Eric Johnson is managing director of Atlantic Consulting and editor of the Environmental Impact Assessment Review.
He was speaking to Susanna Ala-Kurikka.
To read a shortened version of this interview, please click here.
The EU is in the process of deciding whether it should set sustainability criteria for biomass. You have taken the view that this is necessary. Why?
The problem with not having criteria is very large. It's very easy for people to source non-sustainable biomass, which basically damages the environment and potentially damages human health.
The other thing is that it discredits the biofuels industry itself and its regulators. If you say we were doing this for environmental reasons, and then you throw the environmental reasons out of the window, sooner or later the public is going to work that out and realise that actually you don't care about environmental reasons. So I think that just discredits the whole industry.
I'm not saying that the whole industry is like that. Definitely they're not. But there are some people who are just riding another boom wave, and it really has nothing to do with protecting the environment.
Is there such a thing as zero-emissions biomass?
There is zero-emissions biomass and there is even negative emissions biomass, the way these things are accounted for. Particularly if you're using genuine waste to produce power or burn it as fuel or whatever, you can actually get negative.
People do things like burn gas from landfills. That's definitely a good thing, but if you were going out in a forest, let’s say, and chopping down trees, that tends to be carbon positive.
So is it mainly land-use changes that cause the problem?
No, it's not just land-use changes; it's also carbon stock in general. As you can imagine, a forest tends to store a lot of carbon as it is. So if you go in and you start to reduce that amount of carbon stored by chopping down trees, basically you're putting more up in the air than otherwise would be held on the ground.
Within the EU, the transport and energy department is advocating no additional sustainability criteria for biomass, while the environment department would like to see such environmental safeguards. Where do you think the difference in views stems from?
I have to give a guarded answer because obviously I'm not a Commission employee, but I think the environment people are playing it straight. They're trying to protect the environment.
I think the energy people, transport people, to be fair to them, are defending their corner. They want to see less dependence on fossil fuel imports, they want to see less dependence on fossil fuels in general.
Whether or not that helps the environment, they're pushing that.
Do you think it would be technically possible to develop sustainability criteria for biomass?
My answer is yes, I think it is. That's not to say it's easy.
I was just looking at some criteria yesterday that the US state of California has – just in the past couple of months – has come up with criteria for how you measure carbon stocks and forests. And that's only one example.
There are a lot of people and a lot of governments that have been working on this. No, it's not an easy job, but it is soluble.
The thing that California published was real, sort of handbook style guidelines. It wasn't a bunch of vague hand-waving; it was real stuff that you can actually go out and measure your forest. You know it's meant for people who own forest lands.
I think this is possible.
Do you think that strict guidelines would discourage people from developing biomass?
I think they will discourage people. I think they will discourage people who weren't serious about it, or who weren't serious about the environmental side of it. I think they will discourage people who want to just go out and flatten a forest and make money out of it and do something that is highly carbon positive and doesn't really benefit anybody.
What about air pollutants like black carbon related to biomass burning? How big is the problem?
The latest science seems to say that black carbon is somewhere between 15 and 20% of all global warming. Something like two thirds of that comes from biomass, biofuels, so it's a serious issue.
It's more of a serious issue in the developing world where you have these massive smog problems and literally people are dying because of these horrible temperature inversions were you get all the smog. But nonetheless it's an issue in the developed world as well.
You're working on a Black Carbon Reduction Mechanism. What is the idea there?
The idea that we have behind this black carbon mechanism that I've been working with some colleagues in Brussels on – and we're looking to get funding for to see if we can develop it – basically it works like the Clean Development Mechanism, where primarily first-world countries buy carbon credits from third-world countries, and the money allows those third-world countries to make carbon-cutting investments.
The thing that's particularly interesting about this one is that this is going to be targeted at particularly poor people in third-world countries who cannot afford to upgrade their cooking equipment particularly. Now they are spewing out a lot of black carbon which is really bad for their health and bad for the climate as well.
What we're thinking is that funding that can come from the first world can allow these people to upgrade their stoves to stoves that are more efficient and emit less black carbon and use fuels that are less black-carbon-rich.
It's a real win-win situation: we help the poor, we combat global warming. We think this could be a real good combination.
Would you like to see the mechanism operate under the guidance of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change like the CDM?
That's the idea. Like I say, it adds an extra bonus to CDM. CDM is a good thing – there's no question it's a good thing – but this adds on this component of combating poverty and helping the standard of living of poor people in the third world. You get two for one, basically.
Have you gathered any political backing for this initiative yet?
We're just starting that process. We're just starting to have these discussions around the houses now.
I think it's one of those things where the science has come far enough in the past year that it's far enough now that it could support this kind of thing. If you'd tried it a few years ago, I think the science was still a bit vague so it would have been hard to hang a programme on it.
If we were to set up this black carbon reduction mechanism, somebody has to do the knots and bolts of figuring out how it all works and what are the factors and how do you price these things and all those kind of details that need to get sorted out. We would hope to do that work. The thing is, even if we didn't do it, somebody should do it because it's a good idea that needs to get done.
