Is Boris Backing Up The Wrong Tree?

The green ambitions of the UK’s Prime Minister have been called into question this week, with concerns raised over Boris Johnson’s support for a company labelled as the ‘UK’s largest carbon emitter’.<p> Johnson has hosted 200 investors at a business summit this week, a gathering which includes the Drax Group, one of 12 companies seemingly supporting the government’s 10-point climate plan.<p> Drax are being heralded as the future of sustainability as they have dumped many of their coal-burning power plants, burning wood pellets instead, a type of biomass to produce electricity. The company have claimed £800m in subsidies for the switch, however climate think tank Ember have said that Drax is one of the biggest sources of carbon dioxide amongst all of the EU’s power stations - when biomass emissions are included.<p> The issue appears to be the classification of biomass emissions, as the UK immediately classes the energy as carbon neutral due to the assumption that forest regrowth will soak up the carbon.<p> This is a policy disputed by climate activists, who point out that Drax currently pumps out more carbon emissions than many of Europe’s so-called dirtiest power plants, and that the tax-payer is paying to increase carbon emissions into the atmosphere?<p> Drax Group have disputed the claims of Ember saying the report is “completely at odds with what the world's leading climate scientists at the UN IPCC say about sustainable biomass being crucial to delivering global climate targets.”<p> In 2022, Drax’s CO2 emissions from both biomass and coal came to 14.8 million tonnes, around the same as the annual emissions of Ghana.<p> The news comes in the same week that the government teased out details of its ‘net zero strategy’ to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. The under-fire scheme includes subsidies for homeowners to replace old gas boilers with low-carbon heat pumps. However writing in The Sun, Johnson has played down claims that gas-boilers would be banned completely.<p> He said: “While we're going to have to make some pretty major changes to the way we heat our homes, the Greenshirts of the Boiler Police are not going to kick in your door with their sandal-clad feet and seize, at carrot-point, your trusty old combi [boiler]."