Europe’s “Green” Power Fueled by Burning Wood 欧洲的“绿色”能源——烧木头 作者:Jamie @ 2017-02-24

译者:eGregius (@eGregius)

校对:龙泉

来源:The American Interest, http://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/02/23/europes-green-power-fueled-by-burning-wood/ Nearly two-thirds of the Europe’s renewable energy comes from burning wood. No, this isn’t some time capsule report from 500 years ago—that’s actually what the European Union is doing to meet its vaunted climate targets. The BBC reports :

欧洲近三分之二的可再生能量来自于木材燃烧——这可不是出自500年前时间胶囊中的记述，而是欧盟为了达到它吹嘘的气候目标所正在做的。据BBC报道： While much of the discussion has focused on wind and solar power, across Europe the biggest source of green energy is biomass. It supplies around 65% of renewable power – usually electricity generated from burning wood pellets. EU Governments, under pressure to meet tough carbon cutting targets, have been encouraging electricity producers to use more of this form of energy by providing substantial subsidies for biomass burning.

尽管有大量的议题集中在风能和太阳能，生物质能仍然是目前整个欧洲最主要的绿色能源。它提供了约65%的可再生能量——以木屑颗粒燃烧发电为主。在严苛的减碳目标压力之下，欧盟各国政府为电力生产商制定了大量的补贴政策以激励他们采用此类能源。 If cutting down trees and burning them doesn’t sound green to you, that’s because, well, it’s not . It only becomes “climate neutral” when you include some clever accounting: if foresters replant a tree for every one they cut down, then from a “life-cycle” perspective, the emissions involved in burning that wood is offset by the carbon captured by the new forests.

如果你觉得伐木烧柴听起来并不那么“绿色”的话，那是因为，它确实不。哪怕你引入一些精明的算计：如果每伐一株木，护林人都会进行再种植，那么从“生命循环”的角度来看，烧柴所导致的碳排放会被新种树木的光合作用抵消，这也仅仅导致“气候中和”。

But a new report from Chatham House scrutinizes that calculus as little more than fuzzy math:

但来自Chatham House的一项最新报道仔细审视了上述算计，发现那仅仅是含糊的数学： “It doesn’t make sense,” said [Duncan Brack, the report’s author], who is also a former special adviser at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change. “The fact that forests have grown over the previous 20 or 100 years means they are storing large amounts of carbon, you can’t pretend it doesn’t make an impact on the atmosphere if you cut them down and burn them…You could fix them in wood products or in furniture or you could burn them, but the impact on the climate is very different.”

“那说不通，”报道的作者Duncan Brack表示——他同时也是英国能源与气候变化部的前任特别顾问——“无论过去20还是过去100年，森林面积都在增长，这一事实表明森林存储了大量的碳，你没有办法假装砍伐和燃烧它们对气候不会产生任何影响……你可以把这些碳继续固定闸木制品或家具里，你也可以把它们烧掉，但两种做法对气候的影响是很不同的。”

Mr Brack says the assumption of carbon neutrality misses out on some crucial issues, including the fact that young trees planted as replacements absorb and store less carbon than the ones that have been burned.

Brack先生表示碳中和的设想遗漏了一些重要的问题，包括新种植小树苗的贮碳能力并不及那些被烧掉的树。 This dodgy carbon accounting has come under fire (no pun intended) before, and for good reason: it doesn’t pass the common sense test. Even if you claim that the carbon capturing abilities of felled trees are offset by new forests, you need to consider that those new trees will take decades to reach full maturity—decades in which they won’t be sequestering carbon. Then too, consider that every step of the biomass production process—cutting trees down, trucking them out, machining them into pellets, and then shipping those pellets to the power plants where they’ll be burned—all entail emissions of their own.

这种鸡贼的碳核算方法此前就曾经受舆论炙烤（无意双关），这也理所应当，因为它并不符合常识。即使你声称新种植的木头会替代被伐木贮碳，你也需要考虑到这些替代者需要几十年的时间才能完全成熟——而在这几十年间，它们不怎么会吸碳。此外，想想生物质能生产的各个环节——伐木、运输、加工成颗粒再被运到发电厂（燃烧它们的地方）——都会产生排放。

There’s another big problem here, too. Europe buys much of their wood pellets from outside the bloc, and there’s little in the way of regulatory oversight to ensure felled trees are replanted, opening the door to opportunists looking to make a quick buck. And, as the BBC explains, the vagaries of international carbon accounting are producing some odd numbers for Europe:

还有一个不小的问题。欧洲大量的木屑颗粒采购于欧洲之外，没有多少监管措施去保证被伐木材会有新的树木取代，这为只想着快速捞一笔的机会主义者敞开了大门。正如BBC所解释的，国际间碳核算领域的奇招妙术正在给欧洲制造一些奇怪的数据： [U]nder UN climate rules, emissions from trees are only counted when they are harvested. However the US, Canada and Russia do not use this method of accounting so if wood pellets are imported from these countries into the EU, which doesn’t count emissions from burning, the carbon simply goes “missing”.

根据联合国制定的气候规则，燃烧木材的排放只在被砍伐时记录一次，然而美国、加拿大和俄罗斯并不采取这样的计算方法，这样一来从这些国家进口到欧盟的木屑颗粒所导致的碳排放便不会被记录，就这么消失了。 With 65 percent of Europe’s renewable energy coming from biomass, you’d think this would be a bigger scandal. Perhaps the Eurocrats in Brussels are unwilling to examine the problem too closely, fearful that an in-depth investigation might kill the region’s best chance at meeting the climate targets it set for itself. Countries in Europe seem to be doubling down on biomass, too, a decision some observers say is “disastrous” for the environment. The longer this goes on, the more apparent it is that the EU cares more about appearing to be green than it does about actually tackling the issues it makes such a big to-do about on the international stage.

若再考虑到欧洲65%的可再生能源由生物质能组成，你会愈发觉得这是一桩丑闻。也许布鲁塞尔的欧盟官员们更愿意与这些调查保持距离，他们害怕深入的调查会让他们达到为自己设定的气候目标的希望落空。同时，欧洲各国在生物质能使用上似乎正在变本加利，一些观察家认为，对生态环境来说，这是“灾难性”的决定。这样的局面持续越久，欧盟的心思就愈发明显——相比应对让他们真正费力的气候问题，他们更在意台面上的“绿色”。

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