Burning wood isn’t “renewable energy,” so why do policymakers pretend it is?

Burning wood to produce electricity – ‘biomass energy’ – is increasingly being used as a renewable replacement for burning coal in countries such as the UK, Japan and South Korea – even though its emissions are not carbon neutral in practice.
In this episode of Mongabay Newscast, reporter Justin Catanoso talks to Rachel Donald about the UK’s largest CO2 emitter, biomass company Drax, which is trying to open two wood pellet plants in the state of California.
Catanoso explains how years of investigation helped him uncover a complex web of public relations messaging that obscures the fact that replanting trees after they are cut down and burned is in practice neither carbon neutral nor renewable and seriously harms global biodiversity and forests.
“When these trees are uprooted, carbon will be released. This happens before we process the wood and ship it, then burn it and do not count emissions. It’s just (un)believable politics,” he says in this episode.

Justin Catanoso is no stranger to wood pellet plants, as he lives near four of them in the US state of North Carolina, where biomass giant Enviva has several facilities. Although the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this year, it remains the largest single producer of wood pellets in the world.

The company is one of several (along with Drax in the UK) looking to increase its global share in the transition to renewable energy – a category of power generation to which industry and regulators say burning biomass belongs. However, recent analysis shows that it is not renewable energy and adds more carbon to the atmosphere than coal and gas. However, due to complicated language in the Kyoto Protocol treaty that extended the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, several countries and the European Union continue to allow the burning of wood pellets to be counted as such and thus qualify also apply to subsidies. Catanoso says this poses a huge problem for global efforts to slow the biodiversity and climate crisis.

Listen to the conversation here:

“In my area, in North Carolina, which is in the mid-Atlantic, in about 15 years we will have the climate of northern Florida. Our climate is changing so quickly here,” Catanoso says. “It’s coming at us and we’re not pulling the levers fast enough. Slowing it down and cutting down trees, calling it carbon neutral… it’s just one of those loopholes that are completely man-made.”

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Banner image: Wood pellets with a combustion chamber in the background. Photo: AntonioGravante via Envato.

Rachel Donald is a climate corruption reporter and creator Planet: Critical, a podcast and newsletter for a world in crisis. Her latest thoughts can be found on the website 𝕏 By @CrisisReports and in Bluesky via @racheldonald.bsky.social.

Mike DiGirolamo is a Host Producer and Associate Producer at Mongabay based in Sydney. He is the co-host and editor of Mongabay Newscast. Find him LinkedInBluesky i Instagram.

Related research from Mongabay:

The British company Drax aims to build two main wood pellet factories in the forests of California

Whistleblower: Enviva’s claim that it’s ‘good for the planet… it’s all bullshit’

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