Indonesia Biomass Drive Threatens Key Forests
Indonesia's push to add wood-burning to its energy mix and exports is driving deforestation, including in key habitats for endangered species such as orangutans, a report said Thursday.
Bioenergy, which uses organic material like trees to produce power, is considered renewable by the International Energy Agency as carbon released by burning biomass can theoretically be absorbed by planting more trees.
But critics say biomass power plants emit more carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced than modern coal plants, and warn that using biomass to "co-fire" coal plants is just a way to extend the life of the polluting fossil fuel.
Producing the wood pellets and chips used for "co-fire" coal plants also risks driving deforestation, with natural forests cut down and replaced by quick-growing monocultures.
That, according to a report produced by a group of Indonesian and regional NGOs, is exactly what is happening in Indonesia, home to the world's third-largest rainforest area.
"The country's forests face unprecedented threats from the industrial scale projected for biomass demand," said the groups, which include Auriga Nusantara and Earth Insight.
Indonesia's production of wood pellets alone jumped from 20,000 to 330,000 tonnes from 2012 to 2021, the report said.
Auriga Nusantara estimates nearly 10,000 hectares of deforestation has been caused by biomass production in the last four years.
But the report warns that much more is at risk as Indonesia ramps up biomass, particularly in its coal-fired power plants.
The report looked at existing co-firing plants and pulp mills around Indonesia and the 100 kilometres (62 miles) surrounding each.
They estimate more than 10 million hectares of "undisturbed forest" lie within these areas and are at risk of deforestation, many of which "significantly overlap" with the habitat of endangered species.
Animals at risk include orangutans in Sumatra and Borneo, the report said.
Using wood to achieve just a 10 percent reduction in coal at Indonesia's largest power plants "could trigger the deforestation of an area roughly 35 times the size of Jakarta," the report warned.
Indonesia's environment and forestry ministry officials did not immediately respond to AFP's request for comment.
Indonesia saw a 27 percent jump in primary forest loss last year after a downward trend from a peak in 2015-2016, according to the World Resources Institute.
The groups also point the finger at growing demand in South Korea and Japan, two major export destinations for Indonesia's wood pellets.
They urged Indonesia to commit to protecting its remaining natural forest and reform its energy plans to focus on solar, while banning new coal projects.
Japan and South Korea should end biomass incentives and focus on cleaner renewable options, the group urged.
"There are no math tricks that can justify burning forests for energy," the NGOs said.
"Science has clearly proven the vital role of tropical forests for climate stability, biodiversity and human survival."
https://phys.org/news/2024-10-indonesia-biomass-threatens-key-forests.html
*********************************************UK: Some rare realism from a Greenie
The government risks a huge political backlash if it keeps pushing the public to install heat pumps to replace their boilers, one of Britain’s leading green entrepreneurs has warned.
Dale Vince, a major Labour donor and renewable energy advocate, called on Keir Starmer to rethink national programmes, championed by Boris Johnson, pushing the technology. Vince argued that Whitehall should explore alternatives to the devices, which he said were expensive, caused serious disruption and could end up increasing energy bills for some people.
Vince, whose criticism of heat pumps has proved divisive among environmentalists, said mass use could bring a bigger political backlash than London’s expanded ultra-low emission zone (Ulez), which led to a surprise byelection defeat for Labour last year in Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
“It’s a Johnson-era policy, and like most Johnson ideas, it wasn’t thought through,” Vince said. “It wasn’t meant for the real world, if you look at the amount of money committed. Electricity energy bills overall in our households will go up unless you assume heroic levels of performance.
“You’ve got this incredible disruption of home life for tens of millions of people – the need to change heating systems for a lot of people, not just the boiler – and substandard outcomes in a lot of cases.”
He added: “It’s politically threatening for any government to have a heat-pump programme. If you look back at the Ulez byelection and the fuss made about it in elements of the press, imagine a heat-pump programme where a household has just spent thousands of pounds on some technology that doesn’t do the job.” In June, Vince tweeted that heat pumps were like “Ulez on steroids”.
The entrepreneur’s latest comments expose divides even among environmentalists about the best way to move home heating away from the burning of fossil fuels via a regular gas boiler. Critics such as Vince state that heat pumps could increase bills because the electricity used to run them costs far more than gas. A study by the independent Energy Saving Trust put the cost at £20 a year more than using a new A-rated gas boiler. However, new specialist heat pump tariffs could make them cheaper to run.
Johnson’s government was an advocate of the technology, setting a goal of 600,000 new heat pumps a year by 2028. While installations in the UK have hit a record number this year, they have still only reached about 42,000 since January.
Air-source heat pumps cost just over £12,500 to buy and install on average, about four to five times more than a gas boiler. But the government currently offers a £7,500 grant for households installing the technology.
