In Conversation

Manda: [00:00:15] Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I am Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week we’re exploring power, its use and abuse. We live in a burning world. As we record, there are record wildfires across the Americas, record temperatures around the world, falling oxygen levels in the oceans; and however much supposedly renewable energy we produce, jevons paradox means we keep on burning fossil fuels evermore ever faster, producing ever greater amounts of carbon dioxide and throwing it into the atmosphere. This is clearly not an ideal circumstance. But even the so-called renewables have more under the hood than we might see on the surface. Burning wood or miscanthus, or any of the other grasses for ‘green’ energy, is both a massive accounting scam, and one of the ways that the predatory industrial complex sucks in eyewatering quantities of public money while selling us the lie that this is somehow taking us closer to net zero of carbon emissions. It isn’t. But sometimes we need someone who really knows what they’re talking about, to spell out the details for us. And this week, our guest is one of those people. Doctor Mary Booth is the founder and director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, a Massachusetts based think tank that uses science, communications and strategic advocacy to protect forests and our climate future.

Manda: [00:02:23] Mary worked as a senior scientist in the Environmental Working Group in the US, working on water quality. Now she directs the PFPI’s science and advocacy work on greenhouse gas, air pollutant, and forest impacts of biomass energy. And she’s provided science and policy support to hundreds of activists, researchers and policy makers across the US and the EU. And now that the UK is no longer in the EU (pause to grieve) she offers these things in the UK as well. I heard Mary on the Economics for Rebels podcast back in February, and I was blown away by her grasp of the essentials science and her capacity to explain it. And also by the sheer mendacity of the companies involved, the lies they tell, the false accounting they use, and the extent to which they are knowingly destroying the biosphere to give us, or at least those who set our policies and spend our public money, an illusion of somehow being more green, more sustainable, more ethical. And they’re not. So I wanted to give you the chance to hear Mary in action. And here we are. Someone who really knows what she’s talking about and who is doing things to try and redress the balance so that perhaps, seven generations down the line, we will bequeath to the generations yet unborn, a world that actually works. So, people of the podcast, here we go. Please welcome Doctor Mary Booth of the Partnership for Policy Integrity.

Manda: [00:04:12] Mary, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast.

Mary: [00:04:15] Thanks so much for having me.

Manda: [00:04:17] You’re welcome. How are you and where are you? I don’t know where you are in the world.

Mary: [00:04:21] Um, I am in Massachusetts, USA. And I am doing great, because things have really turned around politically here in the last week or so, so we’re all feeling a bit more hopeful.

Manda: [00:04:36] It’s amazing the euphoria is even reaching over to the UK. I’ve started reading the Daily Kos again, which I haven’t done since the Obama election. It feels like everything has turned around. So before we go into anything else, I hadn’t intended this, but who would your pick for Vice president be?

Mary: [00:04:53] I’m a big fan of Josh Shapiro and Pete Buttigieg. But I suspect it’ll be Mark Kelly.

Manda: [00:05:02] Oh do you?

Mary: [00:05:04] And he’s great, too.

Manda: [00:05:05] Okay. I was seeing a lot of movement for Waltz. There’s a whole movement on Twitter for Pete Buttigieg, who I thought would be such an exciting ticket, but I can’t see it really going down with the middle world so well. Everyone seems to think he’s going to be president at some point because he’s just such an intelligent, he speaks something like seven languages and he’s just a genuinely nice guy. Anyway, it looks to me from the long distance on the other side of the Atlantic, like he’s a good secretary of state for transport. Anyway, by the time this goes out, we’ll know who the VP is so we’ll find out who was right. Alrighty. So we’re here today because I heard you on the economics for rebels podcast talking about the utter inequities and the wholesale corruption that exists in the world of burning trees and other lumber to produce what is laughably called renewable and net zero power. And the the depths of inequity really shocked me. And so I wanted to bring you on so that people who listen here can find out. And just so we can bury into it a bit more deeply.

Manda: [00:06:15] So at the start, you are the director of a think tank called the Partnership for Policy Integrity, which is absolutely the best name for any think tank I can possibly imagine, because nobody is going to sit opposite you in any meeting and go, ‘well, we don’t want integrity in our policy’. That’s just never going to be a thing. So first of all, yay for good naming. I’m always impressed when the language is right. And tell us how it came into being and how you came to be a director. And then we’ll we’ll narrow down into what it’s actually doing now. Over to you.

Mary: [00:06:49] I started working on biomass issues here in Massachusetts when I had moved back here after a long time away. And I first founded a, it wasn’t really an NGO, it was just more of an ad hoc group. The Massachusetts Environmental Energy Alliance, working on bioenergy and then realising that actually there was so much going on nationally and so there was a need to work on it nationally. So I decided to found PFPI as kind of a platform for that work. But I started out working on actually water. Water withdrawal permit for a biomass plant that was proposed here in Massachusetts, that was going to withdraw 880,000 gallons of water a day just for cooling. I mean, it’s basically the same technology as a coal plant.

Manda: [00:07:46] But 880,000 gallons per day that would presumably just dry up any river. That’s an extraordinary quantity of water.

Mary: [00:07:53] Well, not necessarily, but certainly during low flow periods it would. And so I started working on that and quickly realised that, wait a minute, they’re treating wood burning as carbon neutral, which is insane. So going from what I thought was just kind of this niche little issue here in Massachusetts to realising that this was being incentivised all over the US. And then and then starting to work internationally. So I founded PFPI. I mean, I started working on the issue in 2008, and I founded PFPI at the end of 2009 and have been working internationally and in the US ever since on this. And my background is I have a PhD in ecosystem ecology and I worked on water carbon, nutrient relations of plants and soils. So the segue into working on carbon flux made sense.

Manda: [00:08:53] How did that original water extraction – did you manage to stop that from happening?

Mary: [00:09:00] We got them to improve the permit a lot. And then because of rules that we got enacted here in Massachusetts that took subsidies away from large scale electricity only plants, that plant never got built.

Manda: [00:09:14] Oh well done. Interesting. And has that reverberated around the US? Are there other similar plants that were planned and that equally have not been built?

