Good and bad green
When you thought you knew it all, it hits you.
Green energy is, despite the obviously good looking color green which exerts a feeling of wellness and positive attitude, not only good anymore!
Minister Maria van der Hoeven (of Economics) received a list of good and bad biomass (of which green energy is made) from Mirjam de Rijk from Natuur en Milieu. This organization can best be described as a lobby-club, striving for more attention to our environment from the government. An admirable striving, yet the in-crowd attitude of such organizations is revolting. As this list has been compiled very recently, and the appointment to hand such an document to a minister can easily be made about 3 months in advance as miniters regularly are very busy people (on a sidenote: The Netherlands have sent an ambassador to the state-funeral of Soeharto as all ministers were too busy); yet Natuur en Milieu handed the list to the minister on an appointment made within a week after the creation of the list.
It could be a coincidence, yet I don’t buy that.
Anyhow: after proclaiming energy from biomass is the future for decades on end, there suddenly are good and bad sources of biomass. Naturally, Wind, Light and Water are good, renewable sources but are not included in the list.
Bad biomass are: rapeseed, soy, palm- and sunflower oil, wheat, beet and manure. These generally produce more CO2-gas than conventional sources of energy and should thus not be subsidized by our government.
Good biomass are: unusable wood from FSC-forests, mown grass from the side of the roads and unusable leftovers from the paper-making industry.
The entire list can be found here.
However true their conclusions, the mentioning of their previous mishap on proclaiming all biomass to be good for our world would be nice. I’m not telling them to be guiltful about the advancing insights: the mentioning of the fact that they were wrong in the past would be nice. The way it is proclaimed now is not nice: the introduction of good and bad into our terminology will lead to unneccessairy complicated conversations. Not to mention any new insights of the future, which might intruduce new categories: good bad biomass or even bad good biomass could be ahead!
I’m in favor of building some new nuclear powerplants in our country, instead of this fancy environmentalist green energy. It costs more, the creation is less efficient and we all can feel less guilty when our energy is indicated to be environment-friendly.
Minister van der Hoeven: build some new nuclear facilities instead of trying to look good with a green image.
Please note: this is my personal rant on the everlasting green-hype.
While this is a real-life scenario I’m not specifically targeting the persons in this post. They just happen to be the direct object of my disaffection.