Chopping down trees to make wood pellets to burn for electricity is not carbon neutral, it’s a carbon nightmare, emitting more carbon than coal.

Biomass is billed as green, but it’s anything but. It involved industrial logging of natural forests in British Columbia, Canada and the Southeastern states of the US. Trees are cut down and turned into wood pellets, before being shipped to the UK. Europe  and now Japan to power biomass plants. The biggest pellet producers in the world – Enviva and Drax – are polluting the air, clear cutting forests, and poisoning the health and safety of environmental justice communities.Trees are being cut down at an alarming rate pushing endangered species such as the mountain caribou to the brink.

The combustion of biomass originating from forests (primarily wood pellets and wood chips) is problematic as it rapidly releases carbon stored in the forests into the atmosphere and also risks the release of carbon accumulated in the soil over a long period of time. Even if forests regrow completely after logging, the time period for this can range from decades to more than one hundred years, so it cannot be said that forest biomass is carbon neutral.