Mary: [00:09:24] What Massachusetts did was they put in place basically science based rules that acknowledged that burning wood emits more net carbon than burning fossil fuels. And because of that finding, it was a state commissioned study, because of that finding, the state decided to eliminate subsidies based on the scientific finding, which obviously we would have loved to have replicate that. Now other states have restricted bioenergy. For instance, New York state has some restrictions on bioenergy as renewable energy, but we are still kind of tackling the problem, trying to get a more science based carbon accounting approach everywhere. And in fact, just this morning, I was working on a set of response comments to the Internal Revenue Service here in the US, who are going to grant clean energy tax credits. We already have a tax credit program, but they’re revamping the program. It’ll give a tax benefit to solar, wind, this kind of thing. But they’re soliciting comments on whether and how bioenergy should be counted as clean energy. Which for so many reasons it shouldn’t, but they are actually proposing to do carbon accounting and count all the emissions. I mean, the thing with bioenergy is, as you probably know by now, is that it’s treated as having zero emissions. It’s treated as not necessarily carbon neutral under every schema, but it’s treated as having zero emissions in many policies, even though the science and the facts are clear; there’s no ambiguity about the fact that burning wood emits a lot of carbon dioxide. So when you burn wood for energy, you actually emit more CO2 at the smokestack than when you burn fossil fuels.

Manda: [00:11:34] Because it’s less concentrated. Because coal is essentially fossilised wood, it’s just that unfossilised wood has more mass and you need to burn more to get the same amount of power out of it.

Mary: [00:11:43] Well, it has generally more water content, so that reduces the efficiency of combustion. So for every unit of carbon that is pumped out into the world, it’s generating less useful energy.

Manda: [00:11:58] And the people who do the fancy accounting, are they trying to tell everyone that the trees have absorbed x amount of carbon, we are only releasing the same X amount of carbon and therefore there’s a neutral cycle. Is that the argument and can you unpick why it isn’t correct?

Mary: [00:12:16] Well, sometimes they do make that argument, but you can always point out to them that coal already absorbed the carbon too. So the fact that the carbon was absorbed in the past is not the issue. The issue is what happens when you burn it. And you’re obviously emitting CO2 to the atmosphere. So the question is can that CO2 be offset in some way through the forest regrowing, which obviously takes a lot of time. So the argument that the bioenergy industry has used, and many policies, including in Great Britain and the EU, but particularly Great Britain. And I know this because I’m actually involved in a legal suit against the UK government right now, so I’m very familiar with their reasoning.

Manda: [00:13:08] I would like to know more about that in a minute. Go on.

Mary: [00:13:10] So basically there are various incarnations of why the CO2 shouldn’t count. Yes, yes, yes, we know it’s emitting a lot of CO2, but it’s not really warming the atmosphere. It’s not really additional CO2 that we’re emitting to the atmosphere because of the following reasons. And all of those reasons are bogus. But the main reason that they tend to use, my shorthand for it is the ‘trees are growing somewhere’ argument. Yes, we know we’re burning trees over here, but those trees over there are still growing and sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere. And as long as there’s net growth on the landscape, we don’t have to count the CO2 that’s coming out of the smokestack. Even though it’s more CO2 per megawatt of electricity generated than if you were just burning coal. Now, this is a bogus argument. It violates physical reality. You don’t get to just wish away carbon. The fact that the trees are growing somewhere else, they were already growing somewhere else. They were already sequestering carbon. Nothing about cutting down and burning trees over here makes those trees over there grow faster and sequester carbon more quickly. Therefore, there’s obviously a net addition of CO2 to the atmosphere. And it is warming the climate just like fossil CO2. So this fake idea underpins a lot of policies, including that of the UK.

Manda: [00:14:46] It’s also really hard to argue when net forest cover is falling. So there may be trees growing somewhere, but they aren’t nearly as many trees growing as when the trees that we just cut down for fuel were growing.

Mary: [00:14:59] Well, forests can be expanding in terms of their areal extent.

Manda: [00:15:04] But they’re not are they? Or are they?

Mary: [00:15:06] Well, in some places they are. Because don’t forget that in the 1800s, 1900s here in the US, for instance, entire landscapes were cleared of trees for agriculture and wood use. So forests are actually still rebounding in some places from that clearing. But the rate at which forests are taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it… So basically to simplify the whole system, you’ve got to think about carbon being in two pools; it’s either embodied in a product or a tree or in soils; it’s physical carbon. Or it’s in the atmosphere or it’s atmospheric carbon that’s dissolved in water.

Manda: [00:15:52] It’s part of the carbon cycle, basically.

Mary: [00:15:56] Right. But the size of those two pools is very much a function of obviously, how much carbon we’re emitting out of smokestacks and tailpipes and that kind of thing. But also how fast and how much carbon trees are sequestering out of the atmosphere and converting into wood. So it is totally possible for forests to be expanding in terms of their areal extent, and yet for the rate of carbon uptake per year to be decreasing. Because forests may be expanding, but they’re getting thinner, they’re being logged so intensively that the areal extent of forest doesn’t reflect their full carbon holding capacity.

Manda: [00:16:40] So an areal extent of a forest is an aerial view from a satellite or a plane that says, we have this many acres of forest.

Mary: [00:16:47] Right. How much area.

Manda: [00:16:50] Is this a measurement that is legally used as an international scale for how much forest there is? Is this the kind of metric that we use?

Mary: [00:16:59] It is one metric that’s tracked internationally, like the FAO tracks forest cover, for instance. And you will sometimes hear apologists for bioenergy industry saying, oh, but forests are expanding, we have more forests than we’ve had in years. And well, that’s nice and we want more forests. But that doesn’t mean that forests are mitigating climate the way that they should be. And in fact, because forests are taking up less and less carbon each year, they’re actually acting as less effective carbon sinks than they were previously. And in fact, in Europe, what we see is that some countries have lost their carbon sink altogether. Their forests are now a net source of carbon to the atmosphere instead of a net sink of carbon. And we see this in countries that have had a lot of forests exploited for bioenergy.

