SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the I-think-you're-doing-it-wrong dept.
What a surprise: If you subsidize something, you get more of it. In the EU, there are financial incentives for generating energy from renewable sources. Trees are a renewable resource, true enough, but I doubt that the Eurocrats intended to subsidize the massive destruction of forests.
Protected forests are being indiscriminately felled across Europe to meet the EU's renewable energy targets, according to an investigation by the conservation group Birdlife.
Up to 65% of Europe's renewable output currently comes from bioenergy, involving fuels such as wood pellets and chips, rather than wind and solar power.
Bioenergy fuel is supposed to be harvested from residue such as forest waste but, under current legislation, European bioenergy plants do not have to produce evidence that their wood products have been sustainably sourced.
Birdlife found logging taking place in conservation zones such as Poloniny national park in eastern Slovakia and in Italian riverside forests around Emilia-Romagna, where it said it had been falsely presented as flood-risk mitigation.
[...] Jori Sihvonen, the biofuels officer at Transport and Environment, which co-authored the report, said: "It is easy to fall into thinking that all bioenergy is sustainable, but time and again we see some forms of it can be worse for society, the natural environment and, in the case of burning land-based biofuels or whole trees, even the climate.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday December 02 2016, @11:25PM
So you should be able to extract two thirds of the Earth's heat without being bad.
We do that in several places in the world, but never getting near that 2/3 level. We also only do this where that heat would be lost soon anyway. (Near-surface steam sources, usually volcanic in origin, but also ground source heat pumps).
I would think cooling the earth's residual heat on any large scale would have negative consequences, probably similar in nature and rate to the damage that people can inflict by lighting a fire to cook and keep warm. How much damage would have accumulated had the entire population of earth been able to adopt ground source heat pumps a couple thousand years ago. Would it be worse than the environmental damage we've done with fossil fuels or wood fires?
Half the energy from the sun that arrives on earth is absorbed at the surface [nasa.gov]. Only 12% of that is re-radiated. Intercepting that 12%, and using it as an energy source would seem to be free of any long term environmental concerns, as eventually every bit of work accomplished by such use would flow back to the environment and be re-radiated.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.