The map my colleague Katie Armstrong made (
above) shouldn’t have surprised me. I knew trees in North Carolina and elsewhere were being cut down to be burned in European power plants. But I didn’t fully appreciate until I saw Armstrong’s map that it was happening all over the Southeast—that there are at least 20 mills from Virginia to Texas chopping wood into tiny pellets, and that millions of tons of the stuff are already being shipped each year from at least 10 different ports in the region.
It’s as if a giant funnel were draining Southeastern woods into European furnaces, one cigarette filter-sized pellet at a time—all in the name of fighting climate change. And it’s all based on a fundamental error, many scientists say.
When the European Union set up its pioneering carbon emissions trading scheme in 2005, it defined wood as a zero-emissions fuel, Sarah Gibbens reports. At first, that seemed to make sense: If a new tree grows to replace the one that was burned, it will absorb carbon from the air to offset the emissions from the burning.
“The whole wood pellet industry is basically being driven by this,” Princeton researcher Tim Searchinger told Gibbens. Coal-fired power plants in the U.K. and elsewhere have been switching to wood pellets, thereby reducing their emissions fees—but not their actual emissions.
The problem, Searchinger and many other scientists say, is that while trees do indeed absorb carbon, they do so only in the long run—they take decades longer to grow than they do to burn. But in the long run the glaciers will have melted; we don’t have decades to wait to cut emissions. And right now, most evidence suggests, burning whole trees puts more carbon in the air than coal, because wood is less efficient.
The loophole that defines wood as a zero-emissions fuel emerged from an earlier COP meeting, Searchinger told Gibbens. In the last session in Glasgow, European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans talked about how Europe had gotten rich off the coal-fired Industrial Revolution. “Coal has no future” now, he said. He didn’t mention that European countries had switched to coal back in the 18th century only after cutting down and burning most of their own forests. From that perspective, importing pellets from North America, in order to switch from coal back to wood, seems like a historic step backward.
