The Guardian reports that the European Union, that green paragon of virtue, is contemplating sawing off the branch we sit on. The Union has issued a new directive that counts burning forests as carbon neutral. The Guardian thinks this masks the fact that forests take decades, even centuries to regrow. Could the learned gentle people in Brussels be making such a cataclysmic mistake?
Is the Stampede for Green Sawing Off the Branch We Sit On?
The answer depends on how we count carbon. It may be incorrect to ring fence the European Union when as much wood will come from elsewhere to feed the burning frenzy. Burning biomass was never meant to mean this surely… Where did the world – all of us go so horribly wrong?
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, climate sciences professor at Université Catholique de Louvain has deep concerns. He rates the risk of the directive encouraging tree clearances and the destruction of global carbon sinks as “extremely high”. “No person is an island,” the poet John Donne said in 1623. A hurt to a part of the world affects us all.
Indonesia, Brazil, and 25 Other Countries Following Suit
By now we know that forests are sinks turning carbon-dioxide into oxygen. The destruction of the Amazon forests is already a tragedy. Deciding to increase the use of wood for power generation “amounts to sawing off the branch we sit on,” Jean-Pascal van Ypersele told The Guardian on September 12, 2018.
The directive will “result in a race to the bottom because there is no inherent limit to the potential over-harvesting,” an unknown European Union source said. “There is a high risk that it will involve the possibility of increasing emissions with no possibility of any greenhouse gas savings at all.”
“Partly that is because of wishful thinking,” the official told The Guardian. “Partly it is so fundamentally wrong that most people would not believe it could be as wrong as it is.”
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