We need an energy policy that reflects the world as it is, not how we want it to be. The Department of Energy and Climate Change is ahead of public opinion on this, and is quietly constructing a policy framework built on millions of dead trees
Last weekend my little son Marcus and I spent a pleasant Saturday afternoon killing an oak tree. It wasn’t old or diseased; it was just in the way of our plans to put up a trampoline, so we had a lot of fun cutting it down and chopping it up.
When I casually mentioned our weekend of tree homicide to my liberal colleagues in the office, I was somewhat taken aback by their angsty response. I genuinely think if I had come in and cheerfully announced I had spent the weekend taking drugs I would have had a more positive reception. People in England really, really don’t like you cutting down trees.
Now step back from your middle-class values, and you will realise that this is a ridiculous emotion. This country used to be one of the most heavily forested in the world, but we cut it all down to build ships and to power the industrial revolution.
In other parts of the world there is still an abundance of trees and they are harvested just like any other agricultural product. My quick Googling shows that approximately 30% of the total land area of the planet is covered in trees, and every day they grow a bit more.
Talk to any Canadian or Russian and they are bemused by our sentimentality about what are in essence big leafy plants. Elsewhere in the world people make an honest living as lumberjacks, whereas here we spend taxpayers’ money on self-righteous Tree Protection Officers (TPO) and any tattooed monkey with a chainsaw seduces women by saying he’s a tree ‘surgeon’.
What makes this all the more absurd is that the dual impact of changes in technology and climate change have combined to create a global surplus of harvestable trees. The introduction of the Kindle has meant that, in the US alone last year, more books were sold electronically than hard-copy paper ones. And in the UK, printed newspaper circulation is in free fall despite the discarded copies of the Metro cluttering up the London Tube.
Because of this, over half of US paper and paperboard mills have closed since 1980 and the trees that fed them are still sitting idly in the surrounding forests.
In parallel, the unusual mild winters in North America have meant that millions of pine beetle grubs have not frozen to death whilst hibernating and, instead, are thriving in record numbers. This innocuous sounding but avaricious little bug cannot believe his luck and is now munching through the North American forests.
The latest estimate, as of May 2013, is that nearly 88 million acres of trees have been killed across all 19 Western States and Canada, which puts little Marcus’s and my genocide into perspective.
Now in contrast to my squeamish colleagues, the civil servants at the Department of Energy and Climate Change are a little bit more sanguine about killing trees. So much so that power stations running on biomass receive a subsidy of about £70 per megawatt hour of electricity compared to 20p for burning coal.
Biomass is of course a euphemism for dead American trees. We have created a situation where the UK taxpayer subsidises an industry that cuts down millions of trees, ships them half way across the world in fossil-fuel powered ships then burns them in power stations. All of this is so you can watch Countryfile on your big flat-screen TV.
Now I suspect at this point some of you may be about to start angrily penning a little missive about the folly of the government’s renewable energy policy. But step back and ask yourself: would we rather buy energy in the form of wood from nice Mr Obama or gas from dead-eyed Mr Putin or oil from whichever crazy jihadist finally wins out in Iraq?
I think the fetishising of trees is part of a wider middle-class myopia about how the energy world really works. Only the other day I read Tim Montgomierie in The Times gushing that ‘one of David Cameron’s best decisions as Tory leader was to replace the party’s torch-of-freedom logo with an oak tree’.
According to Montgomerie, ‘the tree did not just point to the importance of conservation. It also represented conservative values such as continuity, shelter, beauty and strength’.
Seriously? ‘One of the best’ decisions? Not reforming the NHS or hosting the Olympics or any of that big-picture stuff, Montgomerie thinks putting a cartoon of a tree on a leaflet was ‘one of the best’ decisions Cameron ever made.
Clearly this is nonsense. A tree is not a representation of shelter or beauty or strength. It is just a big pile of leafy wood and a perfect source of energy to generate electricity.
Thinking of trees as symbols of conservation whilst enjoying the benefit of an air-conditioned on-grid middle-class lifestyle is beyond hypocrisy. It is symptomatic of a general approach that wants the reality of how we make and consume power to all take place somewhere else and to be someone else’s problem, thanks very much.
We need an energy policy that reflects the world as it is, not how we want it to be. For once the much maligned DECC is ahead of public opinion on this one and is quietly constructing a policy framework that is built partly on the foundation of millions of dead trees. Although your average council-funded Tree Protection Officer might flinch, I, for one, think it’s a good thing.
Michael Ware is corporate finance partner at BDO. @BDO_New_Energy