Manda: [00:17:54] And so I had heard that Brazil, the Amazon, was becoming a net emitter rather than a net sink. I hadn’t realised it was happening elsewhere. My framing of that was in the Amazon, this was in the Bolsonaro years, they were just basically clearcutting and burning on site in order to be able to grow soya, to feed American industrial feedlots. First of all, is that true? And second, what’s happening in Europe? Are they just selectively cutting and thinning out the trees to such an extent that the biophysical reality of the ecosystem of the forest is being compromised? Or is it just that they’re just felling and there’s not as much forest as there was?

Mary: [00:18:37] Well, because of the way forest is classified under these international schemes, you can clear cut a forest so there’s not a single tree standing, but it still gets counted as forest in terms of area.

Manda: [00:18:50] What?

Mary: [00:18:51] Because it hasn’t been converted to some other land use.

Manda: [00:18:55] Oh dear Lord.

Mary: [00:18:56] If you convert forest to agriculture, that’s considered land use change and that’s that’s a big no no. But if you cut down a forest completely and then just let it regrow or replant it, or even, God forbid, convert a natural forest to a plantation forest, that’s still counted as forest. So the dynamics of what’s happening in Europe is obviously quite complicated, because there’s a bunch of different countries that have different amounts of forest, density of forest, all this sort of thing, different intensity of harvesting due to forest industry. But in Europe, more than half the wood that’s cut out of forest is burned for energy. And it’s all counted, even burning in your fireplace is counted as renewable energy in the EU and in the UK, by the way. So when you hear, oh, we’re doing so great, we’re generating so much renewable energy, in fact, a huge amount of that renewable energy comes from burning trees and other wood.  And it’s decreased carbon forest standing stocks enough, in some countries like Estonia and Finland, two very heavily forested countries, have both lost their forest carbon sinks.

Manda: [00:20:20] Good God. Whoa. And I was listening to a podcast the other day where they were pointing out the new incoming Labour government wants to build 1.5 million homes in the UK, and they were arguing for timber as a building resource, because it’s much, much better. You’re locking the wood into the building. In many ways better than concrete. But there’s not going to be the timber. At the moment, I gathered from that, that we are a net importer from Sweden of timber, because we’re not growing enough to build stuff with. But if we’re burning it, we can’t build with it. Is it the same quality of wood that we end up building? Could we build with the wood that we are currently burning, or is it different kinds of wood?

Mary: [00:21:01] Possibly. I mean, it would it would be better to turn wood into long lived wood products than to burn it, obviously, because it does lock up the carbon for longer. But the idea that replacing concrete and steel with wood is going to provide a real climate mitigation is also based on some false assumptions.

Manda: [00:21:30] Can you just talk us through that? Just for my own interest, because I was quite taken by this, it seemed quite a good idea.

Mary: [00:21:36] Well, there’s no question that the more of what we’re harvesting now that can be turned into long lived wood products instead of burning it, that’s better. There’s no question that’s better. But the idea that we can continue to harvest more and more and more to replace carbon intensive materials like steel and concrete is fallacious. Because you’re just robbing Peter to pay Paul. You’re moving carbon around to different pools, but you’re not increasing the amount of carbon that’s taken out of the atmosphere and stored in forests. I mean, people say, oh, young trees grow faster and they suck carbon out of the air faster. But the important thing to remember is that existing forests represent big standing stocks of carbon that is now held out of the atmosphere. When you cut down trees to turn them into long lived wood products, very often relatively small amount of that tree actually ends up, maybe 10 to 15%, sometimes more, but very often just 10 to 15% of the wood from that tree ends up in a long lived wood product. The rest of it ends up in the atmosphere in short order, like two years. It’s either burned for energy or it’s turned into paper stuff that’s disposed of and then burned, incinerated as waste or potentially landfilled.

Manda: [00:23:06] But then it becomes methane, which is even worse.

Mary: [00:23:09] Some of it. Landfilled wood doesn’t actually turn into methane that fast, it stays stored for a long time. But that’s not the answer either. You know, putting wood in landfills. There are actually these harebrained schemes to bury wood as climate mitigation.

Manda: [00:23:29] I’m sorry, what? Talk us through that. What?

Mary: [00:23:33] This is a thing that’s being proposed now. It’s so bonkers. We’re going to cut down trees and bury them or sink them in the ocean so that they don’t decompose and they just represent carbon that’s locked up?

Manda: [00:23:49] That’s functionally insane. But you don’t need to cut them. I mean, if you want more trees, you just grow more trees. It’s not like we’re short of land on which you could grow trees, to be perfectly frank, you just take a few sheep off and let some trees grow.

Mary: [00:24:02] Actually, in some ways we are short on land because population is growing and the need for food is increasing. So you always hear about, oh, we’re going to grow plantations of trees on abandoned land, but there’s not that much abandoned land. I look around, I mean…

Manda: [00:24:23] I live in an area where there’s lots of what we call sheep-wrecked land. And if you took the sheep off, which frankly are not feeding very many people, you could grow a lot of trees.

Mary: [00:24:31] Well, you could grow more trees, but if you’re then cutting them down to turn them into products and they’re not really storing carbon, are they?

Manda: [00:24:38] No. Okay.

Mary: [00:24:38] There’s definitely a super important role for rewilding and bringing forests back. And it needs to be done properly. It shouldn’t be done with plantations. It should be done with forests that are as natural as possible with a variety of species, because we need to restore nature.

Manda: [00:24:57] Exactly. Increasing biodiversity, because we’re in a biodiversity crisis as well.

Mary: [00:25:02] Exactly. But basically the idea of the bioeconomy, which is kind of the shorthand word for the idea that we’re going to replace carbon intensive anything; fossil fuels, steel, concrete for building, with wood. That idea is based on some big assumptions that turn out to not really be met in reality. And when you really look, it’s pretty simple. The more carbon that we can pack into forests, the better for the climate. And all of this is really designed, it’s all part of a framework of thinking that we can just continue to consume indefinitely and that we can support the way we live now, but just shift to other resources instead of fossil fuels or steel or concrete. We’re just going to use wood and we’re just going to carry on as normal. But it doesn’t work that way. The carbon math does not work.

