EU climate plan sacrifices carbon storage and biodiversity for bioenergy

Relevant discussion points:

- European Green Deal _was_ watered down after Exxon met with EU comissioners, specifically to prolong transport related emissions. They will likely get what they asked for. [0]

- Biomass is _not_ carbon neutral in any practical sense The payback time for carbon debt ranges from 44–104 years after clearcut, depending on forest type and assuming the land remains forest. Despite all the media spin this is just too long when we are dealing with a climate emergency with several positive feedback loops.[1]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/06/exxonmobil-...

[1] DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aaa512

I'm sensitive to the tone, since there's still so many climate change deniers about, but overall makes sense once they get to the point:

> The best solution is to incorporate the ‘carbon opportunity cost’ of land use into the accounting of emissions from bioenergy in all climate and energy laws. This cost can be measured simply as the carbon that could otherwise be stored by regrowing native vegetation. A superior approach would use carbon opportunity costs, as we have done here, to calculate the average carbon cost to reproduce the same food elsewhere. This approach does not require a switch to consumption-based accounting but recognizes that land use has an opportunity cost, which should be factored into the life-cycle analyses of bioenergy used by the EU.

As former ambassador of European climate policies, I felt appalled every few months while my job lasted. A seemingly insoluble problem us that for a long time all they do outsources problems via trade leading to land systems change---deforestation.

The carbon storage point made in the article is not valid for some countries in the EU, as they have more forest now that decades ago, and too much wildfire risk setting higher priorities.

typical EU playbook: outlaw it here, make headlines, outsource it en gross without caring about “internal” rules. we hold corporations like apple responsible for following rules across the supply chain, maybe it’s time we check the supply chain of the EU and US also - we subsidize electric cars built in China with local money while Chinese plants do not meet environmental standards. One planet.

I have strong feeling that whole Green Deal will end up like biofuels fiasco - after lot of cheering, slowly forgotten and mostly scrapped.

Given that we're bad at carbon storage, this seems reasonable...