Polish not-so-grey eminence Jarosław Kaczyński, asked about the winter said we have to burn “everything except tires” which is even worse advice than it sounds because it is illegal, so technically he publicly incited to crime, which is a crime too.
Not only renewable, by legal decree burning wood in the EU is considered CO2 neutral. The best part is a lot of those wood pellets come from trees planted in the US specifically to process into pellets and sell in the European market, making the whole process equally as bad as (if not worse than) coal from a GHG standpoint. It originally started as a “what can we do with all this sawdust and unusable wood” problem, but subsidies and “green energy” policies quickly turned it into a cash cow.
I’m not sure about other countries energy mix, but somewhere around half of Germany’s very proudly ~50% “renewable electricity” is wood. The rest is primarily inconsistent solar and wind, meaning that the German grid is kept stable with Polish coal, Norwegian hydroelectric, and French nuclear.
There is few of them left, and PiS is rambling whatever they fried up neurons cook up in the moment, but in reality past 30 years was constant struggle from the miners side to prevent destruction of the industry by the government. It’s not coming back because no fucking way any polish government is gonna revive potential worker power of this size.
They also classified wood burning as “renawable energy source”.
Polish not-so-grey eminence Jarosław Kaczyński, asked about the winter said we have to burn “everything except tires” which is even worse advice than it sounds because it is illegal, so technically he publicly incited to crime, which is a crime too.
Not only renewable, by legal decree burning wood in the EU is considered CO2 neutral. The best part is a lot of those wood pellets come from trees planted in the US specifically to process into pellets and sell in the European market, making the whole process equally as bad as (if not worse than) coal from a GHG standpoint. It originally started as a “what can we do with all this sawdust and unusable wood” problem, but subsidies and “green energy” policies quickly turned it into a cash cow.
I’m not sure about other countries energy mix, but somewhere around half of Germany’s very proudly ~50% “renewable electricity” is wood. The rest is primarily inconsistent solar and wind, meaning that the German grid is kept stable with Polish coal, Norwegian hydroelectric, and French nuclear.
Capitalism is so illogical.
Polish coal is also thing of the past. We import it all the time too.
Yes of course, I wasn’t super clear there. I meant electricity generated in Poland using coal.
Didn’t Polish government plan on becoming a coal exporter? I thought there were coal mines in Poland
There is few of them left, and PiS is rambling whatever they fried up neurons cook up in the moment, but in reality past 30 years was constant struggle from the miners side to prevent destruction of the industry by the government. It’s not coming back because no fucking way any polish government is gonna revive potential worker power of this size.