Sustainable Energy Generation: Burning Trees

Derek Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Westminster Hall

[Derek Thomas (St Ives) (Con)]

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) for securing this important debate. How we create energy is a hot topic, if you will excuse the pun, Mr Gray. It is vital that Parliament, Government and the broader public hear our concern about burning trees to generate energy.

The Government’s own figure put annual bioenergy emissions at 47 million tonnes of CO₂, which is 10% of the UK’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. That is four times greater than those from coal, as the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) has just said. The right hon. Gentleman makes an important point about the wider debate on how we balance the needs to protect the environment and biodiversity and for energy to keep us warm and feed us. It is a really big debate that we do not have time for today but it must be had.

I want to focus my remarks on where the best home for carbon is. Some people rightly emphasise that keeping it in the ground is the best place. They want it permanently kept in unused fossil fuels. I would accept this if the alternative were more destructive. Many of us here believe that the best place for carbon is in trees. They not only store existing carbon, but capture more. We and our constituents cannot believe the argument that says that burning those trees and releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere makes sense. I did not know a great amount about this subject until very recently, but what I have looked at over the last few weeks and what has been said today makes me realise how ludicrous and harmful that argument is. We must find a way to put an end to it.

I would like to speak about a specific store of carbon, where carbon is turned into timber for construction for uses such as building frames and furniture. These are long-term uses for carbon. By making building frames out of timber, we reduce the need for cement and steel, which are both highly carbon-intensive. The problem is that burning trees for energy increasingly takes wood away from use in construction, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon made clear.

Two months ago, the BBC’s “Panorama” reported on the quality of wood being used by Drax in its pellet-making plants in Canada. It found that only 11% was grade 6 or grade Z—the diseased rotten wood that Drax’s PR machine says it uses for pellets. The rest was not waste wood. It could have been used for timber, making things out of chipboard, oriented strand board or other essential sheet building material that stores carbon for the long term. The Telegraph reports that the Government’s current plans for bioenergy would need to burn the equivalent of 120 million trees a year by 2050. We have heard that the entire New Forest has only 46 million trees, so that is the equivalent of burning the entire New Forest every five months. No wonder we import all our wood, but what if other countries did the same?

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) noted a couple of years ago, we all live under the same sky. Forests destroyed in Canada for burning in UK power stations have a big impact for all of humanity. Given that so much useful wood is being burned by power stations such as Drax today, what would be the situation if global demand for wood pellets grew by 3,000%, as forecast by Chatham House? If there is not enough waste wood today, better and better grades of wood will inevitably go up in smoke in our power stations. Inevitably, that will drive up the price of timber, forcing builders to use cement and steel.

There is another important point. We talked about the use of wood in building. I came from the construction trade before I entered this place, but in recent years I have learned that the people who produce the panels and sheet material also find a way to use pretty much all their waste wood. There is a real debate about how we use trees, where we use them and what we should be focusing on for carbon capture.

Bioenergy threatens to devour huge quantities of wood needed for construction, land needed for farming and water needed for drinking. It is robbing land needed for human homes as well as habitat for countless species. Bioenergy is not a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It is a monster, as we have heard this morning. Those who gave it birth 20 years ago might have had good motives, but today we must pass its death sentence. It is doing our planet and climate no good whatsoever. We must not forget that it cost UK taxpayers £1.2 billion in 2021 alone to subsidise bioenergy production.