Burned series

Part 2 – We’ve All Been Burned

We have an economy that tells us it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet.

Paul Hawken

Part 2 – We’ve All Been Burned

This blog reveals a truly devastating environmental disaster which puts my wood burning stove into perspective. See Part 1 – I’ve Been Burned.

Due to the demand for hard wood our supplier now imports oak from Poland. This means that somewhere in Poland someone is felling beautiful old oak woodland so it can travel across land and sea to the UK where we can chuff it up our lum. We don’t buy it by the way

That is wrong in my book.

When we focus solely on an outcome, in this case wanting hard wood the harms caused in pursuit of that end goal get ignored, suppressed or denied. When we burn that tree we destroy so much more than the standing one.

Whatever we call it, however we classify it, burning wood and planting new trees won’t bring back the oak woods. They are gone. Now simply a commodity their intrinsic value is irrelevant. Their place as a habitat, a home to many, and a link in the entangled ecological chain which creates and sustains life on earth, matters not.

Entangled

Our insane and deranged economic system loves this sort of single value commodification of nature. Climate change concerns have conjured up a solution called net zero against which everything will now be measured. This and this alone is how we stop climate change, apparently. We will not be looking at anything else, especially what we may be doing to reach these all important carbon zero targets. 

BIG corporations are of course riding in to save the day. They have all the answers we ever need, don’t they?

Industrialisation of the problem makes profits so they have turned sustainability and carbon counting into mechanisms to feed the shareholder machine. The harms are simply collateral damage in pursuit of a higher aim. We must all worship at the altar of net zero now. Climate change fear demands blind faith in the solution.

Controlling CO2 will save us. 

Maybe and maybe not. Several years ago I came across a documentary called Burned. We watched it at home with some friends and cried. A few weeks ago I listened to this podcast, titled:

When is a Tree not a Tree? The ‘Net Zero’ Wood Burning Scam – with Dr Mary Booth of Partnership for Policy Integrity

As soon as they started talking my heart sank. I listened and then I watched the Panorama programme they mentioned. The Green Energy Scandal, a 30 min reminder of Burned. I cried again.

Both blow the lid of an environmental scandal which appears to tick all the green credential boxes. Net zero is covered by the distorted counting of carbon and subsidies funnel money from the tax payer to make the rich even richer. 

Wood pellets are being made from primary forests in the USA. They are then shipped to the UK and burned to produce electricity. This industrialisation of wood pellets as green energy is now at a scale never seen before. Drax, probably the worst offender, can for example claim £3 million a day in subsidies for doing this. That’s billions of our tax payer money being handed over to this mega corporation because what it does is supposedly green!

The enthroned definitely need deposed.

These ways are not the answer to the ecological difficulties we face.

They look good on paper but they are far from doing good. Business as Usual is greenwashing itself. Designating something as net zero, even when it is not, means it can then count towards the UK targets making this is a political and economic pact of harm.

We are in danger of ticking all the boxes for net zero while absolutely devastating our environment.

The movers and shakers on our planet, aren’t the billionaires and generals, they are the incredible numbers of people around the world filled with love for neighbor and for the earth who are resisting, remaking, restoring, renewing and revitalising.

Bill McKibben

What can we do?

Watch/listen and share:

When is a Tree Not a Tree?

The Green Energy Scandal

Burned – Are trees the new coal? (Various options for watching.)

Support Biofuelwatch and follow their guidance to write to your MP.