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.
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I very much like what the incomparable Philip Larkin said on the subject, in his classic interview with Paris Review.
Interviewer: What about your politics?
Larkin: I’ve always been right-wing. It’s difficult to say why, but not being a political thinker I suppose I identify the Right with certain virtues and the Left with certain vices. All very unfair, no doubt.
Interviewer: Which virtues and vices?
Larkin: Well, thrift, hard work, reverence, desire to preserve – those are the virtues in case you wondered: and on the other hand idleness, greed and treason.
I also like this from the equally incomparable Thomas Sowell
I love TS
Perhaps you could change from binary to triple, along the lines of employed/unemployed/economically inactive? This is a concept which is officially used for various reasons. Then it would be left/right/politically inactive – perhaps.
Regardless of whatever arbitrary labels are used state level politics is the problem, not solution.
We are on this planet to advance spiritually through exercising ever-increasing moral self-control, not carry out ultimately violence-backed control over others.
Nation-states originally arose out of the mass murderous and land-grabbing activities of medieval warlords. Countries remain the only level of human organisation granted ‘legal’ exemptions from the basic spiritual moral code of non-violence (eg wars and the existence of humanicidal nuclear weapons), non-theft (land confiscation, enforced taxation), honesty (deceptive secret services) etc.
Multi-party liberal democracy is a huge step forward from tyrannical state structures such as absolute monarchies, communist and fascist dictatorships (hello China, North Korea, Russia etc) and theocracies (Iran).
But ultimately we need to work toward a fully tolerant, cooperative and non-violent world by evolving away from the power-based nation-state system and all the politicising (left, right, up or down) which largely acts as a smokescreeen for its fundamentally immoral nature.
Finally, and to preempt a frequent misunderstanding of this position, it is most certanly not an appeal for world government, quite the opposite.
Ah, the “medieval” period – that age of chivalry, sadly now almost dead. Whatever their faults, these “medieval warlords” (perhaps you have Genghis Khan in mind, who however I understand was revered by his supporters), they didn’t preside over the killing of their own people on anything like the scale that happens in most multi-party liberal democracies today. And they were less able to interfere in the daily lives of their citizens than today’s tyrants (from Trudeau in Canada to jumping jim in China), and probably would not have done anything on a par with the last two years even if they could.
That’s a very good point.
Western medieval barbarism was at least to some extent tempered by a belief in individual spiritual and moral responsibility (via Christianity);
Whereas contemporary Darwinian atheism shrugs it’s shoulders at worldwide internment (‘lockdowns’), economic suicide (‘Net Zero’) and potential humanicidal nuclear exchanges
You have learned nothing about the world you live in and the species who dominate it.
Go play another John Lennon song and smoke another joint where you can dream about your fairytales while the real world of dog eat dog will continue until the end of time.
The origin of the left – right dichotomy in politics was the sitting order of the revolutionary national assembly of France. The deputies on the right where the ones in favour of keeping a constitutional monarchy, the ones on the left wanted a republic instead.
which as i say makes any Republican party a party of the “left”
My ‘entry point’ into this subject was as a newly elected councillor investigating ‘Local Government Climate Change Adaptation’ policies, and I learnt rather quickly how the arguments had been ‘Framed’ to give bias to the various ‘Intergovernmental Organisations’ who were quite clearly a front for the Ecology/Green Party: ‘negative growth’ types. This led on to Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ (the perfect entry point) and the concept of System 1 and System 2 thinking. Kahneman states that System 1 and System 2 are NOT physical, but merely tools to enable understanding. Later research (that you perhaps allude to) has begun to investigate the physical processing within the left and right hemispheres. I could go on all day. All very interesting. Just saying really.
I think it was Einstein who talked about the shortest distance between 2 points being a curve? certainly in my opinion, politics is not linear with the left or right going off in an ever more left or right direction. It increasingly seems to me the politics is more curved or even circular, at the top you have good balanced honest government a the bottom you have totalitarian, fascist, autocracy. Go too far down the curve on either side and you are on the slide into horror at the bottom of the circle.
The clever trick with covid was that in the interests of ‘keeping safe and protecting lives’ both sides shot down their sides of the curve and met at the bottom in a maelstrom of restrictions, totalitarianism loss of freedoms and in some aspects outright barbarity. The same approach is now being tried with climate change ESGs and the net zero policy.
It is interesting that despite the huge number of words written about politics, Abraham Lincoln’s, fairly brief, Gettysburg address is still seen as one of the great political statements. ” —and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
To my mind politics is about the checks and balances we need to keep society at the top of the circle. After covid and facing climate change stuff; we need people who value self reliance , resilience, independance, freedom, people who are rational realists. Are there any such politicians at the moment? well of course no politician is perfect and they get worse the longer they are in power, but people like Ron Desantis, Kemi Badenoch, Victor Orban, Bolsonaro etc. show signs of being the sort of politicians that can drag us back towards the virtuous top of the circle. It must be remembered of course that they are all only human with all the normal human flaws, in time they will need to be challenged and changed.
Excellent article … really had some thought provoking stuff. Thanks
A political spectrum that ranges from Communism on the left to Fascism on the right is a false dichotomy. You have totalitarianism on both ends.
Would it not be more useful to define the political spectrum as Anarchy to Totalitarianism?