Manda: [00:25:57] No.

Mary: [00:25:58] And the nice thing about increasing carbon density of forests is that existing forests actually are quite thinned out, because they’ve been exploited so heavily, so you actually could store a lot more carbon in forests without claiming other land and putting forests on it. You could just increase the carbon density of existing forests by taking the logging pressure off. Reduce logging pressure. Let trees get bigger.

Manda: [00:26:28] More mother trees. That would be really good. And then you also have the ecosystem building back to an ecosystem. Presumably you build soil which also sequesters carbon. You actually get the whole cycle growing back in again.

Mary: [00:26:42] Yeah

Manda: [00:26:43] So let’s unpick the pressures to not do this. Because one of the things that has really struck me, reading through your website and the associated ones, is the extent to which this false accounting is an integral part of government policy. That they like being able to say we’re producing all this power with zero emissions, when quite plainly there’s actual smokestacks pumping carbon into the sky. How do they get so that moderately sane people somewhere up the tree and not necessarily the people at the top, certainly not when these decisions were made, but there are some people who have the capacity to think in the whole structure. How do they end up being bamboozled into believing that this is the case?

Mary: [00:27:28] Oh, I wish I knew. I think that they do understand what’s really going on. I mean, in the case of Drax in particular…

Manda: [00:27:42] So tell people what Drax is because not everyone listening will have a clue.

Mary: [00:27:47] Well, Drax is this huge power station up in Yorkshire that is responsible for something like 6 or 7% of the UK’s electricity generation. And a number of years ago they started to switch from burning coal to burning wood pellets, and now they’ve completely converted over to wood pellets. And the wood pellets that they burn are sourced mostly from North America, so from the USA and Canada.

Manda: [00:28:16] From old growth forests.

Mary: [00:28:18] Yeah, old growth forests. Some forests that are old but not classified technically as old growth. And then even primary forests, meaning forests that were never logged, ever, until Drax came along.

Manda: [00:28:30] How is that even legal? How are you allowed to log primary forests in this day and age?

Mary: [00:28:34] Well, you’re sort of not supposed to, but Canada has left the door open for this kind of thing and Drax has just gone right through that doorway. Well, Drax diversified into not only buying pellets from other companies, but they started building and purchasing pellet plants themselves. So they built several in the US and then they purchased a company called Pinnacle Pellets in Canada.

Manda: [00:29:05] Okay. There’s steam now coming out of my ears.

Mary: [00:29:08] So the BBC did a great exposé on this, and I can send you a link for the Vimeo version of that. They did an exposé on the logging that’s happening. It’s only 29 minutes long and it’s such a fantastic piece of reporting.

Manda: [00:29:23] Yeah, I will definitely put that in the show notes. But then people know then. Because I have a report from, we’re recording towards the end of July, I have a report from last Friday that Drax reported an increase in profit in the first half, and forecast that its earnings for the full year would come out at the top end of expectations. It now has pre-tax profits of £463 million in the first half of the year, up from £338 million in the same period last year. And they’re getting something ridiculous, like 3 million per day in subsidies from our government, which, frankly, could be spent on almost anything else. The government today has announced that it is cutting all winter fuel payments to pensioners, which is what keeps them warm in the winter, because it hasn’t got enough money. Now, leaving aside that this is economically illiterate and it is the government’s job to spend the money. And they can point out to me what how much of that money they spend would they not get back as tax? And frankly, the bits they wouldn’t get back as tax is the bits they are giving to Drax? Sorry. Big rant. I’m so angry.

Mary: [00:30:24] That’s shocking. So yeah, Drax’s annual financial report from 2022 has a table in it that shows if you add up their contracts for difference and their renewable obligation payments, so the subsidies work in different ways, like they’re not all just direct payments. But basically they are obviously funded with public money. And the total is definitely more than £3 million per day that they get as a public benefit. Or at least that year, I don’t know what the current number is. So this is a shocking amount of money.

Manda: [00:31:05] Over a billion a year in public subsidies. It’s not surprising they’re making a profit for their shareholders. They’re about to do a share buyback scheme, which is the ultimate scam.

Mary: [00:31:14] Yeah, the majority of their so-called profit comes from the payments that are basically from the public. And all of this in the name of reducing emissions when it’s actually increasing emissions. If they were burning coal, they would be emitting less CO2 and they wouldn’t be destroying forests, which they are now. So we would love to see the UK government do better on this issue and maybe the new government will. In the meantime, my organisation, PFPI works closely with a UK charity known as the Lifescape project. And Lifescape is mostly a rewilding charity, but we teamed up to form something called the Forest Litigation Collaborative. And they bring the law and I bring the science. And together we’ve teamed up to bring legal cases on forests, climate and bioenergy all over the place. We helped bring cases in Korea. We’re working on some stuff in Estonia right now. And we have this case where we’ve helped sue the European Commission over the financial taxonomy, which treats bioenergy and forest activities as eligible for green financing.

Mary: [00:32:38] And then we have this case against the UK government, on the biomass strategy. And basically the biomass strategy is more of this bogus carbon accounting; saying bioenergy is zero emissions and therefore we’re going to continue supporting it. The conservative government was on the verge of making a decision which was suspended pending the election, about extending subsidies for Drax. Drax used to say, oh, we’re carbon neutral, we have no emissions to the atmosphere, no net emissions to the atmosphere. Now they’re saying that they’re going to use carbon capture and storage to take the carbon that was coming out of the smokestacks from burning wood and compress it and bury it underground. And that if they do this, that this constitutes negative emissions. So they’re pretending as if stopping emissions that were going into the atmosphere before, actually represents drawing down emissions and sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere. They’re calling this negative emissions. And so the government has somewhat fallen for this and had a consultation on it, to which we responded.

Manda: [00:33:59] Are they likely to listen to you?

Mary: [00:34:01] Yeah. So we would really like to see the Labour government Just put a kibosh on continued subsidies for Drax.

