A UK Government plan to use imported palm oil to generate electricity has run into opposition from campaigners, who are urging Ministers to reconsider the idea.
A Parliamentary committee is due to vote on 6 March on whether to accept Department of Energy and Climate Change plans to subsidise “green electricity”. But Action for Sustainable Energy for Bristol, a city in the west of England, says scientists agree that the biofuels to be subsidised are not “green” as the Government claims, but are worse for climate change than the fossil fuels they replace.
ACSEB says biofuels like palm oil, which the Government plans to subsidise for 20 years, will make climate change worse, destroy tropical forests and endangered species, and add tens of millions of pounds a year to voters’ electricity bills.
A study in the journal Science in 2009 described what ACSEB says is a basic weakness in the Government’s plans. The authors explained in a summary: “The accounting now used for assessing compliance with carbon limits in the Kyoto Protocol and in climate legislation contains a far-reaching but fixable flaw that will severely undermine greenhouse gas reduction goals .
“It does not count CO2 emitted from tailpipes and smokestacks when bioenergy is being used, but it also does not count changes in emissions from land use when biomass for energy is harvested or grown. This accounting erroneously treats all bioenergy as carbon neutral regardless of the source of the biomass.
“For example, the clearing of long-established forests to burn wood or to grow energy crops is counted as a 100% reduction in energy emissions despite causing large releases of carbon.”
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