Biofuelwatch will continue to build the #AxeDrax campaign to shut down Drax by getting their subsidies stopped. Find out more here and email us at biofuelwatch@ymail.com to subscribe to our announcement list and find out how else you can get involved in the campaign.
More than 130,000 people have signed a petition to Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Amber Rudd, urging her to end subsidies for Drax. The petition, which was hosted by Care2.com, denounced the Government’s subsidy policies under which Drax attracted £1.3 million in renewable electricity subsidies every single day in 2015. Drax power station is the UK’s biggest carbon emitter and biggest coal burner and also burns more wood than any other plant in the world. Much of the wood they burn comes from clearcut bidiverse wetland forests in the southern US. Nearly all of it is imported, from regions where clearcutting of native forests is rampant.
You can view a short film of the Petition handover here.
Secretary of State Amber Rudd has now issued a response which dismisses or ignores all of the concerns raised in the petition. Her letter, annotated with Biofuelwatch’s comments, can be downloaded here.
Amber Rudd claims that Drax’s biomass is helping to ‘decarbonise’ electricity in the UK – yet studies show the very opposite: cutting down forests to burn them for electricity is no better for the climate than burning coal. Amber Rudd prides herself of greenhouse gas and sustainability standards which the government has introduced. Yet the greenhouse gas standards ignore the vast majority of carbon emissions associated with biomass. Moreover, standards are worthless if there is no regulator to monitor and enforce them – as is the case with the biomass standards. To find out more about what’s wrong with the UK’s biomass standards, see here.