The Big Green Insane Con – Half Of European “Renewables” is filthy, smoky, high CO2 Wood!

The big green con continues in Europe. While the USA is burning more and more clean natural gas, Europe is burning more wood!

“Which source of renewable energy is most important to the European Union?
Solar power, perhaps? (Europe has three-quarters of the world’s total installed capacity of solar photovoltaic energy.)
Or wind? (Germany trebled its wind-power capacity in the past decade.) The answer is neither.

By far the largest so-called renewable fuel used in Europe is wood.

In its various forms, from sticks to pellets to sawdust, wood (or to use its fashionable name, biomass)
accounts for about half of Europe’s renewable-energy consumption.

In some countries, such as Poland and Finland, wood meets more than 80% of renewable-energy demand.

Even in Germany, home of the Energiewende (energy transformation) which has poured huge subsidies
into wind and solar power, 38% of non-fossil fuel consumption comes from the stuff.”

http://www.thegwpf.org/environmental-lunacy-europe-wood-craze/

Germans and Greeks Stealing Trees To Keep Warm

Germany:

“With energy costs escalating, more Germans are turning to wood burning stoves for heat. That, though, has also led to a rise in tree theft in the country’s forests. Woodsmen have become more watchful.”

Greece:

“Greeks, desperate to find fuel to stay warm because they can’t afford heating oil that has been hit with big tax increases, have been taking to the woods and even city parks to cut down trees and now authorities said someone has felled the olive tree under which Plato sat in ancient times.”

(h/t Ice Age Now)

 

This is your future. Huddled around wood stoves to keep warm  because electricity is too expensive because of subsidies paid to rich people who own wind farms and solar panels.

Dirty Truth About Wood-Burning Biomass

“Far from being “carbon neutral,” wood-burning biomass actually emits more carbon dioxide (the primary global warming greenhouse gas) per unit of energy produced than either gas or coal. Yes, trees can grow back and reabsorb that carbon, but that growth takes many years. The most recent studies show that

The renewability of wood is also questionable, as forests would be threatened by any meaningful increase in electricity generation using biomass as fuel. Replacing just 10 percent of the coal used in Pennsylvania would require more than 12.8 million green tons of wood per year — far more than the state’s annual commercial wood harvest (about 5 million tons).“

Read more here.

Burn Wood – Save the Planet

I love wood stoves. There is nothing like the heat and sounds and smells of killing and burning a tree. Wood burning is renewable. It produces lots of smoke and CO2. What’s not to love.

And it is catching on!  (h/t Tom Nelson)

“Wood, humanity’s earliest fuel for keeping warm, is being touted these days as the latest thing in renewable energy: a greener, often cheaper way to heat a home or building than burning oil or propane or consuming coal-fired electricity.

Save the coal. Kill and burn a tree.

It’s also less expensive to buy and install than solar panels or geothermal systems, advocates say. It’s the workhorse of renewable energy in Europe and should be in the United States,” said William Strauss, president of a Maine-based consulting firm specializing in what it calls “bioenergy.” He spoke recently at a day-long conference in Annapolis aimed at encouraging more use of wood in Maryland to heat homes, offices, schools and even hospitals.”

Bioenergy. Give tree killing and burning a nice new eco-friendly name and its win win!

“Two-thirds of the renewable energy generated in Europe comes from burning wood or other plant-based material”

Sure, Germany and the UK have squandered hundreds of billions on wind and solar, but its good old fashioned CO2 producing burning that does the most work.

While some environmentalists are fully behind expanded reliance on wood-burning for heat, others say that newer stoves and boilers still generate potentially harmful air pollution, especially particulates that can aggravate asthma and cause serious long-term health problems.

They are even dumber than I thought they were.

They also worry that expanding government incentives for wood heat may slow development of other energy sources they think are much greener, such as solar.

Excellent.

And since burning anything to produce energy also puts carbon into the atmosphere, they doubt that promoting wood heat truly helps combat climate change.

Duh!