European countries working hard at reducing their carbon footprint, but new report from The School of Public Policy says they are incorrectly measuring carbon output - 65% of renewables produce more GHG's than just burning coal
CALGARY, Sept. 26, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - The landmark Paris Agreement has now been ratified by 185 of 197 parties to the convention. The agreement sets a course for all countries to limit global temperature rise to below 2°C and preferably to below 1.5°C. The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that global warming is becoming irreversible. The IPCC report does carry a positive message that it is still possible to limit global warming to a 1.5°C increase and describes various mitigation pathways that countries could use to reduce their emissions.
Today, The School of Public Policy with author Eddy Isaacs released a report that points out a major flaw in the way European countries are counting their GHG outputs. In brief, while the European Union (EU) countries are working hard to reduce CO2 output, and they calculate that 211 million tonnes of oil equivalent (Mtoe) have been eliminated by renewables, they are counting biomass burning in that total. Biomass and waste burning represent fully 65% of that renewable total.
Until a few years ago, the EU's CO2 emissions from burning biomass or biofuels were counted as zero. This assumed that the biomass emissions were saved during the growth phase and accounted for in the land-use sector. The EU now acknowledges that this assumption is wrong and estimates that biomass emissions contributed an additional 90 to 150 million tonnes of CO2e in 2013 to the EU emissions trading system (Bannon 2015). Many scientists have concluded that policies which seek to replace fossil fuels with biomass energy systems are misguided and risk making matters worse. For example, a recent MIT-led study demonstrated that use of woody biomass in lieu of coal in power generation will worsen climate change impacts. This is because of the time lag between the instantaneous CO2 release from combustion of wood and the decades of regrowth required; the carbon debt was estimated to range between 44 and 104 years. In addition, there is a loss of future carbon sequestration from the growing trees that are cut down, a loss of soil carbon because of the disturbance, and a difference in carbon emissions due to the processing efficiency of biomass being less than that of coal. In terms of GHGs, coal would be cleaner.
According to the author, "greenhouse gas emissions from all hydrocarbon sources, including biomass and biofuels, should be counted directly as emissions that contribute to exhausting the carbon budget because global warming depends on the accumulated CO2 emissions over the decades that they remain in the atmosphere. Accordingly, the scientifically allowable quantity of GHG emissions that can be emitted in total over a specified time to keep global warming at the desired temperature increase is dependent on the combustion step from all fuel sources and the concomitant atmospheric accumulation. The IPCC guidelines for bioenergy do not count the emissions going into the atmosphere. Policies that have encouraged an upsurge in biomass and biofuel use as substitutes for fossil fuels are damaging to the global effort to reduce GHG emissions and to meeting obligations under the Paris Agreement. In reality, the emissions of many countries are at a significantly higher level than they have reported. The IPCC should take the biomass/biofuel pathway off the table and countries that have been the major devotees to this illusionary method for climate change mitigation should phase it out."
Policies need to consider that global GHG emissions continue to accumulate in the atmosphere and no significant reversal of this trend is indicated for the near future. The implication is that temperatures will continue to increase, if not accelerate, during this century.
The paper can be downloaded at https://www.policyschool.ca/publications/
SOURCE University of Calgary, The School of Public Policy
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