Manda: [00:34:08] Okay, so a whole number of questions arise from there. First of all, carbon capture and storage always struck me a little bit like nuclear fusion. It’s always been at least ten years away. And and we’re not any closer. And, you know, I’m sure the AI is going to solve for nuclear fusion at some point in the future, but I’m not holding my breath. So have they got actual working carbon capture and storage? That’s the first question. Is it actually functional? And second, what is the energy return over energy invested? Because it isn’t no energy to capture carbon. And if what you’re doing is running a power station in order to create the energy in order to capture the carbon that you’re producing from your power station, then the whole thing just needs to stop. Do you do you happen to know the EROI of the carbon capture and storage? Or is it just a fancy thing that the unicorns are sprinkling fairy dust and it will happen in the future?

Mary: [00:34:58] Yeah, my understanding is that it requires and I don’t remember off the top of my head, I don’t want to say an exact number because I don’t remember what it is.

Manda: [00:35:08] Okay, but ballparks will do.

Mary: [00:35:10] It’s like 25 to 30 or more percent of more CO2 is going to be emitted in the process of generating the energy to run the equipment, to compress and store the carbon. So right off the bat, even if you were capturing and storing 100% of the emissions coming out of the smokestack, you’re cutting down 30% more trees.

Manda: [00:35:37] To power your carbon capture and storage.

Mary: [00:35:39] To power it. And of course, the key difference with CCS (carbon capture and storage) for fossil fuels versus bioenergy, is that if you do it at a fossil fuel plant, you had CO2 coming out of the smokestack, now you’re going to capture that and park it below ground. So you’ve turned a plant that was emitting carbon into a zero emissions plant if it works perfectly 100% in theory, right? So you’ve gone from all your emissions entering the atmosphere to none, so you’re now a zero emissions plant. The claim with bioenergy, however, is not that you’re going to become a zero emissions plant, because they’re already claiming to be…

Manda: [00:36:19] Already a zero emissions plant in their fantasy language.

Mary: [00:36:23] So because they’re claiming that they’re net zero emissions already. They say that when you park that CO2 below ground now they’re actually negative emissions and this is sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. But of course this is bogus. And the fact that policymakers haven’t seen through this I mean, it’s like, honestly, I feel like policymakers who are endorsing this are like, ‘Hi, I don’t get it. I’m going to announce to the world how’…

Manda: [00:36:54] How many policymakers have you met who had two functioning neurones that were actually talking to each other? I mean, seriously, honestly.

Mary: [00:37:01] Well lots of people are smart and they would never fall for this if this were like a financial scheme. They would never fall for this.

Manda: [00:37:07] Are you sure? They have fallen for quite a lot of financial schemes. We have a government that paid people £440 billion pounds to cut up black bin bags and sell them back to us as PPE during the Covid pandemic. So you know, they’re not the smartest people on the planet. Okay.

Mary: [00:37:23] Yeah you win that round. But I mean the idea that it’s negative emissions. So say you’ve got a tree that’s 150 years old. The tree has been sequestering carbon and sucking carbon out of the atmosphere for 150 years, right. All that carbon removal from the atmosphere already happened. You cut down the tree, you burn the tree, you capture the CO2 and put that CO2 below ground. You have not removed any new CO2 from the atmosphere. You simply prevented CO2 that was already captured from entering the atmosphere. And that’s not negative emissions, that’s zero emissions.

Manda: [00:38:07] Clearly.

Mary: [00:38:08] And this is so basic that for policymakers to continue endorsing this, it’s like announcing to the world how stupid they are. And I just cannot believe that policymakers are willing to go on the record as being that sort of math illiterate about the most basic things about climate, about what constitutes a positive emission, a negative emission or a neutral emission. It’s the most basic thing that you need to understand. And so for any Minister of Energy and climate to be endorsing this as offering negative emissions, it’s like immediately disqualifying. So hopefully the new Labour government, before they go on the record saying anything stupid about endorsing this as their ongoing policy, Hopefully they’ll take a good look at the science and figure out on their very own that it’s not going to work.

Manda: [00:39:03] Yeah, don’t hold your breath.

Mary: [00:39:04] And that throwing money at it, throwing billions and billions of pounds more additional at this, is a colossal waste of money.

Manda: [00:39:13] But something that really struck me when I heard you before, was the amount of lobbying that happens. And they’re going to have lobbyists who are basically very good at the three cup game, aren’t they? They’re going to be, let me put a little bit of CO2 under these cups. I’m going to move all the cups around and you have to guess where the… Oh look, it’s all gone.

Mary: [00:39:30] It’s your job as a policymaker to see through that. They’re supposedly the best and the brightest, right.

Manda: [00:39:37] I Know. I don’t think that’s what the system does though.

Mary: [00:39:40] All those public school graduates, all those Oxford Cambridge grads: put it to good use.

Manda: [00:39:45] Yeah. Ed Miliband is really smart, I think, and he really gets it, but I’m not sure they have the bandwidth, to be perfectly honest.

Mary: [00:39:52] This is simple. It takes five minutes to explain. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Manda: [00:39:57] You’d think so. So this is my question: so when you explain this, when you get someone and you sit them down and you look them in the eye and you point out the really basic arithmetic of this, do you watch the pennies drop and the little lights going on in their heads? And the moment of epiphany. Has that happened in your company? And if not, why not?

Mary: [00:40:16] Well, I mean, I think it happens with people that I’m talking to, but I’m not toe to toe with high level policymakers.

Manda: [00:40:24] We need to get you toe to toe with them.

Mary: [00:40:27] Well, I mean, we’ve just we’ve sort of given up trying to convince anyone, and we’ve just turned to the courts. We’ve resorted to the courts, basically. We’re having that conversation by filing litigation.

Manda: [00:40:40] Then they pay attention.

Mary: [00:40:41] And because we file litigation, Lifescape being the plaintiff in this case, but us helping. Because of discovery, because of the documents that that we get, we get to see kind of the the back end of the government’s thinking on this, what they’re saying. We’re privy to some of that stuff and it’s really clear that, you know, they’ve come up with like five different explanations about why bioenergy is zero carbon and some of them are mutually incompatible and they just don’t seem to care. At least the conservative government didn’t seem to care.

