I told you so

According to a new study published by Chatham House burning wood pellets is not carbon neutral and creates more emissions than burning coal. I told you so and have been telling you so on these pages for many years.
Governments do not listen. I told them so too, but they obviously thought they knew better. The UK government created a Renewable Heat Incentive based around burning wood pellets under which they subsidised the fuel and the subsidies, paid out of our taxes were very high indeed. In fact in Northern Ireland the RHI became a source of income as the subsidy was greater than the cost of the fuel. 

It gives me no pleasure to have my views confirmed by an authoritative source; I would rather be proved wrong, for the sake of the environment.

If I knew about the problems of wood burning and wrote about hem so many years ago, why did it take until 2017 for these problems to “emerge”?

The problems that Governments make when dealing with the need to reduce emissions and greenhouse gases is that they look for a quick fix, and there are no quick fixes. You see, when reducing emissions we have to look at the whole picture, because the knock on effects of any policy and their unintended consequences are usually ignored in the hunt for a political sound bite claiming to fix a problem.

It was the same with the incentivisation of diesel vehicles, which cut down carbon dioxide emissions but increased emissions of nitrous gases, again producing undesirable effects which should be apparent to anyone looking at the picture as a whole.

Of course it is not just the politicians that are to blame; they are advised by highly paid consultants and civil servants who, when it comes to directing environmental policy have proved not only useless but in some cases positively dangerous.

Filed under: biofuels, biomass, carbon dioxide, carbon emissions, climate change, energy, global warming Tagged: air quality from biomass, biomass, RHI, wood burning, wood pellets