Vince claimed that he was speaking in the “national interest” in criticising heat pumps. He proposes an alternative – green gas, or biomethane, made from organic material, which his company Ecotricity develops.
Other environmentalists claim that the amount of land needed to produce enough green gas would be unrealistic, lead to food insecurity and damage biodiversity.
The Heat Pump Association, an industry body, insisted that the devices are a “proven, efficient, low-carbon heating solution which are readily available and scalable with the potential to reduce carbon emissions from heating by over 75% relative to fossil fuel heating systems”.
“Electricity prices are higher than gas prices in the UK,” it said. “However, heat pumps use three to five times less energy. Well-installed heat pumps that operate efficiently and make use of flexible electricity tariffs will in the vast majority of cases save the consumer money in comparison to their existing heating system.”
A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said of Vince’s concerns: “We do not recognise these claims. The energy shocks of recent years have shown the urgent need to upgrade British homes, and heat pumps are a critical technology for decarbonising heating.
“Biomethane also has an important role in the transition to net zero as a green gas that can decarbonise gas supply, reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and increase energy security.”
Vince also revealed plans to take advantage of the government’s decision to end the effective ban on onshore wind by “dusting off” a plan for 100 turbines in Gloucestershire, where his company is based, to power the county’s homes.
He said they could ultimately be transferred to the council’s ownership, handing it both an asset and long-term income. “If they were owned by the local authority, the windmills would bring £7m a year into local authority coffers,” he said.
“We will take the lead on this. We will find the sites, take them through planning and at some point in the future hope to work with local authorities to hand them over for public ownership.”
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Human CO2 Emissions Are Supercharging Corn Yields
How can carbon dioxide, which has been portrayed as a dangerous pollutant threatening the very existence of humankind, be considered even remotely beneficial? Sadly, such a question can be expected from people – children and adults – who have been fed irrational fears in place of well-established science that shows CO2 to be an irreplaceable food for plants and necessary for all life.
Even some who recognize CO2 as sustenance consider increasing atmospheric concentrations of the gas to be potentially catastrophic, a view devoid of scientific basis and inimical to the fortunes of malnourished millions.
Corn, or maize, is foundational—along with rice, wheat, soyabean—to global food security, serving as a critical source of nourishment for both humans and livestock. Over the past few decades, increases in atmospheric CO2 from industrial emissions have tracked with notable boosts in corn yields.
Between 1900 and 2024, the national corn yield in the U.S. rose to 183 bushels per acre (bu/A) from just 28 bushels. During the same period, atmospheric CO2 increased from 295 parts per million (ppm) to 419 ppm. Worldwide, corn yield rose from a mere 29 bu/A in 1961 to 86 bu/A in 2021.
This phenomenon is not merely coincidental; it is deeply rooted in the physiological characteristics of corn as a C4 category plant. C4 plants like corn – so named for the number of carbon atoms in their photosynthetic product — possess unique biochemical pathways that make their photosynthesis particularly efficient under high concentrations of CO2 and elevated temperatures. Such plants employ a mechanism that concentrates CO2 in specialized structures called bundle sheath cells.
Higher CO2 levels also improve water-use efficiency in corn, which is particularly beneficial where water supplies are limited or during droughts. This efficiency translates into enhanced growth rates and potentially greater yields. In fact, researchers say that “less water will be required for corn under a high-CO2 environment in the future than at present.”
Augmented corn yields driven by increased atmospheric CO2 have had profound effects worldwide, contributing to an agricultural boom that bolstered farm incomes and enhanced food security across diverse regions. Countries like the U.S. with significant corn production have experienced elevated export revenues, strengthening national economies and their positions in the global market.
But this remarkable impact of elevated CO2 is not just limited to C4 crops like corn. C3 plants, such as wheat, rice, potatoes, and soybeans, all rely on an enzyme called rubisco for carbon fixation. Rubisco’s efficiency improves significantly with higher CO2 concentrations because it reduces the enzyme’s tendency to bind with oxygen—a process known as photorespiration that limits productivity.
Consequently, elevated atmospheric CO2 often results in enhanced photosynthesis and biomass accumulation in C3 species, although to a lesser extent than with C4 plants. This is why rice and wheat yields can increase by up to 20-30% under elevated CO2 conditions. We have witnessed this in yield increases across most C3 food crops.
Notably, greenhouse farming—agronomy practiced inside a translucent tent to retain the sun’s warmth—often uses CO2 concentrations artificially increased to more than twice ambient levels to enhance growth.