Manda: [00:41:17] No, no, of course not.

Mary: [00:41:18] And they seem to assume that they’re just going to have total impunity and that they can just misrepresent this. And, you know, I’ve seen question time, like parliamentary question time and the same thing where they’re just lying right into the faces of the MPs. And they know they’re lying and they do it anyway. And I think it just shows how deeply unserious they are about addressing climate. Because if this were any other issue, where they were lying at the same level, say it was about nuclear power and the danger of a really dangerous meltdown or something, people wouldn’t stand for it. But it’s just carbon.

Manda: [00:42:01] And we can make it go away by wishing it wasn’t there and then, look, we’ve got zero carbon and it’s all China’s fault.

Mary: [00:42:07] Like you said, shuffling the cups around or whatever. But I wish that carbon dioxide was dark purple or something when it came out of the smokestack and persisted. Because the fact that it’s invisible, odourless, it’s really a problem.

Manda: [00:42:22] And I had someone look me in the eye and say, well, it’s only 450 parts per million. That’s a tiny amount, it can’t be doing anything.

Mary: [00:42:28] Oh yeah. Don’t even bother engaging with those people.

Manda: [00:42:31] So let’s not even go there. But one thing that I thought was interesting, I listened to Tom Cho, who’s clearly a man with a brain the size of many planets, who worked out there’s some very, very, very expensive multi-billion dollar carbon capture and storage plant in the US, which of course is not actually capturing anything yet and will take many decades to cover the carbon release of the concrete that built it. And he reckoned 200 beavers would sequester the same amount of carbon. And the only reason that’s not being counted is that nobody has found a way to monetise beavers yet. So I just think you should be using a beaver as a unit of carbon accounting. This is how much a beaver can sequester; look if we put ten beavers at the head of the river in your area, they’ll sequester just as much carbon as Drax and it’s not costing you anything.

Mary: [00:43:18] Well, you know, Europe is trying to… You know, it’s too bad about Brexit.

Manda: [00:43:23] On so many levels.

Mary: [00:43:25] Because Europe has got some great ideas about nature restoration.

Manda: [00:43:32] Is Europe beginning to listen? Because they had some pretty fancy false accounting too.

Mary: [00:43:37] Oh they do. I mean, they’re still totally out to lunch on bioenergy, but they do have the land use change forestry regulation, LULUCF, which is setting targets for each member state to sequester more carbon in the land sector. And they’re very unambitious targets. But the fact that they have set targets and then the nature restoration legislation. But we really need to address in policies explicitly that, gratifyingly it’s kind of what you would expect: old, big, complex ecosystems store a hell of a lot of carbon. And it’s just as important to prevent that carbon from entering the atmosphere in the future as it is to incentivise new carbon entering into ecosystems. Fortunately, we can do both.

Manda: [00:44:42] And sometimes at the same time.

Mary: [00:44:44] As I said, many forests have such low carbon density that changes in forest management could renaturalized and store a lot more carbon in existing forests, and then the forests that are still relatively intact, the old growth, the primary; we need to leave them the hell alone. Stay the hell out of them.

Manda: [00:45:04] Right. Okay. In a minute I want to ask you about how we could design good policy, but let’s take a slight step to the side and look at the other biomass concepts, which seems, as far as I can tell, to be growing various forms of grasses, bundling them up, transporting them long distances, and then burning them in a power station. And saying, look, we just sucked it out of the out of the air in a single year. So basically that also, again, is worth zero. And I’m assuming that, well, it seems to me equally false accounting. And is there anything that I’m missing in the fact that this is just basically untrue? In the end, the transport costs must be huge.

Mary: [00:45:43] Yeah, it seems great on paper because the year life cycle of a grass, and particularly if it’s a perennial grass where the root mass is staying intact and storing more carbon in soils, etc.. In theory, this can serve as a low carbon source of fuel. But the problem is you need to look at scaling issues. And the amount of fuel and carbon that you can get off of any given area of land is really small. You need massive, massive amounts of land to grow enough grasses to make into fuel to produce any reasonable amount of power. And then on top of that, then you have where are we going to get that land?

Manda: [00:46:37] What else might it be used for?

Mary: [00:46:39] So are we going to grow less food? Are we going to tell people that we should be doing less animal agriculture? Personally, I think we should be doing less animal agriculture, for lots of reasons that would have a huge climate benefit to do less animal agriculture. But anyway, the bottom line is there’s just not massive amounts of land.

Manda: [00:47:01] And also water.

Mary: [00:47:02] And then people say, well, we’ll use abandoned land. But the thing is, if it’s abandoned, it’s abandoned for a reason. It may be very low productivity. You need water and nutrients to grow a crop.

Manda: [00:47:14] Yeah. And what you don’t want is to be having enormous combine harvesters, which have their own embodied carbon and are chewing through diesel and spreading glyphosate and nitrogen and phosphates, which are more of the boundaries that we’ve broken.

Mary: [00:47:26] And then you have to process the material into a fuel. And it turns out that actually miscanthus, you know, switchgrass and all these things, are not that great a fuel. They have a lot of, it’s called ash even before it’s burned and turned into ash, but inorganic components like silica and different components besides carbon. So they make a lot of ash. They’re sort of low energy density. They’re kind of a pain in the ass to process. You have to dry it, you have to chew it up, you have to pelletise it. Then you have to move it all over the place. And most of that takes fossil fuels or biofuels, liquid biofuels that have also been produced at great carbon cost. So the energy return is diminished.

Manda: [00:48:14] The energy return cannot be great. Negative. We have somebody local here and she’s lovely and it’s all organic and they’re trying to do their best, and they’re growing miscanthus and then the only place it can be processed is in Norfolk, which is absolutely as far as you can get away from us in England without falling into the sea. And by the time they’ve cut it, baled it, transported it across there, turned it into something you could actually put into a power station. I cannot believe that you have any net positive gain at all. Plus the water.

