A better use of wood and public funds

As the European Commission ponders how to respond to the cost-of-energy crisis, and looks at its post-2030 climate and energy package, we urge it to stop wasting billions of euros each year on wood burning incentives that harm forests and the climate, other industries using wood, while harming the energy security of EU citizens still depending on wood for heating. The EU’s limited public funds and wood supply should be used for boosting cheaper decarbonised energy and more competitive uses of wood in the (bio)economy.

This is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to correct the single largest anomaly in EU energy and climate policy, inherited from the early 2000s: a framework that still defines the burning of wood – including whole trees taken directly from forests – as zero-carbon renewable energy, on the same terms as wind and solar.  

The simplest course of action would be to exclude woody biomass from the EU Renewable Energy Directive’s (RED) list of renewable energy sources, and end the zero-rating of its considerable CO2 emissions on the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS).