mere acts of cutting down trees, transporting them, and then processing them into wood pellets all produce emissions. For another, oftentimes the trees that are cut down aren’t replanted, and those purchasing this “green” biomass often don’t do their due diligence to ensure they’re sourcing their wood from responsible foresters.

But as the BBC reports, a group of scientists say that those accounting problems have deeper roots:

Leading researchers have condemned attempts to change the way carbon from trees will be counted in Europe…As the European Union tries to put in place wide-ranging plans to restrict future carbon emissions, officials want to ensure that accounting for the impact of forests on the atmosphere should be based on sound science.

To this end they want to cap the use of forestry at the levels seen between 1990 and 2009. If countries want to harvest more trees in future than they did during this period, the loss of carbon would count towards the country’s overall emissions. However several countries including Austria, Finland, Poland and Sweden want a change in these rules so that increased harvesting in the future should not be penalised. […]

[Accounting] for carbon contained in trees is a fiendishly difficult task. Forests can both soak up and emit carbon depending on how old they are, and how they are managed and harvested.

Forests have long life cycles, and it’s hard to pick a baseline by which to judge the “correct” amount of forestation for a given region. Certain EU members are asking Brussels to relax requirements based on when their forests were originally planted, but that’s giving rise to worries that total tree cover might shrink, and with it the continent’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) from the air.

If this sounds like a complicated mess, well, it is—both on a regulatory level, and even on a scientific level as well. It’s a problem that’s only exacerbated by the EU’s foolhardy insistence that biomass is a carbon neutral renewable energy source—a convenient point of view that’s allowed the bloc to meet the green targets it set for itself.

But biomass isn’t the green energy of the future. One environmentalist called it “disastrous” for the environment, and even its most ardent advocates have to admit that the carbon accounting underpinning its case for being green is dodgy. So while Europe continues to posture itself as the global green leader (especially in the wake of President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement), remember that the bloc’s latest emissions data recorded an annual rise of 0.5 percent, and that much of its “renewables” growth is coming from burning wood.

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