Advarsel til EU's energiministre Følg ikke Danmarks vej
Den 4. og 5. september mødes EU’s energiministre og den danske EU-kommissær for energi, Dan Jørgensen, i København.
Første punkt på dagsordenen har overskriften “Venner af dekarboniseret energi”.
Det klinger utroligt hult, når første stop på turen, var en rundvisning på Avedøreværket, som er Danmarks største biomassekraftvarmeværk. Altså stedet hvor Danmark brænder verdens skove af og kalder det vedvarende energi, selvom det udleder mere CO2 end kul og gas.
NOAH har prøvet at få adgang til mødet for at informere EU’s ministre om, at Danmark har valgt en helt forkert vej ved systematisk at brænde skove ned og fokusere på bioenergi frem for at genopbygge Jordens kulstoflager. EU bør ikke kopiere Danmarks falske klimaløsninger!
Desværre fik vi ikke lov til at komme ind. I stedet har NOAH, sammen med vores internationale venner i Forests are not Fuel Europe, sendt et brev til alle ministrene som du kan læse her:
Dear Energy Ministers
Welcome to Denmark!
Your upcoming informal meeting in Copenhagen is to be held in a country of good intentions but unfortunately also some bad energy policies.
The bad policies are related to an enormous dependence on burning biomass for energy, which is destroying the forests of other EU countries, and forests outside the EU, such as those in the United States, and is harmful to both the climate and the environment.
While we support the Danish Minister for Climate, Energy and Utilities, Lars Aagaard, in his efforts for the Danish presidency to reach agreement on the climate target of a 90% reduction in GHG emissions by 2040, we strongly disagree on the methods used to get there.
Denmark's enormous consumption of biomass for heat and power generation is misleadingly treated as reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Biomass is claimed under policy to be CO2-neutral, although in reality, the IPCC says burning wood emits more CO2 than fossil fuels. Burning wood for energy is harmful to the climate and environment, because logging forests for fuel is degrading forest carbon stocks and harming biodiversity.
In addition to the huge consumption of wood for combustion in CHP plants, the Danish state gives subsidies to BECCS or BioCCS, which combines biomass with carbon capture and storage. This technology will however not deliver “negative emissions” as claimed, but simply adds to the burden on forests as, in the current policy and forest conditions, BECCS is done at the expense of the LULUCF land sink and therefore does not remove CO2 from the atmosphere: as a matter of fact, BECCS plants themselves require energy to run, consuming even more biomass.
Rather than removing CO2 from the atmosphere, BECCS is likely to even increase greenhouse gas emissions. As a group of NGOs have recently shown in a briefing for the European Commission decision-makers, the carbon that is stored comes from the biosphere - not the atmosphere - and undergoes an extremely costly detour to achieve something the biosphere is better at in the natural way without interference. Nor does the IPCC GHG reporting protocol treat BECCS as delivering negative emissions. Bioenergy does not contribute to decarbonisation! We hope you will keep this in mind during Working Session I on September 5th: “Friends of Decarbonisation”, when you will be visiting a huge biomass power plant.
Dangerous to follow Denmark’s path
During your visit to Denmark, you will indeed visit a power plant that uses biomass as fuel and has Estonia and Latvia amongst its main suppliers. Estonia has lost its forest carbon sink, and Latvia has likely done so recently as well. Denmark has gone down a completely wrong path by systematically burning down forests and generally focusing on bioenergy rather than rebuilding the Earth's carbon pool.
NOAH’s recently published report “No smoke without fire – How the Danish energy transition harms the forests of Estonia and Latvia” shows that Denmark and other importing countries are causing severe damage to the Baltic forests, and that burning forests for energy is overall negative for the climate.
The report is prepared in collaboration with the two Baltic environmental organizations Save Estonias Forests and the Latvian Ornithological Society, who are daily witnessing the consequences of Denmark's irresponsible behaviour. We hope you can use this brief visit on the ground to realise that the EU should not rely on such fake solutions for both its renewable energy and climate targets.
Yours sincerely,
on behalf of NOAH’s Campaign against bioenergy and Forests are not Fuel Europe coalition,
Bente Hessellund Andersen
Tobias Jespersen