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

From The Daily Sceptic. Excerpt:

"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."