"In recent years ... there has been a bizarre but dangerous push to retrofit power plants and factories to burn wood."

 Source:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-12-28/wood-burning-power-plants-clean-energy

"Burning wood will add to global warming — even if the wood replaces coal or natural gas, as scientific organizations and hundreds of scientists have long argued.

For decades, the wood industry has generated electricity and heat by burning wood wastes from harvesting and turning wood into paper and timber.

Doing that makes sense because using the waste does not require cutting down more trees.

In recent years, however, there has been a bizarre but dangerous push to retrofit power plants and factories to burn wood.

The European Union has spurred this effort by adopting laws to require more low-carbon renewable energy ...  allowing wood to count as a carbon-free, renewable fuel.

Countries in the EU responded by subsidizing power plants to burn wood.

Utilities lobbied for this shift after realizing that their coal-fired power plants could stay in business if modified at public expense to mix in some use of wood.

But the process of burning wood results in more carbon being released into the atmosphere than burning coal.

... Trees in a forest store carbon and keep it out of the atmosphere.

When trees are cut down, more than half the wood is left to rot or burned in producing a usable form of fuel (usually wood pellets), which releases carbon into the air.

The wood fuel that is ultimately burned in power plants generates still more carbon.

...  using wood produces two to three times as much carbon per kilowatt hour as burning coal or natural gas.

... It takes decades of regrowth to offset the carbon released in burning before the net addition of carbon to the air even equals the amount released if power plants had just used fossil fuels.

... utilities using wood to meet clean energy requirements displaces the use of truly clean energy sources such as solar or wind.

... Since the early 1990s, countries have reported their emissions each year to the United Nations as part of a global treaty, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Because it is easier to count the carbon to be released from trees as soon as they are cut, a global scientific panel told countries to report the carbon at that stage.

To avoid double-counting, countries then do not count the carbon released into the atmosphere when the wood is burned.

... lawmakers have misread this rule as a declaration that carbon from burning wood can be ignored entirely in national and local laws for power plants and factories — as has been the case with Europe’s renewable energy laws and emissions trading system."