The relationship between rising atmospheric CO2 and crop yields is clearly a positive one. So, ignore fearmongering media headlines about toxic human CO2 emissions. You, your family and the industries that support our society have greened the planet with daily emissions of carbon dioxide, making food more plentiful and affordable for those grappling with poverty and everybody else.
https://co2coalition.org/2024/09/18/human-co2-emissions-are-supercharging-corn-yields/
************************************************‘It’s almost beyond belief’: Findings blast Australia’s biggest carbon offset scheme
Australia’s biggest carbon credit scheme is barely removing any greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, according to a new study, despite hundreds of millions of dollars being pumped into it by businesses and the government.
One of the study’s authors, Dr Megan Evans from UNSW Canberra, said the findings about the Human Induced Regeneration scheme, known as HIR, pointed to “such huge failures that it’s almost beyond belief”.
Co-author and University of NSW senior lecturer Megan Evans.
Co-author and University of NSW senior lecturer Megan Evans.
The HIR is intended to allow farmers and project proponents to reduce stock and feral animals from vast areas of rangeland Australia which, they argue, allows forest to regrow there in a way it would not otherwise.
Credits are then issued for each tonne of carbon dioxide abated by the assumed growth in trees based on a model of how the forest should regrow in those areas, plus on regular audits.
The new research from a group of ANU and UNSW scientists, led by Professor Andrew Macintosh, used historical and current satellite images to suggest there was no meaningful change between forest growth on areas that were claiming carbon credits compared with neighbouring areas.
The new paper suggests that whatever trees have grown on the 116 projects surveyed was overwhelmingly due to recent rainfall, not the human management of projects.
The study found most projects showed “minimal impact on woody vegetation cover in credited areas” even though they had already generated about $495 million in carbon credits.
Their findings were immediately rejected by another ANU scientist, natural resource management associate professor Cris Brack, who has done extensive work for the government regulator, the Clean Energy Regulator.
Brack rejected the statement that little or no abatement had taken place, saying he had “personally reviewed numerous projects across NSW, Queensland and WA”, and had access to independent assurance-audit reports that proved projects were on track.
The HIR method is the largest single contributor of carbon credits to the Australian government and private industry, with 465 projects covering 42 million hectares – an area significantly larger than Japan. Having issued 44 million carbon credits, the Australian scheme is, according to the new study, the fifth-largest nature-based scheme in the world, making these findings of global significance.
The problem, the researchers say, is that HIR schemes are being credited on rangeland that was unsuitable because it was never cleared of forest in the first place, and is already close to its natural coverage of forest (trees above two metres tall over at least 20 per cent of the landscape).
Since 2021, Macintosh and a growing team of scientists have described the method as a fraud that would cost Australia up to $5 billion by 2030.
Their concerns have prompted a number of reviews, most notably by former chief scientist Ian Chubb. In 2023, he found the method was sound and said, “we have no reason to believe that there are substantial numbers of [Australian Carbon Credit Units] ACCUs not credible at the moment”.
But the new, peer-reviewed report, published by Macintosh and his team on Friday in The Rangeland Journal, closely analysed 116 sites in NSW, Queensland and South Australia using high-resolution satellite images.
Based on the number of carbon credits generated on the project areas, the tree canopy should have covered 30 per cent of the sites. Instead, they found the average cover was just 13 per cent. They also found the project’s management had made little difference to tree coverage.
“The areas are likely to be at or near their carrying capacity for woody vegetation, meaning any changes in tree cover are most likely to be attributable to seasonal variability in rainfall,” the report said. “Projects are being credited for regenerating forests in areas that contained forest cover when the projects started.
“Given that 2023 was the third year of a rare triple-dip wet La Niña, if the projects were performing as expected, observed levels of canopy cover across the projects would be significantly higher.”
The scientists said the real problem with this was that emitters would not alter their behaviour because they could buy offsets, then if those offsets did not produce real cuts in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Australia would not genuinely reduce its emissions.
Another of the project’s authors, Professor Don Butler from the ANU, said the government body that administers the scheme, the Clean Energy Regulator, had “let us all down terribly”.
“They’ve used hundreds of millions of dollars of public money to build a house of cards that is enabling climate inaction ... The failure of this scheme will only become more obvious as time goes on.”
But Brack, who has audited the scheme for the Clean Energy Regulator, and found it was meeting its targets, said the other scientists had got their measurements wrong.
The satellite images they used were not picking up all the extra growth, he said, much of which could only be seen from photographs or “in situation measurements” on the ground.
Brack added that projects could still meet targets if there were small trees that had not yet reached full size.
In a statement, the Clean Energy Regulator said the HIR method had been reviewed and found to be sound, by Chubb, the Australian National Audit Office and most recently by Brack who had given “strong assurance that the projects are being managed properly”.
If a project was not compliant, carbon credits already paid out were clawed back, the statement said. “We only issue carbon credits where a project can demonstrate regenerating native forest,” it said.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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