Drax and a Climate-Change Tipping Point

HNY, C@W readers everywhere!  Mine’s off to a good start as I got round to reading this piece in the Observer:

Burning wood for power is ‘misguided’ say climate experts

Well yes; some of us have been saying this ever since the UK biomass thing really got going (click ‘Drax’ thread below).  The science is easy, the conclusion a no-brainer.  Then again, no-brain is exactly how the ‘green’ debate proceeds, as a glance at many of the CiF comments BTL under that story will confirm.  At the same time, there are even more anti biomass comments there too – which wouldn’t have been the case even a couple of years ago.  2017 probably marks the year the biomass issue turned around in public discourse.

This whole thing exemplifies neatly a phenomenon one can often identify.  Something, somehow, becomes ‘received wisdom’ – in this case, that burning trees for electricity is carbon-neutral.  Anyone suggesting otherwise gets deluged with derision and disdain (or, in less advanced societies, gets lynched).  Then, one day, the penny drops and the cry goes up: why did no-one ever warn us about that?  And to the obvious answer: well actually, they did - the response is: yes, but those people are nutters.  (I recall Roy tub’o'lard Hattersley deploying this logic after the financial crash a decade ago.)  It’s an interesting cognitive trap: you can’t pay heed to the lone voice in the wilderness – because, by definition, he’s obviously bonkers – but …   But what?  

I suppose the only real rationalisation could be:  … but someone (the ‘experts’, maybe?) ought to have listened on our behalf, and carefully considered the nutter’s arguments, and told us to change our views.  Ah yes, the experts.  I think we know the fallacies in such an argument.  Ho hum; that’s the way of the world.  You can get pretty cold and bitter, out there in the wilderness.

The ‘carbon-neutral’ biomass thing was always a demented view, given the lie by two centuries of science and technology: but it wasn’t just a batty green opinion.  No, it forms the basis of gigantic ‘renewables’ subsidies for woodpellet-burning electricity in the UK (almost £1 billion p.a.) which in turn has spawned a substantial new industry: the felling of tens of millions of trees a year in North America;  conversion into wood pellets;  shipping to northern England (we are the world’s biggest wood pellet burners, oh yes);  and storing / onward trucking thereafter to the powerplants.  Several port authorities, and firms like Eddie Stobart, have become pretty well hooked on the trade; not to mention Drax and its smaller peers.

We’ve wondered before how long Drax plc – up to its eyebrows in biomass subsidies that must surely be in question – can survive when it becomes increasingly obvious the biomass game is up.   To be fair, Drax has been diversifying as fast a big company can – which isn’t particularly fast but it is fairly purposeful.   They know the score.

My guess is, the government has decided it can continue to brazen out the carbon-neutral nonsense: nobody actually cares about CO2 when push (GHG) comes to shove (GDP).  But Drax is still in big, big trouble.  Air quality is a new-ish issue that really does exercise people (air quality, not CO2, is the reason the Chinese are trying to cut back on coal); and the government will find it harder to ignore the appalling particulates spewed out from wood-burners.  Yes, as well as being worse than coal in terms of (a) energy efficiency and (b) CO2, wood-burning is (c) very much worse as regards genuinely harmful particulates.  (Have a watch of this Drax-plume-tracker – unless you are prone to epilepsy …)   

That graph may not yet have found the bottom.

ND