Highlighted Article: The Contradictions of Green Policies to Limit CO2 Emissions

From: edmhdotme

Date: November 11, 2020

The Contradictions of Green Policies to Limit CO2 Emissions

Summary

"The context of the 2019 CO2 emissions from various Nations and Nation groups is shown above.

Currently the burning of Biomass is designated as “CO2 neutral” by Western Nations to give the appearance of reducing CO2 emissions and thus controlling Climate Change.  The designation of Biomass burning as Carbon neutral is essentially self-defeating as:

burning Biomass substantially increases the instantaneous output of CO2 emissions.
is hugely destructive of natural environments and habitats wherever employed at the necessary industrial scale.
The primary government actions to limit CO2 emissions have been to mandate a change in the fuels used to generate electrical power.  The Green thinking requires the substitution of fossils fuels, replacing them with nominally “CO2 emissions free” fuels such as the Wind and Solar power as well as Biomass and Biofuels, which are designated to be sustainable and CO2 free by policy, because their plant material may well regrow eventually.  These fuel substitution policies have already done proven damage to the reliability of Power grids in the South Australia and California and are making power supplies increasingly vulnerable wherever those policies are instituted.  A low wind period in the UK and Europe in November 2020 came very close to causing the failure of the UK Grid.

The inevitable CO2 emissions characteristics of their mandated alternative fuels are conveniently ignored by policy makers:

the substitution of fossil fuels particularly by Biomass for electricity generation has gross and immediate extra CO2 emissions consequences.
the engineering requirements for Renewables, (Wind and Solar), themselves cause very significant CO2 emissions and also imply the utilisation of massive, limited mineral resources.
The policy of promoting Biomass:

is essentially self-defeating in it objective to limit CO2 emissions an save the Climate:
in spite of being declared “Carbon neutral”, by EU and UK policy it is far from Carbon neutral by its effect:  for the same power produced, burning Biomass releases much more CO2 than other fossil fuels, (Coal, Lignite and particularly Natural Gas).
is massively destructive of virgin forest environments, wherever the wood is harvested.  In Europe there is insufficient timber feedstock even to maintain partial power production.
will require up to 100 years to fully restore the destroyed native forest wild life habitat and virgin environments and to thus reabsorb the total CO2 that is released instantaneously by the burning of the Biomass in power plants.
requires significant heat energy to dry and process the harvested wood material converting it into the pelletised, transportable product.
requires significant fossil fuel use for long distance transport.
has already required substantial and costly refit of the generation and local fuel supply technologies at Drax where the UK Biomass is burnt.
these factors in combination result in an additional, instantaneous CO2 release into the atmosphere of about 3.6 times that produced by burning Natural Gas for the same power output.
Germany and the UK are leaders in the development of Renewable Energy in Europe. This post uses 2019 hourly generation datasets showing the scale of various generation technologies over the year.  It combines that power output data with data on the CO2 emissions of different fossil fuels to show the extent of CO2 emissions in 2019.

It questions the efficacy of using Biomass to reduce CO2 emissions at all, as

the scale of CO2 emissions from Biomass cancels out any potential CO2 savings made from using Weather Dependent Renewables.

So all the excess expenditures on Weather Dependent Renewables have done nothing to reduce Global CO2 emissions overall.

The excess costs of Weather Dependent Renewable power generation in the EU(28): 2020" ...

The Contradictions of Green Policies to Limit CO2 Emissions