False Solutions to Climate Change: Agriculture: Resilience

"A veritable cornucopia of false solutions is being pushed these days, not only by corporations and think tanks but by the UN’s IPCC, the international body responsible for research and action on climate.  We could have made a gentle transition if we had begun when we first became aware of this problem decades ago, but for various reasons we did not. There is no time left for barking up one wrong tree after another; no time to waste in false solutions. Hence this series pointing out the fallacies behind such proposals as electrifying everything, carbon trading, geoengineering or switching to “gas—the clean energy fuel!”

I’ve divided the issue into sectors: electricity generation, transportation, agriculture, buildings, and then there are two sections on false solutions that aren’t part of an energy sector—geoengineering schemes, and some other policy options. Finally, we look at real solutions. I am not an expert on anything except maybe gardening, so my hope is to spur discussion.

Part 3: The Agricultural Sector"

Read the excellent complete Resilience article

‘A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement’: Michael Moore Damages Our Most Important Goal: Rolling Stone

'Basically, Moore and his colleagues have made a film attacking renewable energy as a sham and arguing that the environmental movement is just a tool of corporations trying to make money off green energy. “One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different from fossil fuels,” Ozzie Zehner, one of the film’s producers, tells the camera. When visiting a solar facility, he insists: “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels.”

That’s not true, not in the least — the time it takes for a solar panel to pay back the energy used to build it is well under four years. Since it lasts three decades, it means 90 percent of the power it produces is pollution-free, compared with zero percent of the power from burning fossil fuels. It turns out that pretty much everything else about the movie was wrong — there have been at least 24 debunkings, many of them painfully rigorous; as one scientist wrote in a particularly scathing takedown, “Planet of the Humans is deeply useless. Watch anything else.” Moore’s fellow filmmaker Josh Fox, in an epic unraveling of the film’s endless lies, got in one of the best shots: “Releasing this on the eve of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary is like Bernie Sanders endorsing Donald Trump while chugging hydroxychloroquine.” '

Read the Rolling Stone article

Burning trees as climate mitigation: A resort to the Court: Euractive

"EU demand for wood pellets has increased forest harvesting for fuel, including clear-cutting fragile boreal forests in the EU and Canada, and wetland hardwood forests of the US South, write Jean-Pascal van Ypersele and Mary S. Booth. [McBeth / Flickr]

There is no debate that burning wood for energy emits more greenhouse gases per unit of energy than burning fossil fuels. Yet the EU’s renewable energy directive continues to uphold that burning forest wood is “carbon neutral,” write Jean-Pascal van Ypersele and Mary S. Booth.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele is a climate scientist and professor at Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL).  He is former vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2008-2015). Mary S. Booth is the director at the Partnership for Policy Integrity (PPI), an organisation promoting science-based policies to protect air, water, ecosystems, and the climate.

As the UN’s International Day of Forests approaches (March 21), it’s a good time to focus on the role of forests in fighting climate change.

But given the obvious climate and ecosystem benefits of protecting and expanding forests, people might well ask, why does the EU’s flagship policy on climate, the new Renewable Energy Directive (REDII) promote logging and burning forests for energy?

This question lies at the heart of a suit filed this month in the Court of Justice of the European Union on behalf of six plaintiffs from the EU and the US.

The suit is necessary because the policy process, which should have protected people, ecosystems, and the climate, has failed. There is no debate that burning wood for energy emits more greenhouse gases per unit energy than burning fossil fuels.

And there is no debate that EU demand for wood pellet fuel has increased forest harvesting for fuel, including clear-cutting fragile boreal forests in the EU and Canada, and wetland hardwood forests of the US South."

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EU dragged to court for backing forest biomass as ‘renewable energy’

A group of plaintiffs from Estonia, France, Ireland, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, and the US are filing a lawsuit against the European Union on Monday (4 March) to challenge the inclusion of forest biomass in the bloc’s renewable energy directive.

Read Euractive article 

DISCLAIMER: All opinions in this column reflect the views of the author(s), not of EURACTIV.COM Ltd.

By Jean Pascal van Ypersele and Mary S. Booth

 Mar 20, 2019


See also:

A record share of Australians say humans cause climate change: poll: SMH