The biomass furphy

 From Just Have a Think

Two quotes:

The legal mandate to record forest biomass-fired energy as contributing to the EU's renewable energy targets has had the perverse effect of creating a demand for trees to be felled in Europe or elsewhere in order to burn them for energy, thus releasing the carbon into the atmosphere which would otherwise stay locked up in the forest, and simultaneously drastically reducing the carbon sink strength of the forest ecosystems;

and: 

The scale of this operation is astounding, with a year's worth of [wood] pellets consumed by Drax representing wood mass approximately equivalent to clearcutting a forested square extending to 18 miles [29 kilometres] on each side.

So, here's what we do.  We give subsidies to companies that plant trees, because negative emissions, and then we give subsidies companies that burn the wood to produce electricity, because carbon-neutral.  Dotty.