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Bioenergy with carbon capture distracts from real climate solutions
(EurActiv, 9 Dec 2022) Subsidies for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) risk diverting large sums of funding to projects unlikely to benefit the climate. Instead, they should be spent on home insulation and heat pumps that will reduce carbon emissions and relieve fuel poverty, argues Almuth Ernsting.
Almuth Ernsting is co-founder and co-director of Biofuelwatch.
On 30th September, the European Commission published its “Proposal for a Regulation on an EU certification for carbon removals”, aimed at incentivising carbon offsets for activities deemed to be ‘carbon negative’.
Over 200 civil society organisations denounced the proposal, which warned that “In this strategy, every ton of promised future CDR [carbon dioxide removal] represents emissions that are bringing us more climate chaos today”.
One of the main technologies promoted in the proposal is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), which has already attracted EU financial support, including through the Innovation Fund.
Environmental NGOs and scientists have long warned that BECCS could accelerate demand for biomass, i.e., for forest wood and for dedicated crops and trees, resulting in high carbon emissions from forest degradation and land conversion, loss of wildlife habitat, and competition with food crops. If BECCS could be applied on a large scale, those would indeed be major concerns.
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EurActiv, 9 Dec 2022: Bioenergy with carbon capture distracts from real climate solutions
