The article certainly looks like it was commissioned by the giants of the fossil energy industry. The questions highlighted in bold are ones that our scientists should investigate – is this really true? Burning wood is more harmful than coal...
The authors continue their hysteria against the use of wood for heating, the production of pellets and briquettes, etc., that is to say, it is directed specifically against the Baltics and Scandinavia...

On Wednesday (29 March), EU legislators planned to finalise the text of the revised Renewable Energy Directive. They have the opportunity to correct a historic mistake regarding the burning of wood.

The scientific data is clear: burning wood for energy production worsens climate change for decades or even longer, and we cannot avoid the greatest damage caused by climate change. However, the European Union and the United Kingdom continue to claim that forest biomass does not actually generate carbon dioxide emissions, thereby allowing these countries to subsidise wood bioenergy and not include the carbon dioxide (CO₂) resulting from wood combustion in their emission reports.

Subsidies for burning “wood biomass” in Europe currently exceed 10 billion euros per year, causing a significant increase in bioenergy, which now accounts for about 60% of the EU's renewable energy.

However, burning wood for energy production increases CO₂ emissions even if the wood replaces coal (???). The EU and the bioenergy industry claim that trees felled for energy will grow back and thus, as the forest grows, additional CO₂ will be sequestered. But forest regeneration is not guaranteed and takes time – many decades or longer. Meanwhile, burning wood exacerbates climate change.

The result? Citizens in the EU and the United Kingdom are paying for their governments to claim that they are reducing emissions, while in reality, they are only deepening climate change.

A large part of the debate about wood energy is whether the biggest players in the industry – pellet plants or power stations – primarily obtain wood from the forest or from lumber residues.

A large number of photographs show that many of them actually use roundwood to a large extent. Removing subsidies for primary wood biomass (as recommended by the European Parliament) could help avoid some of its most adverse climate impacts, as well as reduce soil erosion and habitat loss. However, even when burning wood obtained from forest thinning and wood residues, more CO₂ is released into the air per kWh produced than in the case of fossil fuels. (???)

This means that for wood bioenergy, regardless of whether it is produced from whole trees or wood residues, the primary impact is an increase in CO₂ in the atmosphere, which accelerates climate change, even if the wood replaces coal – a critical step backwards that will not be reversed for decades or even longer – time that we do not have to meet Paris commitments and avoid the worst damage caused by climate change.

The scientific data has been repeatedly brought to the attention of EU policymakers. When the EU first revised the Renewable Energy Directive in January 2018, 772 scientists wrote a letter to members of the European Parliament pointing out these issues.

A critical commentary published in Nature Communications concluded that: “Overall, substituting fossil fuels with wood by 2050 is likely to result in 2-3 times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere per gigajoule of final energy.”

The European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC), which includes all national science academies of EU countries and whose environmental programme is led by one of these authors, published a paper in September 2019 arguing that “there remain serious discrepancies between science and policy in the field of forest bioenergy”.

This was an addendum to the commentary “Forest bioenergy and carbon neutrality” published in 2018. Before the COP25 meeting in Madrid in December 2019, EASAC scientists issued another statement to policymakers: “We have repeatedly pointed out that in many cases, large-scale substitution of coal with forest biomass will accelerate global warming.” (???).

Since 2018, three more letters have been received from hundreds of scientists (including a former Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)) pointing out the dangers of wood bioenergy to the climate and biodiversity, and the European Commission's Joint Research Centre concluded in an extensive literature review in 2021 that only burning small branches would be more climate-friendly than burning fossil fuels over a ten-year period. All other raw materials obtained from forests are much more harmful.

The fact that all subsidies for forest biomass must be stopped immediately, regardless of its source, is repeatedly emphasised by the IPCC, which calls for urgent and rapid emission reductions. Biomass only provides an opportunity to reduce overall emissions, but only at some point in the future. If the 1.5 °C or 2 °C targets have already been exceeded, humanity will have arrived at irreversible and dangerous climate change.

The European Parliament’s modest first step towards abandoning this harmful practice, by excluding “primary wood biomass” from subsidies, was included this week in the final negotiations between MEPs, the Commission, and member state governments regarding the Renewable Energy Directive.

However, even this small step is subject to serious attacks from industry sectors and countries that have become dependent on bioenergy subsidies.

If they prevail, EU countries will continue to spend renewable energy subsidies on a technology that increases the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere and accelerates global warming and the resulting damage: faster melting of Greenland and Antarctica, more rapid sea-level rise, more severe drought periods, extreme weather conditions, crop yield losses, deaths due to heatwaves, and other damage caused by climate change that will not be reversible even if forests eventually recover.

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pointed out last week, we must act immediately. A good start would be to adopt Parliament’s proposal to exclude primary woody energy from the EU Renewable Energy Directive.

You can read the Land and Climate Review briefing on the scientific basis for biomass combustion, as well as further details on several field studies on wood harvesting for energy production in Europe.