OPINION
The IPCC slips on a banana peel
You won’t often find The Charcoal Project taking issue with an IPCC report and nodding in approval of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial position on climate change and renewable fuels.
But that’s exactly how we felt upon reading the summary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation.
Our beef with the IPCC’s report concerns the assertion that:
“On a global basis, it is estimated that Renewable Energy (RE) accounted for 12.9% of the total 492 Exajoules (EJ) of primary energy supply in 2008.”
The paragraph goes on to say that a full 10.2% of this energy was produced by biomass, with the majority (roughly 60%), being traditional biomass used in cooking and heating applications in developing countries. What this means is that biomass accounts for about 80% of all the RE energy produced worldwide in 2008.
A footnote to the statement above affirms that, in addition to biomass use estimated in the report, there is “an additional 20 to 40% biomass consumed that is not reported in official databases, such as dung, unaccounted production of charcoal, illegal logging, fuelwood gathering, and agricultural residue.” The implication is that the biomass is likely to make up even greater percentage of the total RE balance.
In its opinion article, the WSJ gets it right when it writes:
It turns out that the great majority of this energy, 10.2% out of the 13.8% share, comes from biomass, mainly wood (often transformed into charcoal) and dung. Most of the rest is hydro; less than 0.5% of the world’s energy comes from wind, tide, wave, solar and geothermal put together. Wood and dung are indeed renewable, in the sense that they reappear as fast as you use them. Or do they? It depends on how fast you use them.
The Charcoal Project has reported at length on this blog about how solid biomass fuels used in the developing world — especially in sub-Saharan Africa where more than 90% of the population depends on wood and charcoal — are largely harvested and consumed in an inefficient and unsustainable manner.
Do we need to repeat the facts that the Ugandan government has officially announced the country will run out of woodfuel by the end of this decade? Do we need to remind people that in parts of the country, families are having to choose between cooking and eating because of the high cost of woodfuel? Do we need to mention that water-borne diseases are on the rise in parts of Africa because families cannot afford to boil the water for sanitation long enough due to the high cost of the solid biomass fuel? Do we need to point out that for every three acres of forest consumed in Tanzania, only one is replanted. Do we need to remind folks that the IEA (International Energy Agency) has project the increased used of biomass fuels by the poorest of the poor over the next several decades?
It is therefore no mystery that the United Nations Environment Programme has told us it considers the unsustainable and inefficient production and consumption of solid biomass fuels in sub-Saharan Africa possibly the greatest threat to progress on the Millenium Development Goals.
Bringing this back to the IPCC report, while it is true that solid biomass fuels are renewable under ideal circumstances, there is little doubt that current rates of production and consumption are actually adding Greenhouse Gases into the atmosphere instead of reducing them.
J. Kim Chaix
Editor
The Charcoal Project
PS – Disclosure: The Charcoal Project is organizing the first International Conference on Charcoal in 2012 in an effort to address the issue.
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