How Ed Miliband’s Net Zero Fantasy Is Deforesting North Carolina

As everyone must now know, it doesn’t matter where the energy comes from in the great rush to Net Zero, only that the source must preferably be invisible to British consumers and voters. It seems that hundreds of acres of forest are being torn down in North Carolina to produce wood-pellets that are then poured into the gaping hungry furnaces of the UK’s Drax power station. 

The Mail has the story:

Some 280 acres of once pristine and ecologically-important wetland forest – a mix of oak, maple, hickory, cypress and pine – have disappeared, torn out as if by a marauding monster. All that’s left is a bleak expanse of boggy pools of water and pulverised pieces of wood.

It’s eerily reminiscent of photographs of No Man’s Land at the Battle of the Somme – only with the addition of several large piles of logs that the men who harvested the lumber from this remote north-eastern corner of North Carolina in November 2023 couldn’t even be bothered to take with them and left to rot.

According to scientists and environmentalists, the idea that new trees will replace the old ones felled any time soon is a load of nonsense:

They point out that burning wood is even dirtier in terms of carbon dioxide than coal and, more important, that it takes decades – 60 or 70 years in the case of hardwood forests – for a new tree to absorb the CO₂ lost by burning the old one. 

That’s precious time, they say, that a warming planet simply doesn’t have, and hardly anyone’s idea of ‘sustainable’ energy.

However, that hasn’t stopped successive UK governments, the world’s most enthusiastic convert to the wonders of wood pellets, from giving billions of pounds in renewable energy subsidies to biomass operators.

Needless to say, the heroic leader of the vanguard to turn Britain into a Net Zero paradise of impoverished and frozen people is out in front to help drive this ultimate example of greenwashing:

This week, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband became the latest politician to keep this astonishing arrangement – described by opponents as Britain’s “biggest green hoax” – on the road when he approved a new funding arrangement giving the vast Drax power station in North Yorkshire (the country’s largest) around £2 billion over four years to keep burning biomass.

Miliband, the architect of the Government’s drive to Net Zero, has been implicated in the Drax scandal since 2008 when he was appointed Secretary of State for the newly created Department of Energy and Climate Change by then Prime Minister Gordon Brown. 

Although the new deal cuts Drax’s subsidies in half, given all the Starmer Government has promised about tackling global warming, environmentalists had been hoping for Drax to lose all its subsidy.

Drax, which ironically shares its name with a James Bond villain who set out to destroy the planet, burns the equivalent of 27 million trees every year and – because wood is much dirtier even than coal – is Britain’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, last year producing nearly 12 million tons of the planet-warming gas.

The Mail’s Tom Leonard inspected the site in person with a local guide:

There were no signs of new trees growing, or anyone trying to re-plant, even on one site that was logged three years ago. “This is ground zero for clearcuts – you see them appearing all the time and it’s really sad,” said my companion, who asked me not to use his name as “these people can be mean”. 

He used to go out regularly looking for new clearcut sites and then follow the lorries taking away lumber and chipped wood so that he could say with confidence that it had gone to an Enviva pellet plant.

Since it started importing huge quantities of pellets in 2012, Drax has relied on America’s South for most of them, not only because it has vast tracts of forest close to coastal ports for easy export but also because these conservative states impose few of the regulations that protect woodland in the UK and the rest of Europe.

Logging companies traditionally cut down only the biggest trees as they are most suitable for the building and furniture industries, leaving the smaller ones to keep growing. They also left the ecologically-precious ‘wetland hardwood’ varieties such as cypress because they were too gnarled to become planks or tables.

It doesn’t matter what your position on climate change is. The story here is the sheer hypocrisy:

Everyone I spoke to in North Carolina admitted they were slightly shocked that “tree-loving” and climate change-aware Britain, of all countries, had facilitated the biomass industry –adopting renewable energy accounting rules that didn’t account either for the forests being lost in the US or the carbon emissions from burning the wood.

Derb Carter, a senior lawyer at the Southern Environmental Law Centre, told me he had repeatedly visited the UK to explain the situation to government officials.

“There was this assumption that surely the US regulates how forests are managed to protect the public interest,” he said. The Brits were “surprised”, he said, when he explained that in southern states like North Carolina, there was nothing of the sort.

He was disappointed by Ed Miliband’s verdict on Drax this week, saying: “This is not a good decision for our climate and certainly not for our forests over here.”

“We had hoped that a new government would have taken a really hard look at this. When you’re basically cutting forests and hauling them across the ocean to burn instead of coal, it makes no sense.”

Mr Carter believes the fact that the environmental destruction happens out of sight – and therefore out of mind – has been very useful for Drax in winning British acquiescence.

“It’s a lot harder to burn your own forest than someone else’s,” he says. “People are going to be a lot more tolerant if the wood pellets just show up on a ship and you don’t see the trees being cut and don’t see the forest being lost.”

Just like buying solar panels and batteries from China, where the coal power stations providing the energy to manufacture them are conveniently out of sight, and allowing China to gain a chokehold on the UK renewables sector.

The North Carolina story is worth reading in full.