Mary: [00:48:44] Well it just becomes really expensive. Even if you do have a net gain, you know, the amount of carbon that is involved in transport and stuff is still a relatively small percentage of the carbon that’s embodied in the fuel. But it just is really expensive to do all that stuff. And people don’t want to don’t want their electricity price to double. Yeah. And if you are going to double their price, do it because you’re building solar or whatever. Don’t do it for some dumb combustion based technology. Combustion is so yesterday. Because on top of the carbon problems you’ve got, of course conventional pollutant emissions. None of this stuff burns cleanly and then you and then literally tons of ash left over that you have to get rid of.

Manda: [00:49:37] And what do you do with that?

Mary: [00:49:38] So they’re oh, spread it on fields. It’s like, well, that might not be so good.

Manda: [00:49:43] Depending what’s in it. So what does happen to the ash? Do they just literally go out and spread it, or do they dig landfill with the ash?

Mary: [00:49:50] Some of it gets landfilled, some of it gets spread. It’s just a gigantic exercise in moving carbon and waste around.

Manda: [00:50:02] Right. So let’s pretend that the incoming government called you up and said, Mary, we would like a strategy that’s sensible and wise. If they made you some kind of, I don’t know, energy production staff, which is they like they like to think that they’re all Russian, don’t ask me why. What would you what would you say? What would your strategy be?

Mary: [00:50:24] I mean, I don’t make any claim to being, I’m very narrowly specialised in this one area, so I don’t claim to have some broad vision.

Manda: [00:50:35] Just play. You must have some ideas.

Mary: [00:50:38] Well, the first thing they need to do, which, of course they’ll never do, but they need to stop lying to people. They need to be honest about where we’re at with the the climate crisis and what’s going to be required to actually address and to move to a low carbon energy system. And it’s going to require a lot more. And then they’ve just got to double down on energy efficiency. You know, houses need to be made more efficient so that you don’t have to expend so much to heat them and then electrify everything that can be electrified.

Manda: [00:51:15] But that’s going to take huge amounts of copper. I had somebody else on the podcast a while ago, Doctor Simon Michaux, who said that if the EU went ahead with its net zero concepts, we have over the lifetime of humanity, mined something like 800 million tons of copper. I might be an order of magnitude out there. We would need to mine the same amount in the next 22 years, just for the EU to electrify everything they want to electrify. And that’s not possible. It takes ten years to find a new copper mine. 1 in 10 of them survives, and then it takes another ten years and a lot of fossil fuels to get the stuff out of the ground, and it’s not there. We can’t electrify everything.

Mary: [00:51:54] Well, it looks like we’re all going to be on beachfront property and a lot warmer in the future then.

Manda: [00:52:01] Yeah, and doing without air conditioning.

Mary: [00:52:04] If people want to continue with the same standard of living or anything close to it, we have to emit a lot less. I mean, first of all, we can’t continue at the same rate of resource extraction, but life is becoming unliveable for some people already.

Manda: [00:52:28] For lots of people around the globe. Yeah.

Mary: [00:52:30] Because of extreme heat.

Manda: [00:52:33] And the wildfires.

Mary: [00:52:35] Yeah. And we’re reaching tipping points. So people need to wrap their heads around that. And then they need to figure out, you know, how to do all of this without burning stuff. It’s burning stuff that got us into this mess. We are not going to burn our way out of the climate crisis. Switchgrass, trees, none of it. Fossil fuels. It’s all carbon into the atmosphere and it needs to stop.

Manda: [00:53:07] There is no carbon capture and storage possible enough.

Mary: [00:53:12] No. Sorry.

Manda: [00:53:14] No. It’s true. I mean, this podcast says this all the time. And I am wondering, with the wildfires in Canada and the US, whether their governments will then stop Drax. You know, we’ve just lost however many millions of acres of trees which have just belted all their carbon into the atmosphere, so you guys are just not going to get to cut any more trees and burn them as well. Is that even a sequential series of logical processes that happens?

Mary: [00:53:42] No, not from what I’ve seen, the BC government. They’ll just say, see, we told you these wildfires, they’re just going to burn everything anyway, so we might as well cut down these trees and burn them for energy.

Manda: [00:53:56] And sell them to people for lots of money. That some of which happens to come to the people making the decisions, amazingly.

Mary: [00:54:03] That’s what Drax said, if you watch that BBC The Green Energy Scandal exposed, that came out a couple of years ago, but about Drax logging in primary forests in B.C., this is one of the things that they say is, oh, this is all fire prone. These beautiful, healthy forests they’re gonna burn, so we’d better cut them down.

Manda: [00:54:25] Oh my goodness. I realise it doesn’t sound like this to people who listen to this podcast often, but I do try to feel and think the best of people. But it’s it’s getting quite hard in this particular circumstance.

Mary: [00:54:38] Trust me, if you watch this, the Drax executive who lies right into the face of Joe Crowley, the reporter who did the investigation; he’s a bad guy. It’s unambiguously.

Manda: [00:54:50] Is he still in post? Is he still there?

Mary: [00:54:52] I don’t know. I hope not.

Manda: [00:54:54] All right. We’re going to have to stop shortly because I’ve kept you in for an hour. I’m just very curious, before we go, of how the litigation is going. Anywhere in the world, are you having success with courts going yes this is obviously scandalous, we need to stop. Is that a thing?

Mary: [00:55:10] Well, as much as a non-lawyer, I would like to believe that litigation is this magic bullet; i’m always like, let’s just sue them. See, I’m a terrible litigious American, the stereotypical. But I want it to be something fast. It’s not fast. It takes a long time. We filed the case in the EU. We helped a French lawyer file the case against the European Commission. We just found out recently that we actually did get oral arguments. So, okay, the Court of Justice will be hearing an oral argument. So that’s a step forward. It’s got moved beyond just shuffling papers back and forth, there’s an actual date at the court. This is progress.

Manda: [00:56:02] Somebody gets to hear you talk, that’s got to be a good thing. Do you go and give evidence? Is that part of your role in this?

Mary: [00:56:09] It’s not going to be that sort of a hearing, but I already put in written evidence, so. And then the UK stuff is sort of grinding forward slowly. We update whenever we can on our website, which is forestlitigation.org has an overview of all the cases that were that we’re involved in.

