By Kenneth Richter, Bioenergy consultant at BirdLife Europe & Central Asia At 4:00am on June 14 exhausted negotiators of the EU Parliament and European Council agreed on a new framework for renewable energy – the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) – for the time between 2020 and 2030. Despite best efforts by the Parliament (credit to negotiator […]
By Sasha Stashwick, senior advocate with the Climate & Clean Energy program at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Kenneth Richter, Bioenergy consultant at BirdLife Europe & Central Asia and NRDC. While Donald Trump has mocked the reality of climate change, EU leaders like to think of Europe as a global front-runner in reducing […]
By Adam Colette, Program Director at Dogwood Alliance. Over the past several months, the European Union has spent huge amounts of time debating the impacts the bioenergy industry. Parliamentarians have heard loud and clear from their colleagues, scientists and civil society that burning forests for fuel is bad for our climate, forests, and communities. Yet, […]
By Kenneth Richter, Bioenergy consultant at BirdLife Europe & Central Asia. We have been keeping you updated with the developments on European Union’s Renewable Energy Directive and the danger dirty bioenergy poses. The negotiations are now slowly moving into home straight. Unfortunately, things are not looking too good right now, but there is still hope for […]
By Matt Williams, Policy Officer at RSPB. Thursday, 18 January 2018’s vote by MEPs on the future of renewable energy in Europe was overall a blow to forests, wildlife and the climate as they bowed to pressure from the farming and forestry industries and failed to take the opportunity to rule out the use of environmentally harmful biomass. Despite the pleas of […]
By Alice Collier and Matt Williams, Policy Officers at RSPB. Today’s European Parliament vote, like yesterday’s marine vote, delivers yet another dramatic death blow to our living planet. Razing whole forests to the ground to feed our energy use releases vastly increased carbon into our atmosphere; carbon which would otherwise be naturally stored in the forest. Converting […]
By Alice Collier, Policy Officer (Climate Change & Energy) at RSPB. As we all begin winding down for Christmas break, here at BirdLife Europe we have been taking stock of the developing position of the European Parliament on how Europe should progress with the energy transition out to 2030 and beyond. Climate change is one of the […]
By Jori Sihvonen, Clean Fuels Officer at Transport & Environment. People who have heard of the renewable energy directive (RED) often associate it with the overall renewables obligation for all sectors – the 20% target until 2020. On Tuesday 28th of November the industry, research and energy committee (ITRE), in charge of the file, will […]
By Linde Zuidema, Bioenergy campaigner at FERN. Opposition to the use of forest biomass for energy generation is going mainstream, writes Linde Zuidema, as evidence builds that wood is being burnt in large scale inefficient coal-fired power stations. Every day resistance is growing to the use of wood as a renewable energy. Environmental NGOs have long opposed the use of ‘forest biomass’ […]
By Arnaud Collignon, Energy officer at Fédération Inter-Environnement Wallonie. The project, aimed at converting an old Belgian coal power plant into a large-scale biomass power plant, definitely now seems to be a thing of the past. Wallonia, Belgium’s French-speaking region, just decided to definitely abandon its project to develop a 200MW wood chips power plant. The decision […]