Alexander C. Kaufman
@kaufman
This is a pretty good breakdown of the insanity that is the transatlantic wood pellet energy trade. U.N. carbon accounting rules count the CO2 from losing a tree in the country where it’s cut down. So when American trees are milled into pill-sized pellets and shipped to, for example, England to be burned in a power plant, the British can claim its carbon-free power — even though they’re burning twice as much to compensate for the more energy-dense coal they’re replacing. This scam has been allowed to continue, however, in part because the typical pro-climate bloc in Europe — ie Nordic countries — all have big timber industries and haven’t wanted to crack down on a market. Meanwhile, the heavily-polluting pellet mills processing all these old-growth forests being felled in the American South are overwhelmingly located in poor, rural and mostly Black towns.
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Mind Attic
@mindattic
It paints a picture, but not an accurate one. I'm from Latvia, and it shipped $200 million worth of timber to the U.S.(2022)—selling to each other to extract profit at the expense of biodiversity. Logging is just one of the five main drivers of deforestation: Urban Development Logging and Timber Harvesting Wildfires Pests and Diseases Agricultural Expansion All combined, these have caused a 75% loss in biodiversity over the last 200 years.
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Alexander C. Kaufman
@kaufman
I’m not speaking about the timber industry overall — just the wood energy industry.
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