Manda: [00:56:34] I will put that in the show notes. Okay. I spoke a couple of weeks ago to Jojo Mehta of Stop Ecocide International. She and Polly Higgins set it up and and she is hopeful that if the crime of ecocide is taken up by the EU, and apparently they’ve just passed something which references an ecocide-like behaviour, then that becomes criminal action. And then the CEOs of companies can be put into actual jail.

Mary: [00:57:04] But the definition of ecocide is fairly narrow. My understanding of that is it’s the deliberate destruction of an ecosystem for the sake of destroying it, not necessarily as a by-product of extractive activities.

Manda: [00:57:21] Right. Okay. All right. So I was hoping that maybe Drax could be done for ecocide. You don’t think that’s very likely?

Mary: [00:57:27] I’ve been following that a little bit because I had the good fortune to meet Judge Pocar, who helped Stop Ecocide formulate some of the thinking on that case. So I’ve sort of been following that issue a little bit. And I was like, oh, yeah, it’s such a great concept and everything. But then when you really zero in, you realise it’s fairly narrowly defined. But I wish them all the best and I hope it goes forward.

Manda: [00:57:55] Right. So it’s more for things like oil spills that are obviously accidental and catastrophic.

Mary: [00:58:01] Well, and also I think there’s an element of it needing to be deliberate.

Manda: [00:58:04] Or due to negligence. I got the impression from Jojo that the Deepwater Horizon would have counted because because there was obvious negligence. It’s retrospective and that can’t happen, but if it were to happen after the laws passed, then they would definitely give it a go. I mean, what Drax is doing is completely deliberate and it is destroying entire ecosystems.

Mary: [00:58:25] True. But logging, the thing about bioenergy and logging is that, I’m not in any way trying to downplay it, because  bioenergy is the only time that we’re logging and saying it’s zero carbon or whatever, but with policies deliberately trying to increase it. But bioenergy logging is really only a fraction of the total logging that happens around the world.

Manda: [00:58:56] All right my lovely. Thank you. It has been a joy, although it is still deeply distressing. But the more people that know about this, then obviously the more people that we can begin to apply pressure. Is there any way that people listening, 50% in the UK, the other 50% around the world, is there any way that we can help? Is there anything useful that listeners can do?

Mary: [00:59:19] I mean, other than intervening with policymakers and becoming educated about this issue, which sounds like a complicated issue but it’s really not, it’s just grow forests don’t burn them. That’s what we need for nature restoration and saving the climate. Save trees, save the climate. And so anyone who cares about this issue of course they’re welcome to get in touch with us through the Forest Litigation Collaborative website, PFPI.net, which is our website.

Manda: [00:59:52] I put those in the show notes already, so they’re already there. People can find you.

Mary: [00:59:56] We also run another website called forestdefenders.eu that will soon be forestdefenders.org. So there’s various ways to get in touch with us if you’re interested in learning more about policies around the world and how to get involved. Yeah.

Manda: [01:00:15] Brilliant. I will put everything in the show notes and anybody listening who’s keen. This is a good area to become really well educated and be able to stand up. Because once you’ve got it, it’s really clear. And it seems to me if you can talk to people.

Mary: [01:00:27] People just need to fight for forests. Fight for forests, no matter how small a bit of forest it is, even if it’s just a tiny little park or whatever. Fight for forests.

Manda: [01:00:40] Fight for your big old trees as well. Yeah.

Mary: [01:00:42] Trees are the salvation of the planet. They really are. And of us.

Manda: [01:00:48] Brilliant. That’s a very beautiful note to end on. Mary, thank you for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. And your cats.

Mary: [01:00:56] Thank you. Yes, always.

Manda: [01:01:00] Well, there we go. That’s it for another week. I am so grateful to Mary for taking the time to come and talk to us, but more for the work that she is doing. The PFPI’s website is loaded with information. Wherever you are in the world, there will be something that you can use in your local or national areas, to get the policymakers to understand that burning wood or burning grasses is not a useful way to create energy. If we look at things in the round, I don’t think there are many useful ways to create energy, and yet we live in an entire culture that is predicated on having easy access to the kinds of energies that our forebears simply couldn’t have imagined. Finding ways to wind down the amount of power that we use is going to be critical to our survival. However, in the meantime, simply stopping the iniquities of places like Drax or their equivalent, wherever you are in the world, is absolutely critical. So if you have the ear of anybody at any level of policy making, please see if you can wrap your head around why this is completely false accounting and be able to explain it clearly and cleanly, and then go talk to people. Get them to imagine a 150 year old tree in a forest that has just been cut down, chopped up, turned into pellets, shipped across the world, and poured into a power station so that it can belch CO2 into the sky. And then imagine what’s left behind. And then also imagine what happens if we decide to plough up the land, releasing massive amounts of CO2, in order to plant serried rows of Sitka spruce, or whatever other monoculture people decide is useful. This is not how we want the world to flourish. We need to be cannier than this.

Manda: [01:02:58] And if it is the case that actually burning coal would produce less CO2 than ripping down forests and burning the trees, then let’s at least think about it. Let’s have an intelligent conversation. Let’s all look at how we are living and how we might change. Each of us individually and all of us collectively. So that’s your homework for this week, people. Go get educated. Head off to the PFPI website and all of the others in the show notes, see what you can do to help stop what’s happening. Thank you.

Manda: [01:03:37] And that apart, we will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the production. To Lou Mayor for all of the videos. If you’re not watching on YouTube (and frankly, why would you, when it is more power to download a video than to listen to an audio?) Please start thinking about your power use in everything that you do. But also if you could subscribe on YouTube, that would be grand. Actually, if you could go to anywhere in the world that provides podcasts and subscribe. Like us. Leave a review. That would be very, very good. Back to the credits. Thanks to Faith for all of the tech and for the conversations that keep everything moving forward. Thanks to Anne Thomas for the transcripts. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anyone who wants to know more about how we produce power, or even the inequities and corruption and sheer blind idiocy of a lot of the policy stuff around this, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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