Is the EC taking bad biofuels out of the picture? By Cristina Mestre, Climate and Biofuels Officer, Transport & Environment July 20th was marked in bright red in many of our calendars. While waving some colleagues off on their long-awaited summer break, we were waiting for the launch of the European Commission’s “summer package”, Accelerating Europe’s […]
Bioenergy emissions, just counting isn’t enough By Sini Eräjää, Policy Officer EU Bioenergy, Birdlife Europe and Central Asia and the European Environmental Bureau As the European Commission published its new climate policy this week to address emissions from land and forests (LULUCF), the Commission also stated that the new proposal will cover and record emissions […]
By Sini Eräjää, Policy Officer EU Bioenergy, Birdlife Europe and the European Environmental Bureau As our fact-finding mission in the US to witness firsthand the origins and impacts of bioenergy being supplied to the EU came to an end, we drew some conclusions. We then went to Washington D.C. to share what we learned about […]
By Ariel Brunner and Trees Robijns, BirdLife Europe – partially based on the analysis of the Commission’s Globiom study carried out by Transport & Environment (T&E) Biofuels have been promoted in Europe since the early 2000s. In the beginning, they were touted as a magic potion: saving emissions, ensuring energy security in Europe and helping farmers find […]
By guest author Linde Zuidema, Bioenergy Campaigner, Fern “Communities were not informed nor consulted about this wood pellet facility, the process was everything but transparent. All is decided behind closed doors, and all they tell us is lies, lies, lies. The County claims it doesn’t have money to put a new roof on the school, […]
By Sini Eräjää, Policy Officer EU Bioenergy, Birdlife Europe and the European Environmental Bureau “There are still some trees down here but there’s all the time less forests” said a shopkeeper in the town of Ahoskie in North Carolina. He was sitting in front of his shop while the smokestacks of a pellet mill owned by […]
By Sini Eräjää, Policy Officer EU Bioenergy, Birdlife Europe and the European Environmental Bureau I never would have thought that in the early days of the EU’s efforts to increase renewable energy use that working in this field would take me to forests along the southern US coast. What do European renewable energy policies have to do with […]
By guest authors Mohammad Abdel-Razek, Jan Henke, Pascal Ripplinger, GRAS Global Risk Assessment Services GmbH The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledges that “bioenergy has a significant greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation potential, provided that the resources are developed sustainably”. True, the only way bioenergy should be allowed to contribute to climate protection is if […]
By guest author Linde Zuidema, Bioenergy Campaigner, Fern Since the middle of last year, the Dutch government has come under increasing fire over its climate and energy policy. The main issue on the table: the need for a total phase out of coal and biomass co-firing. In June 2015, a Dutch court ordered the state […]
By Jos Dings, Policy Team Director at Transport & Environment April 2015 will enter history as the month in which the EU reversed course on its energy policies in transport. It adopted its long-mooted reform of biofuels policy – especially regarding indirect land-use change (ILUC). The practical implications in the next years may not be […]