{"id":4745,"date":"2016-11-30T15:51:56","date_gmt":"2016-11-30T14:51:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eubioenergy.com\/2016\/11\/30\/a-dirty-day-for-the-commissions-clean-dream\/"},"modified":"2025-07-04T07:25:05","modified_gmt":"2025-07-04T05:25:05","slug":"a-dirty-day-for-the-commissions-clean-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eubioenergy.com\/fr\/2016\/11\/30\/a-dirty-day-for-the-commissions-clean-dream\/","title":{"rendered":"A Dirty Day for the Commission\u2019s Clean Dream"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Dirty Day for the Commission\u2019s Clean Dream<\/strong><\/h2>\n

By Sini Er\u00e4j\u00e4\u00e4, EU Bioenergy Policy Officer, Birdlife Europe and Central Asia<\/a> and the European Environmental Bureau<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Commission\u2019s Clean Energy package<\/a>, launched today, proudly boasts of finally introducing sustainability requirements for all forms of bioenergy \u2013 something many NGOs have been repeatedly calling for over the past number of years. Yet, as BirdLife Europe and Central Asia<\/a> and many<\/a> other<\/a> organisations<\/a> stated today, the \u2018sustainable bioenergy\u2019 proposal has spectacularly failed the test on sustainability.<\/p>\n

Instead of truly addressing the problems of unsustainable bioenergy use \u2013 already witnessed on the ground<\/a> and uncovered by research \u2013 the Commission is merely \u2018green washing\u2019 existing bad practices. A slightly closer look at the Commission\u2019s proposals quickly exposes the dirty side of the Commission\u2019s \u2018clean dream\u2019.<\/p>\n

In order to (supposedly) guarantee the \u2018sustainability\u2019 of biomass from forests, the Commission is proposing to only require that (i) the country of origin has some very basic forestry legislation and (ii) there is some form of accounting framework for land sector emissions (LULUCF) in place. In practice, these very lax requirements would not impose any new legal restrictions on any European country or, indeed, the majority of countries already exporting forest biomass to the EU (notably, Russia and the US).<\/p>\n

Even more importantly, the focus on forest management completely overlooks the fundamental issue of bioenergy sustainability \u2013 ensuring that it is a renewable that actually reduces emissions. One might argue that the new LULUCF policy proposal will take care of emissions accounting for most forest biomass, but just accounting for them isn\u2019t nearly enough<\/a>. Quite simple, we shouldn\u2019t be producing these emissions in the first place \u2013 and producing them under the umbrella of \u2018green\u2019 renewable energy policies just adds insult to injury.<\/p>\n

A good litmus test for the effectiveness of the EU\u2019s upcoming LULUCF policy was provided this week by Finland. Despite the fact that the LULUCF policy is supposed to ensure that countries maintain the carbon storages and sinks of their forests, Finland\u2019s new 2030 climate and energy strategy actually envisions slashing existing carbon sinks of forests by half<\/a> in order to supply bioenergy and the \u2018bioeconomy\u2019. Moreover, it seems that the Commission itself isn\u2019t fully convinced by its own proposal on forest biomass sustainability as it already envisioning a review of it in 2023.<\/p>\n

But doesn\u2019t the sustainability criteria proposed by the Commission also include criteria specifically requiring certain levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) savings for bioenergy? Isn\u2019t this already better? As strange as it might seem, this requirement only measures emissions from the processing of bioenergy \u2013 such as from transporting, drying and compressing of the biomass \u2013 but it completely \u00a0ignores the carbon that\u2019s released from the forests, soils and agricultural fields, as well as emissions from indirect land use change (ILUC).<\/a> These so called \u2018biogenic emissions\u2019 are the big pink elephant in the room; they are responsible for the actual climate impacts of different bioenergy sources.<\/p>\n

Ignoring these emissions \u2013 particularly the ILUC emissions from biofuels \u2013 in the first 2009 Renewable Energy Directive forced the Commission to revise the whole policy a few years after its adoption<\/a>. Yet, lessons clearly have not been learned and today\u2019s package shows that a new Commission is up to old tricks.<\/p>\n

For biomass from agriculture, the Commission proposes to expand the existing sustainability criteria for biofuels in transport to heating and electricity. However, these criteria were concluded by all EU institutions to be insufficient to avoid massive emissions from indirect land use change and therefore a cap to limit the use of biofuel crops grown on land was proposed by the Commission later on. Nevertheless, the new proposal doesn\u2019t say anything about expanding the scope of the cap even if, for example, the majority of biogas electricity today is made of food crops, just like biofuels are.<\/p>\n

To \u2018move on\u2019 from the struggles with food and land based biofuels the Commission has not only allowed a portion of the very problematic land-based biofuels to continue (at 3.8%), it is also proposing a new, 3.6 % target for so called \u2018advanced biofuels\u2019 by 2030. A dedicated target is a very strong incentive \u2013 as we\u2019ve learned through the current 10% target for renewables in transport that led to the emergence of a whole new food based biofuel industry \u2013 so one would assume the Commission would be very careful about any such targets for 2030. The definition of what constitutes \u2018advanced biofuels\u2019 is, however, not based on any kind of sound assessment of environmental and climate impacts. Rather, it is based on political negotiations between Member States and the European Parliament that resulted in an annex of the revised Renewable Energy Directive in 2015 which is far from a sound assessment.<\/p>\n

In summary the bioenergy sustainability criteria and other requirements proposed by the Commission today seem to repeat the same kind of \u2018trial and error\u2019 exercise witnessed previously with biofuels during the current Renewable Energy Directive. It seems that it has been left to the co-legislators, the Parliament and the Council to pick up the lessons learned, draw conclusions and strive for new kinds of policy measures that would actually limit the use of unsustainable bioenergy<\/a> in practice.<\/p>\n

Banner photo:\u00a0Stumps – Keuruu, Central Finland \u00a9 Matti Aalto<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Dirty Day for the Commission\u2019s Clean Dream By Sini Er\u00e4j\u00e4\u00e4, EU Bioenergy Policy Officer, Birdlife Europe and Central Asia and the European Environmental Bureau. The Commission\u2019s Clean Energy package, launched today, proudly boasts of finally introducing sustainability requirements for all forms of bioenergy \u2013 something many NGOs have been<\/p>\n

En savoir plus<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4352,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[221],"tags":[223,266,230,273],"class_list":["post-4745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-fr","tag-bioenergy-2-fr","tag-lulucf-fr","tag-renewable-energy-directive-fr","tag-renewable-energy-package-fr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eubioenergy.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eubioenergy.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eubioenergy.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eubioenergy.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eubioenergy.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4745"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.eubioenergy.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5579,"href":"https:\/\/www.eubioenergy.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4745\/revisions\/5579"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eubioenergy.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eubioenergy.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eubioenergy.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eubioenergy.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}